RED BARAAT

Dhol and brass
Brooklyn, New York

Sunny Jain has been dubbed “the Hendrix of dhol,” his Brooklyn-based ensemble Red Baraat was declared “the best party band in years” by NPR’s Bob Boilen, and last year Vulture magazine hailed Red Baraat’s 2017 appearance on Boilen’s Tiny Desk Concert as one of the legendary show’s 10 best performances ever. With its huge brass band sound anchored in the traditional rhythms of the Punjabi dhol, Red Baraat delivers an unparalleled immersion in the sounds of the South Asian diaspora, playing ecstatic North Indian bhangra music infused with the sounds of Bollywood, jazz, and hip hop.

Bandleader Sunny Jain grew up in Rochester, NY, in a rich musical mélange of American pop culture and the sounds of his immigrant parents’ South Asian heritage. Originally from the ancient Rajasthani desert town of Osian, his Manani forebearers were displaced in the 12th century to the agricultural regions of the neighboring Western Punjab state. There they adopted the last name Jain to signify their faith tradition. One of the world’s oldest religions at over 5,000 years and counting, Jainism takes nonviolence (ahimsa) as one of its central doctrines. Two decades after their families were again displaced during the 1947 Partition of India, Jain’s parents emigrated to the U.S. in 1970. Sunny grew up learning Jain bhajans (devotional songs) from his mother’s beloved cassette deck, and dancing to the Bollywood soundtracks his dad played on the reel-to-reel. At age 10 Jain was introduced to the American jazz tradition by his drum teacher, and as he says, “my mind was blown open.”

Sunny Jain weaves these vibrant threads back together into distinctive and joyful musical explorations that speak to the complexity of the South Asian immigrant experience. His projects range from the Sunny Jain Collective, which fuses jazz with Indian classical music, to the upcoming theater piece Love Force, centering the Jain concept satyāgraha (insistence of truth) to explore “the multiple identities so many immigrant families confront in the process of staying connected to the past and imagining new futures.” The band Red Baraat takes these histories and hopes, channels them through centuries of musical celebration, and puts them on the dance floor in all their undeniable glory.

Red Baraat debuted in 2008 as the wedding band for Sunny Jain’s own nuptials — baraat is the Hindi term for the groom’s processional — and quickly became a regional and international sensation. Jain leads the band with the unstoppable rhythm of his dhol, a large barrel drum slung waist-height and played with a distinctive curved bass stick on one head and slender high-note stick on the other. He’s backed by drums, guitar, and a mighty “expandable” brass section. With seven albums under their belt, and celebrated performances from Tiny Desk to WOMAD, London Olympics to Brooklyn’s hippest stages, Red Baraat’s celebratory South Asian traditions “transcend nations and their varied claims, to find instead an ethics of being here, on this soil, in this world—an ethics based in radical empathy and interconnection.”

Artist social media and website:

redbaraat.com
facebook.com/redbaraatband/
instagram.com/redbaraat
youtube.com/@redbaraat

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