Ryland Peter Cooder is an American musician, songwriter, film score composer, record producer, and writer. He is a multi-instrumentalist but is best known for his slide guitar work, his interest in traditional music, and his collaborations with traditional musicians from many countries.
Henry St. Claire Fredericks Jr., better known by his stage name Taj Mahal, is an American blues musician and actor. He plays the guitar, piano, banjo, harmonica, and many other instruments, often incorporating elements of world music into his work. Mahal has done much to reshape the definition and scope of blues music over the course of his more than 50-year career by fusing it with nontraditional forms, including sounds from the Caribbean, Africa, India, Hawaii, and the South Pacific.
Mohan veena refers to either of two distinct plucked string instruments used in Indian classical music, especially Hindustani classical music which is associated with the northern parts of the Indian subcontinent.
Pandit Tarun Bhattacharya is an Indian classical musician who plays the santoor, a type of hammered dulcimer. He studied with Ravi Shankar. He was awarded the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award for 2018.
Harry Manx is a Canadian musician who blends blues, folk music, and Hindustani classical music. His official website describes his music as being a "blend Indian folk melodies with slide guitar blues, add a sprinkle of gospel and some compelling grooves and you'll get Manx's unique "mysticssippi" flavour." Manx plays the slide guitar, harmonica, six-string banjo, mohan veena and Ellis stomp box. He studied for five years in India with Vishwa Mohan Bhatt. Bhatt is the inventor of the 20-stringed mohan veena, which has become Manx's signature instrument. He has released twelve albums in twelve years, and has his own record label Dog My Cats Records. He has received much recognition and many awards, including: seven Maple Blues Awards, six Juno nominations, the Canadian Folk Music Award in 2005 for Best Solo Artist, and CBC Radio’s "Great Canadian Blues Award" in 2007.
Water Lily Acoustics is an American record label in Santa Barbara, California founded in 1985 by Kavichandran Alexander, a Tamil from Sri Lanka. Alexander is a record producer and audio engineer. He named the label after his mother, Lily. The label primarily releases recordings of Indian classical music and collaborations by musicians from around the world. At its inception, the Alexander emphasized Eastern musicians, espousing the belief that they had seldom been recorded with proper sound quality compared to their Western counterparts. He began to include music from outside Asia. Alexander has recorded and produced musicians such as José Neto, Ali Akbar Khan, V. G. Jog, Vishwa Mohan Bhatt, Ry Cooder, Jerry Douglas, Béla Fleck, Taj Mahal, Papa Susso, Jiebing Chen, Simon Shaheen, Hungarian National Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, and the Saint Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra. Music he has recorded has appeared in the films Angel Eyes, Dead Man Walking, and Meet the Fockers.
Cassius Khan, is a Canadian Indian classical musician known for playing the Tabla while singing.
Doug Cox is a multi-instrumentalist, composer and music programmer, and is currently signed to Toronto's NorthernBlues Music.
Pandit Motiram Pandit Maniram Sangeet Samaroh is an annual Indian classical music festival held at Chowmahalla Palace in Hyderabad, India. The festival is organised by noted classical singer Pt. Jasraj in memory of his father and brother, both classical musicians. Jasraj always performs on 30 November every year, his father's death anniversary and a tribute to Jasraj's guru, his mentor and elder brother, Maniram, who died in 1986, and Jasraj renamed the festival to include his brother's name.
Pandit Balwant Rai Bhatt was a noted Indian composer and musician of Hindustani Vocal Music. He was also known as Bhavrang (भावरंग). He died at his home in Varanasi on 2 May 2016.
Asad Ali Khan was an Indian musician who played the plucked string instrument rudra veena. Khan performed in the style dhrupad and was described as the best living rudra veena player in India by The Hindu. He was awarded the Indian civilian honor Padma Bhushan in 2008.
Tabula Rasā is a collaborative album by American banjoist Béla Fleck together with Vishwa Mohan Bhatt and Jie-Bing Chen, who plays the traditional Chinese two-string fiddle erhu. The unusual combination of Fleck's banjo together with these traditional instruments creates a unique sound on this album, which was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best World Music Album at the 39th Grammy Awards.
Salil Bhatt is an Indian slide guitar player. He is the son of the fellow slide player and Grammy Award winner, Padmashree Vishwa Mohan Bhatt.
A Meeting by the River is an album recorded by Ry Cooder and Vishwa Mohan Bhatt; it was recorded in September 1992 and released in April 1993 through the record label Water Lily Acoustics. This improvised, collaborative album features Cooder on slide guitar and Bhatt on the Mohan veena, a stringed instrument created by Bhatt. A Meeting by the River was produced by Kavichandran Alexander and Jayant Shah, engineered by Alexander, and mastered by Kevin Michael Gray and Paul Stubblebine. It peaked at number four on Billboard's Top World Music Albums chart, and earned Cooder and Bhatt Grammy Awards for Best World Music Album at the 36th Grammy Awards in 1994. The album is included in Tom Moon's 2008 book 1,000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die.
Rupam Sarmah is a musician, filmmaker, entrepreneur, author, sound engineer, and computer scientist. Rupam is a Guinness World Records holder and had a #1 release on the Billboard World Music chart. He won a Gold Telly Awards. As a filmmaker, Sarmah has directed documentaries, short films, and feature films. Sarmah directed the English-language feature film One Little Finger with a theme of Ability in Disability.
Kavichandran Alexander is an audio engineer and record producer. He is the founder of the American record label, Water Lily Acoustics. Alexander was the producer and engineer for the 1993 album A Meeting by the River, featuring Ry Cooder and Vishwa Mohan Bhatt, which won a Grammy Award for Best World Music Album.
Laura Sullivan is an American composer, arranger, pianist, producer, author, and a New-age, World, Spoken Word, Native American, and Pop music artist. She has worked with leading musicians of the industry and Grammy award winners including Eric Sullivan, Nancy Rumbel, Jeff Oster, Eugene Friesen, and Will Ackerman. She is best known for her album, Love's River, which won the Grammy Award for Best New Age Album in the 56th Annual Grammy Awards. Love’s River was recognized as one of the best commercial productions by Will Ackerman after 2009. Sullivan's album Pieces of Forever was nominated for Best New Age Album in the 64th Annual Grammy Awards.
Vidushi Sumitra Guha is an Indian classical vocalist, known for her expertise in the Carnatic and Hindustani schools of classical music. The Government of India honored her in 2010, with the fourth highest civilian award of Padma Shri.
Sakar Khan (1938–2013) was an Indian musician, considered by many as the greatest exponent of the Kamayacha, a Rajasthani version of the Persian musical instrument of the same name, popular among the Manganiar community of the Indian desert state. The Government of India honoured Khan in 2012, with the fourth highest civilian award of Padma Shri.
Music for the Motherless Child is a collaboration album between English folk guitarist Martin Simpson and Chinese pipa player Wu Man, released by Water Lily Records in 1996. As with the other album's released on the label, it was recorded at Christ the King Chapel, St. Anthony Seminary, Santa Barbara, by Tamil producer and label owner Kavichandran Alexander, who, also similarly to the label's other releases, curated and oversaw the project as a fusion between the music of two disparate cultures. Neither Simpson or Man had met before the recording of the album, which was done in only a single session that lasted seven hours. Alexander employed vacuum tube recording and took advantage of the church's natural acoustics.
