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 will feature the New York premiere of Parvathy Baul, an artist from the mystical Baul sect of West Bengal; a tribute to Ali Akbar Khan on his centennial from his son, Manik Khan; the torchbearer of Iraqi maqam, Hamid al-Saadi; ambient modular explorations from Kroba; and over a dozen more artists to be announced.
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.
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.