Friday, August 11, 2023 - 8:00pm

Varun Rangaswamy:

The album REINHERITANCE is a process of understanding, a way to see ancestral tradition as fundamentally about change. It deals with the idea that one of the ways tradition is simultaneously reproduced and radically transformed is through repeated acts of inheritance. It is also a process through which I look for ways to engage with ancestral tradition that invite alterity.

In this album, I respond to three of my musical ancestors: Ornette Coleman, M.S. Subbulakshmi, and Aretha Franklin. Each of these responses is not only a piece of music, but also an act of inheritance in real time. I do this not by trying to recreate their work, but by offering my presence to theirs, creating a musical space that fuses past, present, and future. They are a part of my past, and I am a part of their future.

REINHERITANCE is a multi-track solo album, meaning I am the only musician on it, and I have superimposed multiple recordings of myself on different instruments to create the sound of an ensemble. Those instruments include bassoon, mridanga, voice, tenor sax, and electronics. I also do some noise improv on instruments I have no training on, like clarinet, guitar, and pots and pans. By responding to musicians from such disparate contexts with multiple recordings of myself playing multiple different instruments, I hybridize myself. I exponentiate my own voice, not to make it louder, but to make it varied, to make it different from itself.

By making this album, I want to show how I inherit, as all of us do, forms of music and ways of being multiple times through multiple different iterations of myself. Those ways of being are always changing how they come to me and I am always changing how and what I inherit through the act of inheritance itself.

In my responses to Ornette, M.S., and Aretha, their spirits are present, but no attempt to respond to the past can be pure and whole; the past can never be fully recreated, nor should it be. The weight of time leaves gaps, generational movements create open space, and it is in this space that alterity finds its expression. REINHERITANCE gives voice to the alterity I am able to discover in the gift of space my ancestors have given me.

Siddharth Ashokkumar/Devi Majeske duo:

Siddharth Ashokkumar has played the South Indian (Carnatic) violin for the last 19 years. He is a student of the Lalgudi Jayaraman style, learning from the founder's key disciples - his son, Lalgudi Krishnan and Vittal Ramamurthy. Siddharth is the recipient of many awards from North American Indian music festivals and competitions and has had the privilege of performing internationally.

After finishing his undergraduate studies from the University of Pennsylvania, Siddharth continued to play and experiment with Indian classical music, including performing as part of a global fusion ensemble, Falsa, which combines ancient Sufi traditions with Spanish, Indian, and West African music.

Devi Majeske is a classical sitarist and singer-songwriter from Philadelphia. She was first introduced to the sitar by Dr. Jagadeesh Gokhale in a class at UPenn. After graduating in 2019, Devi decided to live in India for several months in order to study sitar more seriously in the Hindustani tradition under the tutelage of Seema Pal from the Maihar Gharana. Devi is currently training under Brooklyn-based musician Abhik Mukherjee from the Etawah Gharana. Aside from playing sitar, Devi writes songs for her indie rock project "Air Devi". You can listen to her music listed under “Air Devi” on Spotify, Apple, Music, etc., and can find her performing with her live band from time to time in the Philadelphia area.