About the Show
Aakash Mittal’s Awaz Trio is part of the Spring Revolution festival, National Sawdust’s annual two week festival celebrating the musical revolution created by Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. Held from March 1st through March 11th, this year Spring Revolution celebrates the voice of multicultural women, with every night featuring female curators, artists and composers because the female perspective is the human perspective and the human perspective should be inclusive.
The Awaz Trio sculpts sonic landscapes, pointillistic textures, and angular melodies from Indian and American improvised music. The trio has performed across the Northeast, New York, Denver, and Kolkata, India.
Their debut project, Nocturne, is a series of pieces that abstract and deconstruct five Hindustani evening and night ragas. The colorful dissonances, meditative silences, and punctuated rhythms that emerge paint a unique picture of the night. At times the music evokes the meditation of a world at rest, night terrors conjured by the imagination, and the slow cadence of blue light melting into darkness.
The Trio is led by Aakash Mittal, the colorful multi-instrumentalist who has been renowned since 2002 for spinning colorful dissonances, meditative silences, and angular rhythms to express environments and spaces from the American west to the dense streets of Kolkata. He is accompanied by Miles Okazaki (guitar), and Rajna Swaminathan (mridangam).
About the Artists
Aakash Mittal’s Awaz Trio
The Awaz Trio sculpts sonic landscapes, pointalistic textures, and angular melodies from Indian and American improvised music. Their debut project, Nocturne, is a series of pieces that abstract and deconstruct five Hindustani evening and night ragas. The colorful dissonances, meditative silences, and punctuated rhythms that emerge paint a unique picture of the night. At times the music evokes the meditation of a world at rest, night terrors conjured by the imagination, and the slow cadence of blue light melting into darkness. The trio has performed at such notable venues as the Shastra Festival at Le Poission Rouge in New York City, Dazzle Jazz Club in Denver, Colorado, The American Center in Kolkata, India and The Walden School Concert series in Dublin, New Hampshire. In 2014 the trio conducted a residency in northern Colorado that involved workshops in public schools and state universities. The trio’s mission is to program new work that explores the concept of Awaz, a Hindi-Urdu word that changes meaning between sound, noise, and voice depending on the context. The trio is comprised of Aakash Mittal (saxophone), Miles Okazaki (guitar), and Rajna Swaminathan (mridangam). Nocturne was created with support from the American Institute of Indian Studies.
