Open Ear Festival to begin in February

Come February, the Open Ear Festival — a brainchild of two young musicians, Ustad Sultan Khan’s nephew and classical musician Imran Khan and electronic artist Laiq Qureshi, will bring together some interesting  combinations of artists on one stage.

While Pete Lockett (World Music artist) will play with an Indian percussionist, Beat boxer Jason Singh will perform with morchan player Rais Khan. But there will be many firsts too — Midival Punditz will perform with Amaan and Ayaan Ali Khan, Iranian musician Bahramji, Dilshaad Khan and Ishtiyad Khan will play together and Smoke (Ashu and Dhruv) will collaborate with Ustad Sultan Khan.

“It’s not a casual jugalbandi. It’s collaborations between different genres of music like classical and electronic. The artistes get two days for rehearsals and we will be personally directing the music,” says Laiq who started Inroom Records (a label dedicated to creating gender bending music) with Imran.

The most interesting thing to watch out for are collaborations between classical musicians and electronic music artistes. As in the case of Midival Punditz and Amaan and Ayaan who will rehearse in Delhi, and Qureshi plans to fly down to be with the trio to check out the effect. “The idea is to create interesting sounds live though there will two days to rehearse which will add some method to the madness.”

Laiq and Imran have been working on the concept for almost a year. “Imran and I are both musicians. In fact, he is my sitar guru and we used to keep talking about creating good music and sharing various other ideas. We decided to start our own label which will create unique sounds and bend genres. He is Ustad Sultan Khan’s nephew and is into classical music, and I am into electronic music. I approached electronic musicians and they loved the idea of playing with classical musicians,” he says, adding, “we did a lot of mixing and matching before arriving at this line-up.”

Interestingly, all the acts at the first Open Ear stage at Bandra Fort amphitheatre will be free. Partners for the event, Blue Frog, will be hosting a couple of the events too.