Ghazal Ensemble
The Ghazal Ensemble, founded in 1997 by Shujaat Husain Khan and Kayhan Kalhor,
creates a musical bridge between Iran and India-two of the world's most expressive and
distinctive traditions. The connections between these musical traditions stretch back
thousands of years to the old Silk Road, where ideas of modal scales, rhythmic cycles, and
melodies were exchanged. The ensemble takes its name from the term that refers to poetry in
Persia and a sung poetry form in North India. The group has toured extensively and recorded
four CDs, including Lost Songs of the Silk Road (Shanachie), which was named one
of the "100 Greatest World Music Albums of All Time" on amazon.com, and the
Grammy-nominated The Rain (ECM). This program marks a rare New York appearance for
the group.
Shujaat Husain Khan
Shujaat Husain Khan, a master sitarist, has become one of the leading Indian classical
musicians of his generation. Son and disciple of the late Ustad Vilayat Khan, he belongs to
the Imdad Khan gharana (school). He is the seventh in an unbroken line in a family
that has produced many musical masters, including his grandfather Ustad Inayat Khan, his
great-grandfather Ustad Imdad Khan, and his great-great-grandfather Ustad Sahebdad Khan. He
performs in the gayaki ang style, which is imitative of the subtleties of the
human voice.
Khan started playing sitar at the age of three and gave his first public performance at
the age of six. Since then, he has appeared at all of the major music festivals in India
and toured throughout Asia, Africa, North America, and Europe, playing at such prestigious
venues as Royal Albert Hall in London and Congress Hall in Berlin. In 1997, he was a
featured artist at The Music Festival of India at Carnegie Hall, and in 1999, he was the
featured soloist with the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra. Khan has more than 50 musical
releases on various international labels, plus the successful Khandan video. He
has received many honors, including the national Rashtriya Kumar Gandharva Sammaan (2001),
India's highest award for a classical musician under the age of 45. He has been a visiting
professor at Dartington in the UK, the University of Washington in Seattle, and the
University of California (Los Angeles).
Kayhan Kalhor
Kayhan Kalhor is an internationally acclaimed virtuoso on the kamancheh. Born in
Tehran, Iran, he began his musical studies at the age of seven. He performed with the
prestigious National Orchestra of Radio and Television of Iran, and the Shayda Ensemble of
the Chavosh Cultural Center while still a teenager. Deeply devoted to the Iranian classical
repertoire (radif), he was further inspired to study regional folkloric
traditions, which added dimensions to his improvisations and acted as springboards for
cross-cultural explorations. Since then, Kalhor has performed and recorded with Iran's
greatest instrumentalists and singers, including Mohammad Reza Shajarian and Shahram
Nazeri.
Kalhor co-founded the Dastan, Ghazal, and Masters of Persian Music ensembles, and has
appeared with the New York Philharmonic and the Orchestre national de Lyon. He was the
featured soloist on the soundtrack of Francis Ford Coppola's Youth Without Youth,
a score on which he collaborated with Osvaldo Golijov. In 2004, Kalhor gave a solo recital
at Carnegie Hall as part of American composer John Adams's In Your Ear series;
later that year, he shared a double-bill at Lincoln Center's Mostly Mozart Festival. Kalhor
is an original member of Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road Ensemble and his works are heard on the
ensemble's recordings. Three of his 13 albums have been nominated for Grammy Awards, and
his 2008 Silent City CD (World Village) with Brooklyn Rider reached the top 20 on
Billboard's world music chart. His most recent commission for the Cologne
Philharmonic in Germany premiered in October 2009, and in July 2010 he collaborated with
Romanian theater director Nona Ciobanu and Slovenian visual artist Peter Kosir in the
multimedia show Hopscotch, The Silent City in Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia.
Samir Chatterjee
Samir Chatterjee is a virtuoso tabla player who travels widely, performing as a soloist
and with musicians from both Indian and Western musical traditions. He began his early
studies with Bankim Ghosh, Balaram Mukherjee, Rathin Dhar, and Mohammad Salim, and later
trained under the guidance of Amalesh Chatterjee and Shyamal Bose. He represents the
Farrukhabad gharana (school) of tabla playing.
Chatterjee has accompanied many of India's major musicians, including Ravi Shankar,
Vilayat Khan, Bhimsen Joshi, Pandit Jasraj, Nikhil Banerjee, Shivkumar Sharma, and Amjad
Ali Khan. A catalyst in the fusion of Indian and non-Indian music, he has worked with
Pauline Oliveros, Branford Marsalis, Ravi Coltrane, Myra Melford, Steve Gorn, Bobby
Sanabria, Dance Theatre of Harlem, Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, and many other jazz,
classical, and avant-garde musicians. Chatterjee is a member of the jazz trio SYNC with Ned
Rothenberg and Jerome Harris, and Inner Diaspora with Mark Feldman and Eric Friedlander. He
has also collaborated with Sufi-rock singer Salman Ahmad of Junoon. He performed at the
2007 Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo, Norway, and since June 2008 has worked
relentlessly towards the musical revival of Afghanistan. Chatterjee has taught for more
than 35 years, and is the founder-director of Chhandayan, an organization dedicated to
promoting and preserving Indian music and culture. He is author of the comprehensive A
Study of Tabla and Music of India.
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