We are excited to present an evening of Indian classical music featuring, Soumya Chakraverty (Sarod) and Amod Dandawate on the tabla. Check out this video from last year’s concert: https://youtu.be/iQ8Qq-fXPAs
Bios
SOUMYA CHAKRAVERTY
Soumya was born into a family of music lovers. His mother received some early training in the Sitar and vocal music. However, both his parents were avid music listeners and had a large collection of LPs and other recordings of classical music at home. His siblings and cousins were all learning Indian Classical music of some form by the time Soumya was a little boy and with lessons on the tabla, so began Soumya’s initiation into Indian classical music. He turned to playing the Sarod when he was eleven under the tutelage of the highly respected Pt. Samarendranath Sikdar, a senior disciple of the late Pt. Radhika Mohan Maitra of the Shahjahanpur Gharana. For nearly thirty years he has received extensive training under his guru in a multitude of north Indian Ragas, some of which are very rare and unique to his Gharana.
His solid technique and thorough grounding in the roots of his own music notwithstanding, his interests also lie in exploring the commonalities of North Indian Classical music with other music styles.
His playing style has been greatly influenced by the likes of his guru and other masters of his Gharana. It highlights a perfect blend between the Rababiya and Gayaki styles that is unique to the Shahjahanpur Gharana. He is both a purist, who likes to maintain the authentic forms of the Ragas as passed down the generations of Ustads (maestros), and at the same time, he likes to experiment with other forms of Indian as well as world music, to find common strands of melodic expression.
Soumya blossomed as a young artist on All India Radio Calcutta between 1990 and 1995. During a brief stint in Australia for a couple of years in the nineties while pursuing his MBA, he truly established himself as a mature instrumentalist, and also began to collaborate with other forms of world music. He performed live with a Flamenco dancer in a production that combined the gypsy roots of the dance with Latin American percussion, Middle Eastern vocals and Indian Classical instrumental music. He returned to Australia in 2000 and 2011, giving concerts, lecture demonstrations and workshops.
For more than a decade, Soumya has been performing throughout the US and neighboring countries. His focus remains on traditional Hindusthani instrumental music, and apart from solo recitals, he has also collaborated with a number of instrumentalist and vocalists. In addition to pure Hindustani he continues to work with other music genres such Classical Carnatic (south Indian), compositions of Rabindranath and Nazrul, flamenco, jazz and latin American percussion.
AMOD DANAWATE
Amod Dandawate’s training has primarily been in the Farrukhabad style of Tabla playing. Before migrating to the USA, he was in Hyderabad, India where he was groomed by his father Dr. Vasantrao Dandawate, a disciple of the legendary Maestro Ustad Amir Hussain Khan. He received further guidance and encouragement from Shafaat Khan as an accompanist and then spent some time taking lessons from Ustad Zakir Hussain. Having settled in New Jersey he has been receiving advanced training, since 2001, as a disciple of Pt. Samir Chatterjee, a well known maestro of the Farrukhabad gharana. Besides performing solo Tabla, Amod has accompanied several eminent artists and keeps a busy performance schedule
