This year’s Ragas Live Festival will feature a number of special events, but perhaps most special of all is the fact that it’s happening at all. Ragas Live Festival began as a 24-hour radio broadcast and evolved into a set of ragas, from traditional to experimental, performed live in New York City. This year because of the pandemic, it is a 24-hour, 24-set live-stream and radio broadcast presented by Brooklyn Raga Massive, Pioneer Works, Rubin Museum of Art and NYC Radio Live. It will feature more than 90 musicians from 13 cities around the world including Zakir Hussain, Toumani Diabate and Betsayda Machado.
The 2020 Ragas Live Festival will stream from 7 p.m. November 21 to 7 p.m. November 22 (Eastern Standard Time (or midnight 21 Nov – midnight 22 Nov GMT) at live.pioneerworks.org/ragas/. The virtual event is free but encourages donations.
One of the special events will be the release of Brooklyn Raga Massive’s recording of its three-part raga In D. The piece also will be performed in this year’s Raga’s Live Festival, and will be followed by a rare apperance by Terry Riley himself, with a set of raga-based improvisations on solo keyboard from Japan.
Here’s a Bandcamp sample from the festival’s big compilation release Ragas Live Retrospective in 2018.
