Welcome the Festive Season with this intimate baithak concert, Rāgānjali, featuring a Hindustani vocal / Khayal recital by Samarth Nagarkar along with Ishaan Ghosh on tabla and Suhail Yusuf Khan on sarangi.
Be it Diwali or the nine nights of Naratri / Durga Pujo, festivals depict the conquest of good over evil, of light over darkness, through a joyous celebration of many moods and rasas like devotion, courage, reverence, rage, mercy, fear, benevolence, kindness, and love. The timeless beauty of Raga music embodies all these rasas in their subtle shades.
The musicians -
Samarth Nagarkar
Samarth Nagarkar is a Khayal musician (Hindustani /North Indian classical voice music) - a singer, educator and author, regarded as a flag-bearer of raga music globally. He features in prominent music festivals and venues, including Lincoln Center (New York), LearnQuest Conference (Boston), Central Park Summer Stage, Chicago World Music Festival, and others. He has several solo and collaborative albums to his credit and has authored the much lauded book, ‘Raga Sangeet’. Trained under distinguished gurus, Ulhas Kashalkar and Dinkar Kaikini, he represents the Gwalior, Agra and Jaipur gharanas and is a former scholar of the ITC Sangeet Research Academy, Kolkata.
Samarth is a voting member of The Recording Academy, popularly known as the Grammys. He is a recipient of the Outstanding Achievement Award for Excellence in the Arts from NAKA, and a Fellowship from the Ministry of Culture, Govt. of India. He is one of the founding members of Brooklyn Raga Massive and co-curator of their Colors
of Raga concert series. Samarth presently runs Raga Sangeet Creative and is among the first to scale digital platforms like Patreon in the Indian classical music world, pioneering new avenues of audience engagement, music education and mentorship.
Ishaan Ghosh
Ishaan stands out as a front-ranking young Tabla player of India, having received intensive training from his father, the renowned Tabla and sitar exponent, Nayan Ghosh. He hails from the illustrious family of Indian musicians such as his grandfather, ‘Padma Bhushan’ Nikhil Ghosh and his great-uncle, the pioneering flute maestro, Pannalal Ghosh. Starting out as a child prodigy, over the years, he has carved a niche for himself as one of the most sought after tabla musicians of his generation, both as a soloist and as an accompanying co-artiste.
A traditionalist at his core, he has extensively collaborated with master musicians of diverse genres like Jazz, Electronica, Persian, Chinese, Scandinavian & Afro-Cuban music. Ishaan has conceptualised ARAJ – one of the most popular Neo-Classical bands of India which has been rapidly gaining a global following for their power packed performances and innovative musical ideas.
In 2023, he has culturally represented India at the United Nations in Geneva and performed as part of UNITAR’s 60th Anniversary Celebrations. He was awarded with the ‘Baba Allauddin Khan Yuva Puraskar’ by the Govt. of Madhya Pradesh in 2012, the ‘Achievement Award’ by US President Jimmy Carter in 2016, the ‘Rising Star Award’ in 2019 and the ‘Kalashree Samman’ from Govt. of Maharashtra in 2020.
Dr. Suhail Yusuf Khan
Suhail Yusuf Khan is one of today’s leading exponents of Sarangi. He brings together expertise from a performance career that has extended over 25 years, a creative ability, and academic research to find new modes of expression in Hindustānī music. Trained under his grandfather, the pioneering sarangi maestro Sabri Khan, and uncle Kamal Sabri, Suhail carries forward a lineage of eight generations of musicians in his family.
He is a PhD and Postdoctoral Associate Fellow at Yale Institute of Sacred Music for the Academic Year 2024-25. His doctoral dissertation, “Bridge Overtones: Lessons from the Sarangi” is the first in-depth ethnomusicological study of the North Indian bowed instrument tradition by a hereditary sarangi player. He has been featured on over twenty albums and signed to Domino records, U.K.