Suphala
Suphala is one of the most versatile young tabla artists making music today. A protégé of the great tabla masters Ustad Allarakha and Ustad Zakir Hussain, Suphala is fluent in a diversity of musical traditions that inform her unique compositions and her highly improvisational performances. The four albums she has released to date – Instru Mental(2000), The Now (2005), Blueprint (2007) and Alien Ancestry (2013) – go beyond the limits of genre and style while referencing such diverse influences as Western classical, Indian classical, electronic, jazz, folk and soul. Her concerts also break down boundaries: she made history in early 2005 when she traveled to Kabul, Afghanistan as the first musician to play in public since the fall of the Taliban.
The musicians she has recorded or performed with include Norah Jones, Perry Ferrell, Edie Brickell, Vernon Reid, Timbaland, Sean Lennon, 4Hero, Yoko Ono, Vijay Iyer and Joan Osbourne, among others. The artistic alliances Suphala forms — including ensembles with vocals, strings, woodwinds, reeds and percussion — are an integral part of her innovative approach to making music. With her unique rhythmic and melodic vocabulary and production chops that are both rigorous and inventive, this next phase of Suphala’s evolving musical expression is bound to continue a trajectory rooted in a deep understanding of the proud legacy of the tabla and a passionate commitment to expand the scope of its expression and to communicate it to the wider world.