Hindustani Classical Music

My way into Hindustani classical music is recent and slow. Where most students arrive in childhood, I arrived in my twenties, drawn to the patient grammar of raag and the way a single bend on a sitar string can hold a memory. The discipline has quietly reshaped how I think about everything else - what it means to repeat, to listen, to wait.

What I love about this tradition is how rigid form opens into utter expressive freedom. A raag is a frame - a defined set of notes and characteristic movements - but inside that frame every artist finds their own voice; two evenings of the same raag can land in entirely different places. I'm drawn to Khayal for the breadth of that freedom, and to the sitar for its bell-like voice and the way a single string-bend can hold a phrase. I'm drawn to Dhrupad and the surbahar for their meditative weight - the slow, microtonal alaap of Dhrupad, the deep sustained voice of the surbahar - that turns every note into a place to dwell rather than pass through. I trace my Khayal to the Etawah Gharana and my Dhrupad to the Dagar Vani. At its root, this practice is Naad Yoga, the yoga of sound, where the act of playing becomes the act of being still.

What follows are recordings from that journey - some polished, some unfinished, all honest.