Natalie Portman As Sita

A new video from Devendra BAnhart, features his girlfriend Natalie Portman as Sita... Very interesting!

Rupa And The April Fishes...

A truly multicultural band with an Indian American as the lead singer, guitarist and lyricist. Rupa, also happens to be a San Francisco based doctor on the side! Wow! Enjoy...



NPR reports that, "When she isn't on stage, Rupa Marya is a doctor of internal medicine on faculty at UCSF, and often draws ideas for songs from her patients' stories. She was able to take advantage of a flexible residency track designed for female doctors who may be expecting children, which allows her to spend six months working and the other half of the year touring.
"And so after my first year of internship, I went into my program director and said, 'Listen, I'll be a terrible doctor if I'm not an artist, and I'll be a terrible artist if I'm not a doctor," Marya says. "'And I need to find a way to do these things.'"

Read the full story about the band on NPR --
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89695578

The marriage of Indian and Jazz music continues to be celebrated

There has always been a strong similarity between Indian music and
jazz music. Especially Carnatic music and jazz. This tradition
continues till date.

An article in the Boston Phoenix talks about Rudresh Mahanthappa's
Indo-jazz connection. An excerpt from tis article
"Mahanthappa, now 36, is one of the more celebrated young musicians of
his generation, a critics'-poll winner and Guggenheim fellow with an
original compositional style rooted in jazz and, yes, Indian music,
rich in rhythmic and melodic complexity, with an aggressive attack on
alto saxophone. His fat tone and fearsome articulation give his
improvisations a Coltrane-like sweep and grandeur. It's a trait he
also shares with one of his teachers from his days at Berklee, George
Garzone. Mahanthappa, who comes to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
with his quartet on February 21 (as a complement to the Gardner's
current Indian-themed "Luxury for Export" exhibit), tells a story
familiar to many first-generation children of immigrants. It's one of
musical and cultural crossover, and typically American."

An article in the Boston Globe says, "He's a self-described egghead, a numbers nut who could have become a mathematician or economist. He's a science-fiction fan who loves William Gibson's "Neuromancer" and is liable to zone out to sci-fi reruns on TV. But when Rudresh Mahanthappa takes the stage, it's with an alto saxophone, not chalk and blackboard, that he burrows into theorems and explores alternate planes, in a musical language so vivid and complex that hard-bitten jazz arbiters have dared to compare him to Ornette Coleman or John Coltrane."

Read the Boston GLobe article at --
http://www.boston.com/ae/music/articles/2008/02/15/for_saxman_its_all_adding_up/

Read the Boston Phoenix article at --
http://thephoenix.com/article_ektid56101.aspx

Carnatic Music Festival

I'll never forget my winters as a young child attending the Carnatic Music concerts in mid December, in my silk pavadai, all decked up and pretty, holding my grandparents and parents hands and listening to some of the greatest stalwarts of carnatic music, watching some of the best Indian dancers perform, enjoying the best of tamil dramas and theater. The music (or fine art)festival is a cultural phenomenon. The breaks between the concerts and the hot mouthwatering tiffins from the makeshift cafeterias were a divine treat.

NPR did a recent story on this festival. Listen to it at --

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=18146238