Results for "Indian Jazz"

Willie Hill

Born: July 1, 1952

Willie Hill Biography

Willie Hill is a veteran musician who spent a number of years playing with touring R&B and soul acts before starting his own recording studio and record label in Durham, NC.

Hill is a native of Durham and attended North Carolina Central University (located in Durham), where he played trumpet in the University's marching band. He began playing guitar as a teenager and soon gravitated to bass guitar, a move which landed him his first band gig, at age 15.

By the age of 19, Hill was playing bass with the Communicators and had written a hit single, "One Chance," which was recorded by the group in 1974 and is featured on the 1999 album Lost Soul Oldies, Vol. 5.

Todd Mosby

Born: May 5, 1957

Instrumental composer, songwriter, and Imrat guitar innovator Todd Mosby is a storyteller and a landscape artist. He uses the guitar to whisk listeners away to a borderless realm where jazz, jazz fusion, North Indian classical, classical composition, bluegrass, bossa-nova, and folk-rock create transporting and transformative experiences. His latest album, Land Of Enchantment, is a gorgeous scrapbook of the visual, emotive, spiritual and cultural interactions Todd has personally experienced within the New Mexico region of the United States.

Todd is an acclaimed Indian and jazz guitarist influenced by St. Louis’s vibrantly varied cultural blend of Indian, African-American, and Americana traditions. He is one of the few musicians in America who has mastered three mountains of music; western composition, jazz improvisation, and Indian raga music, incorporating them freely as a part of his musical language. He attended Berklee College of Music as an undergrad, Webster University as a graduate student, and, for 13 years, studied classical North Indian music with Ustadt Imrat Khan in the most disciplined way. He has the distinction of being the only guitarist to become a member of the famed Imdhad Khani Gharana of musicians, India’s most prestigious family of sitar musicians dating back 500 to Tansen in the court of Mughal Emperor Akbar. From his years studying this rarified and sacred music, Imrat worked with Mosby to develop a unique guitar technique. This led to  an innovative bridge instrument, the Imrat guitar, which has been undergoing design upgrades since 1997. Built by luthier Kim Schwartz to the performance standards of Mosby and the overall sonic palette of Imrat Kahn, the resulting hybrid 18-stringed sitar-guitar instrument allows for a cross-cultural East-West musical dialogue right at your fingertips and integrated into his musical vocabulary.