Boston Globe, March 9, 2012

NEW YORK – Music is rarely the subject of news from Afghanistan. War, terrorism, corruption, and other such topics have dominated the headlines. And if the Taliban – who outlawed all music save religious chants during their rule from 1996 to 2001 – had had their way, there wouldn’t be any Afghan music to speak of at all.

That background provides some context for the concert that joins Homayun Sakhi, a master of the rubab, an Afghan lute with over a thousand years of history, with Ken Zuckerman, a virtuoso of the Indian string instrument sarod, and Salar Nader, an Afghan-American tabla player, at Brandeis University Saturday night.

Sakhi fled Kabul with his family in 1992, when he was 14, and developed his craft living as a refugee in Peshawar, Pakistan, before settling in California. His journey reflects the experience of Afghan musicians who scattered around the world to escape war and repression.

Nader, a brilliant young percussionist who studied from an early age with the tabla master Zakir Hussain, was born in Germany, grew up in the United States, and only made his first visit to Kabul – meeting scores of relatives for the first time – in 2010.

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Boston Globe, November 8, 2009

According to a story that still circulates in India’s celebrity press, when Kailash Kher first arrived in Mumbai in 2001, he was so poor and bereft of connections that he had to live for a while on the platform of a suburban railway station.

That tale is an urban myth. And Kher, now one of India’s best-loved stars for his exhilarating, Sufi-inspired music, debunks it regularly. But the hardscrabble image of an aspiring singer arriving from the hinterland with no pedigree in the glitzy Bollywood biz is accurate in spirit, if not in detail.

Kher has made his way to the limelight with a sound and a story that separate him from Bollywood convention and the industry’s clannish milieu. The son of a Hindu priest from the town of Meerut, outside Delhi, he writes songs that brim with the devotional themes of Sufi poetry. He delivers them with a tone full of longing and a worshiper’s unmistakable sincerity.

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Boston Globe, October 2, 2009

The band Indian Ocean will not take offense if you call its music “fusion.” For one thing, the Delhi-based foursome is too laid-back to worry much about labels. And it’s true that at first glance Indian Ocean’s approach summons up echoes of Orientalist jazz-rock projects from the ’70s, with their setup of guitar, bass, and drum kit plus tablas, and their long, improvisation-heavy songs that weave Western melodic elements into a texture of Indian rhythms.

But this is no Mahavishnu Orchestra or Shakti. For one thing, all four members are Indians who grew up and still make their home in the country. Not all of them trained in Indian classical music, but they take from it not just the rhythm cycles but a lot of the same source material, be it folk music from India’s many rich regional traditions or the devotional poems of the medieval mystic Kabir.

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