Mohamed Assani: Sitar and Tabla, History and Innovation

Conversations with Musicians, with Leah Roseman

This podcast is also a video on my YouTube and the transcript is also linked to my website: https://www.leahroseman.com/episodes/mohamed-assani Today’s guest is the genre-defying sitarist and composer Mohamed Assani. In this conversation a couple of compositions from his album Wayfinder are featured. Wayfinder incorporates a range of stylistic influences, including South Asian Classical, Middle Eastern, jazz, funk, Western Classical, ambient & electronic music. It was produced by Juno and Emmy nominated producer Adham Shaikh and in the show notes you’ll find links to the complete music videos and to his albums. Mohamed is also a wonderful educator, based in Vancouver Canada, also teaching online, and I’m so grateful to him for being so gracious in agreeing to demonstrate on both sitar and tabla some basics of these instruments, and of stylistic elements in South Asian music, for this episode.

I’m an independent podcaster, and I truly need the help of my listeners to keep this project going. https://ko-fi.com/leahroseman Remember you can sign up for my weekly newsletter to get access to Sneak Peeks for upcoming episodes: https://mailchi.mp/ebed4a237788/podcast-newsletter

This is the final episode for Season 3, and season 4 launches January 6th, so do check out episodes you may have missed from the first 3 seasons: https://www.leahroseman.com/about Mohamed Assani website: https://www.mohamedassani.ca/about/ Timestamps: (00:00) Intro (02:37) Mohamed’s path in music, South Asian music and history (08:56) introduction to the sitar with musical examples (13:34) history of the sitar, the Mogul rule (20:20) tabla, rhythm in South Asian music (25:28) tabla demonstration (28:51) please support this podcast (29:31)music education (32:12) Wayfinder album, Lullaby for Guli, Transit (41:07) Solace, understanding beat cycles (49:58) the intuitive versus analytical (51:28) Shahbaz Hussain tabla player (54:06) Aga Khan 80th birthday concert (56:22) reflections on learning music and self-development