Tabla - Samir Chatterjee
Harmonium - Kedar Naphade
Come join us at the Chhandayan Center for a tabla solo performed by our founder Samir Chatterjee
Samir Chatterjee
Samir Chatterjee is a virtuoso Tabla player. He travels widely across the world throughout the year performing in numerous festivals as a soloist or with other outstanding musicians from both Indian and non-Indian musical traditions. Samir performed at the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo, Norway. He also performed at the UN General Assembly. His compositions are widely acclaimed as well as his writings. Samir is a firm believer in the transforming effect of music on the society and all aspects of his work reflects this conviction.
Chatterjee began his studies early with Bankim Ghosh, Balaram Mukherjee, Rathin Dhar and Md. Salim. His later formation as a musician occurred under the guidance of Amalesh Chatterjee and Shyamal Bose. All of Samir's teachers have been from the Farrukhabad Gharana of Tabla-playing, which he now represents.
Samir can be heard on numerous recordings featuring as soloist, accompanying many of India's greatest musicians and in collaboration with western musicians of outstanding caliber. In concert Samir has accompanied many of India's greatest musicians including Ravi Shankar, Vilayat Khan, Bhimsen Joshi, Pandit Jasraj, Nikhil Banerjee, V.G. Jog, Shivkumar Sharma, Hariprasad Chaurasia, M. S. Gopalakrishnan, Amjad Ali Khan, Salamat Ali Khan, Lakshmi Shankar, Manilal Nag, L. Subramanium, U Srinivas, Veena Sahashrabuddhe, Shujaat Khan, Shahid Parvez, Ajoy Chakraborty, Nishat Khan, Rashid Khan, Tejendra N. Majumdar, Arti Anklekar, Kaushiki Chakraborty, to name only a few.
Samir Chatterjee has been a catalyst in the fusion of Indian and Non-Indian music, in his own creations and others as well. He has performed with Pauline Oliveros, William Parker, Branford Marsalis, Ravi Coltrane, Joshua Bell, David Liebman, Oliver Lake, Dave Douglas, Ned Rothenberg, Mark Dresser, Mark Feldman, Jerome Harris, Eric Friedlander, Steve Gorn, Dance Theater of Harlem, Boston Philharmonic, Minnesota Orchestra, and other jazz, classical and avant guard musicians and ensembles. He also collaborates with Sufi-Rock singer Salman Ahmad of Junoon from Pakistan. He is the composer and director of Tablaphilia, Indo-Flame, Chhand-Anand, RabiThakur, Meghadootam, and Dawn to Dusk and Beyond. He performs with Sanjay Mishra on his CD "Blue Incantation" featuring Jerry Garcia as guest artist.
Chatterjee has been teaching for the last 50 years. Many of his students are established performers. He is the founding president of Chhandayan. He has authored books titled A Study of Tabla, Music of India and Those Forty Days. He has taught at the Manhattan School of Music, Univ. of Pittsburgh, New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music, Yale University, NYU, Columbia University, Princeton University, UCLA, among many other major institutions in the USA, Europe and India. He has master's degrees in English and History.
Samir made significant contributions towards the musical revival of Afghanistan since 2008. He has received several awards including Sunshine Caribbean Award in 2016, Jadu Bhatta Award from Salt Lake Music Conference, Acharya Varistha Award from Pandit Jasraj Institute, Taal Mani Award from Council of Indian Classical Music, Delhi in 2018, and the Lifetime Achievement Award from SMIPAC Trust, Delhi in 2018.
Kedar Naphade
Born on January 10, 1972, Kedar Naphade received preliminary training in Hindustani Classical Music from his grandfather, Shri Dadasaheb Naphade and from Shri Arvind Gajendragadkar.
Since he was 10 years of age, Kedar has had the great good fortune of training under the loving and expert guidance of Pt. Tulsidas Borkar, one of the topmost harmonium players in India today. Under his nurturing guidance, Kedar has imbibed the unique style of solo harmonium performance developed by Pt. Borkarji’s guru, Madhukar Pednekar or P. Madhukar. P. Madhukar was a genius with tremendous mastery over the instrument that is to date unsurpassed. His glorious tradition, which utilizes the strengths of the harmonium to the extreme, is presented to the connoisseur today by his stalwart disciples like Pt. Tulsidas Borkar and Pt. Anant Kemkar and the next generation of disciples consisting of Sudhir Nayak, Seema Mestri-Shirodkar, Kedar Naphade and others.
Kedar has also had the privilege of training under Smt. Padmavati Shaligram-Gokhale, a veteran singer of the Atrauli-Jaipur gharana. She played a pivotal role in his musical development and sowed in him the seed that developed into a passionate love for the vocal art form. As such, Kedar’s music derives inspiration from the stylistic genius and dexterous wizardry of P. Madhukar as well as the character of the traditional Hindustani vocal art form, especially of the Gwalior and Jaipur gharanas. In addition to classical music, Kedar also plays the semi-classical forms of Marathi Natyasangeet (Stage Music), Bhajans, Thumri, Dhun etc.
Kedar has performed harmonium solo and has accompanied vocalists at numerous concerts in India, Europe and in the U.S. including prestigious festivals and venues such as the Alladiya Khan Smruti Samaroha, Dadar Matunga Cultural Center, Lincoln Center, Symphony Space etc. He has accompanied artists of high caliber such as his guru Smt. Padmavati Shaligram-Gokhale, Pt. Phiroz Dastur, Pt. Jasraj, Smt. Veena Sahasrabuddhe, Pt. Ulhas Kashalkar, Smt. Laxmi Shankar and others. Kedar continues to train from Pt. Tulsidas Borkar and maintains an active concert schedule in the U.S.