Mohamed Assani

The innovative sitarist and composer Mohamed Assani is featured in this episode, linked here is the podcast, video and transcript. Mohamed demonstrates on both sitar and tabla, speaks to me both about his own journey as a musician and about the history of the sitar and South Asian music. In this conversation a couple of compositions from his album Wayfinder are featured. Wayfinder inco rporates a range of stylistic influences, including South Asian Classical, Middle Eastern, jazz, funk, Western Classical, ambient & electronic music. Mohamed shares his perspectives as an educator and creator: “So sitar to me will always be a challenge, right? Music is bigger than us, I believe. So if I can do something like that, what do I learn from it? It just gives me a lot of things to reflect about me as a person. So you start having these kinds of conversation with yourself, and once you accept that whoever you are is going to show on the stage, and that happens, right? So then maybe you start fine tuning some aspects of yourself.”