Ragas Live Festival 2022

Pioneer Works is excited to present Ragas Live Festival 2022. From October 22-23, Ragas Live Festival will present 24 continuous hours of transcendent, spiritual music at the Pioneer Works main stage. The 24-hour format is inspired by ragas’s unique time cycle in which specific modes are only played at specific times of the day. This year marks the 11th annual incarnation of the event, which is rooted in raga—the classical music genre of South Asia.

This year’s festival includes Carnatic superstar Sid Sriram; the New York premiere of Parvathy Baul, a leading exponent of the mystical Baul sect of West Bengal; Brazilian percussion legend Cyro Baptista; and master of the Iraqi maqam, Hamid AlSaadi. There will be late night analog synth explorations from both Qasim Naqvi and Kroba, and a tribute to Ali Akbar Khan on his 100th centennial featuring his son Manik Khan on sarod.  As we approach the finale, Samir LanGus will invoke the ecstatic trance music of Gnawa with a large ensemble of Moroccan and New York musicians, while the Arun Ramamurthy Trio improvise Carnatic music in the context of a jazz trio.

Over the 24 hour period, the audience will also be treated to masters of the sitar, veena, bansuri, sarangi and vocal in the classical raga tradition including a sunrise set from Samarth Nagarkar and a sunset tribute to Shivkumar Sharma with Vinay Desai on santoor.

Ragas Live Festival 2022 will be experienced live and in-person once again at Pioneer Works—featuring 24 hours of live performances while also being broadcast to a global audience via WKCR. This year, the festival will be an immersive experience as the performances take place within an installation by Charles Atlas on a stage designed by artist Mika Tajima in collaboration with Chadha Ranch.

About Ragas Live Festival

Ragas Live Festival was born as an in-studio radio broadcast at Columbia University's radio station, WKCR, in 2012 and immediately gained a global listening audience. The annual presentation of 50-70 musicians and its expansive presentation of music inspired by the Indian Classical tradition became central to a musical movement that the New York Times, New Yorker, NPR, and others have called “The Raga Renaissance”. The event first left the studio and became a live, in-person broadcast in 2016 at Pioneer Works, where it has since grown a passionate following.

Presented in collaboration with Brooklyn Raga Massive and the Society for Arts and Culture of South Asia.

Ragas Live Festival is supported by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Brooklyn Arts Council. Brooklyn Arts Fund (DCLA) is sponsored, in part, by the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, administered by Brooklyn Arts Council.