Home » Jazz Musicians » Aditya Balani
Aditya Balani
In 2004 he co-founded Advaita (with Abhishek Mathur), a musical outfit featuring some of the finest musicians from India combining western concepts of songwriting and harmony, with Indian Classical music elements. Today Advaita has grown to become one of the most respected acts on the Indian music scene, and released their debut album 'Grounded in Space' with Virgin/EMI records in March 2009. Aditya is also a passionate music teacher, having taught guitar performance, music theory and music technology at two prestigious schools in India, Peformer’s Collective and Gurgaon School of Music for over seven years.
Aditya Balani Group, is a world-jazz ensemble which brings together talented musicians from countries across the globe. The group has included musicians from India, Spain, Serbia, Chile, Bulgaria and US. Aiming for true artistic expression and drawing from their ethnic roots each musician adds a unique color to their sound, which is an exciting blend of the spontaneity and harmonic interplay of Jazz with the sheer intensity of melodies and rhythms influenced by Indian Classical/Folk music, and various other musical traditions of the world. Aditya is one of the rare guitarists who perform microtonal music, and some of his tunes feature a unique approach to fretless guitar, developed from sarod and sitar playing techniques. Since 2008 Aditya Balani Group has been performing regularly in India and the US. In January 2010 the band went on their second tour of the Indian sub-continent, which was extremely well received and featured Aaron Bahr on trumpet, Will Cafaro on bass, Tarun Balani on drums , Sharik Hasan on piano, and Aditya Balani on fretless/fretted guitars. The group has been chosen as one the featured artists for Jazz Revelation Records for 2010, and will be releasing their full length album this year as well.
Tags
The Evolving Sound of Learning: Western Music Education in India

by Karan Khosla
In this final article of the series on India's evolving jazz landscape, we examine the growing role of contemporary Western music education in shaping new generations of musicians. For generations, Indian music was handed down through the immersive guru-shishya tradition: students living with, or close to, their teachers, learning by ear, imitation and hours spent in the intensity of live, informal apprenticeship. Broadly, in post-independence India, this personalized relationship gave way to imported pedagogical frameworks dominated by the ...
Continue Reading