2026 ·Jun 03, 2026

Kunal Gunjal & Amit Kavthekar

KUNAL GUNJAL & AMIT KAVTHEKAR

South Indian santoor and tabla
Boston, Massachusetts

The roots of Indian classical music go back millennia, and yet this tradition remains vibrant because artists never stop seeking ways to perfect its sound. Celebrated Boston-based musicians Kunal Gunjal and Amit Kavthekar bring a duo to the Lowell Folk Festival which features the tabla, a percussion instrument long central to the tradition, and the santoor, a Kashmiri folk instrument which was only adapted to classical music in the last generation.

Kunal Gunjal fell in love with classical Indian music as a child, when he would accompany his father, a devoted amateur santoor player, to music festivals in his native Pune, India. While Kunal studied the tabla for many years as a child, like his father he eventually fell in love with the santoor. The santoor is a cousin of the hammered dulcimer, and like that name suggests, it is played by striking its 100 metal strings with delicate wooden mallets, making it both a stringed and a percussive instrument. At age 15, Kunal was invited to become a student and then disciple of the great Pandit Shivkumar Sharma, the very man who had brought the santoor into the classical tradition. Gunjal studed closely with Sharma for 15 years, even after moving to the U.S. to pursue graduate studies in engineering. Today Gunjal has transitioned back to full-time work as a musician, becoming himself a sought-after master teacher, a spellbinding performer on stages across the U.S. and India, and a composer of award-winning film scores.

Whereas the santoor is a bold and still-not-entirely conventional choice as the melodic voice of a classical Indian performance, the tabla is essential, providing the rhythmic accompaniment that defines the genre. The tabla consists of a pair of small hand drums, the slightly larger left-hand drum playing the bass line, while the smaller right-hand drum is adjusted in tone to the specific raga via tapped tuning blocks. Growing up in Mumbai, Amit Kavthekar showed such facility with the tabla that by age six he was already being trained by the legendary Ustad Alla Rakha, famous to western audiences for his longtime work with Ravi Shankar. Amit carries on the legacy of that family in two ways, as Ustad Alla Rakha’s last disciple, and by having been a student of Ustad Rakha’s son, Ustad Zakir Hussain. Now relocated to Boston, Kavethekar teaches at the New England School of Music in addition to his prolific and celebrated work as an accompanist to many of the greatest names in Indian classical, western classical, and jazz, including Al Di Meola’s acoustic jazz trio.

Amir Kavthekar and Kunal Gunjal’s musical partnership goes back two decades to performances in Mumbai while they were still both college students. This long association, strengthened by the subtle attunement they must find between the santoor and tabla in performance, creates ideal conditions for both performers and audiences: onstage, says Kavthekar, “We look at each other, and we know exactly where we are and where we’re going.”