Archives: Artists

Anoushka Shankar is one of the world’s great sitar players and the only artist to be trained solely by her father, the unsurpassed Ravi Shankar.

Anoushka Shankar has not only blossomed as a great sitar player but also as a composer in her own right producing great new music that is rooted in the Indian classical tradition but also boldly explores musical connections and fusions in a unique and thoroughly engaging way.

Following her acclaimed CDs ‘Rise’ (nominated for a Grammy) and ‘Breathing Under Water’, this project carries forward to a new generation the sense of exciting and open-eared musical exploration that has marked both their careers.

Arooj Aftab is a Grammy Award–winning artist whose work occupies a singular space in contemporary music, blending jazz, minimalism, South Asian musical traditions, and avant-pop. Declared “the coolest rock star in the world right now” by Uncut, she is a highly acclaimed artist and one of the most distinctive voices of our time.

Her breakthrough album, Vulture Prince, ushered Aftab into the cultural zeitgeist with widespread critical acclaim, earning a Grammy win for the song “Mohabbat” and appearing on Barack Obama’s 2021 Summer Playlist. In 2024, she released her fourth solo album, Night Reign, which received a Grammy nomination for Best Alternative Jazz Album, while its lead single, “Raat Ki Rani,” was nominated for Best Global Music Performance.

Aftab has performed at major international festivals including Primavera Sound, Glastonbury, and Coachella, and has collaborated with ensembles such as the Metropole Orkest. She has appeared on NPR’s Tiny Desk, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and Later… with Jools Holland, and has been praised by The New York Times, The Guardian, Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, and The Financial Times.

After nearly 20 years of raging against oppression and injustice, it is sometimes easy to forget that this multi‐cultural British crew are also one of the most musically inventive, explosively exciting live bands on the planet. Now, their strongest line up yet combines their trademark fusion of punk rock,electronic beats, reggae, bhangra and hip‐hop that has attracted many famous
fans, from Primal Scream to Radiohead, Sinead O’Connor to Chuck D, all former touring partners and studio collaborators.

Over the years, this ever‐evolving band have continued to expand their agenda, delivering live soundtracks to film and tackling operas, while taking their fiery mix of music and social activism to
far‐flung places where conventional western rock bands rarely tour: Morocco, India, Cuba and the favelas of Brazil.

Their live soundtrack to French film ‘La Haine’ acted as a catalyst to forming the line‐up, where founding guitarist Steve Savale has been re‐joined by original members Dr Das (Bass) and Rocky Singh (drums). For the Music Beyond Mainstream commissioned soundtrack of George Lucas’s dystopian sci-fi film THX1138 former vocalist Ghetto Priest returned alongside ADF’s newer members,
Aktarvata and Nathan ‘Flutebox’ Lee.

Forget every rule you’ve ever been taught about live music. Ignore every outmoded notion of what it is to be a ‘live’ band. Forget even what you think you think ‘live music’ actually means.

What drives this band is a need to communicate with their audience in a way not possible with traditional live bands.

There are no ‘songs’ as such to perform, there’s no album to promote. The Bays only perform live, they never rehearse, they don’t have a set-list and they couldn’t ever do the same performance twice. It’s all about the moment – an experience or an event that exists between the band and the audience for one time only.

What they do that is so unique, so unprecedented, is that they enter into a creative partnership with the crowd, receiving feedback from the dance floor and reinterpreting that response, rewiring the vibe and taking it to a new level. Each of The Bays is feeling a progression in the music and is anticipating where the performance is going to next. It could change at any moment and pursue a new direction in a second.

And that’s why Music Beyond Mainstream loves The Bays.

Ben Folds is an Emmy-nominated singer-songwriter who has created an enormous body of genre-bending music that includes pop albums with Ben Folds Five, multiple solo albums, a holiday album, and numerous collaborative records.

He currently tours as a pop artist, while also performing for over two decades with some of the world’s greatest symphony orchestras.

Folds, who served for eight years as the first ever Artistic Advisor to the National Symphony Orchestra (NSO) at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, stepped down from his post when Donald Trump announced his takeover of the Center. Just days before the US presidential election, Folds recorded two sold out performances with the NSO which he released as a live album this summer which debuted at the top of the Billboard classical and classical crossover charts.

A New York Times Best Selling author, Ben also creates new music for film, tv and theatre, including original songs for an ongoing series of animated Peanuts specials on Apple TV.

In 2022, he launched a music education charitable initiative in his native state of North Carolina entitled “Keys For Kids,” which provides funds and keyboards to existing nonprofits that offer free or affordable piano lessons to school-age children from economically disadvantaged households. For the past 15 years he has been an outspoken advocate for arts funding, music education and music therapy in the US as a member of Americans For The Arts and the Arts Action Fund.