$35 advance, $40 at the door
Five College students: $20 advance, $25 at the door
Youth 17 and under: $20 advance, $22.50 at the door
You know Sunny Jain as the founder and leader of the unruly, oversized, genre-mashing — and always infectiously fun — Brooklyn-based band Red Baraat. Like Red Baraat, Wild Wild East draws from Jain’s identity as a first-generation South Asian American and as a global musician. Jain’s music with this project taps his family’s immigration story and his far-reaching musical roots. And it finds Jain recasting the immigrant — steeped in the courage to leave a familiar homeland for a new beginning — as the modern-day cowboy and cowgirl. Jain sources musical inspiration from the scores of Bollywood classics and Spaghetti Westerns, Indian folk traditions, jazz improvisation, and rollicking psychedelic and surf guitar styles. Rooted in the contemporary American soundscape, Wild Wild East illustrates the love of new discovery that makes Jain a natural for our Next50 series. It gives us a familiar singer-songwriter and bandleader exercising his well-established genius in a new voice. As Jain tells us, borrowing the words of Walt Whitman: “I am large, I contain multitudes.”
“One of the leading figures in North America’s burgeoning Asian music scene. A global musical alchemist and cultural agent provocateur.”
— SONGLINES MAGAZINE (UK)
“The indefatigable drummer and dhol player Sunny Jain is an unrepentant maximalist-were he a visual artist, one imagines bright-hued paints splattered across his canvas, his floor, and perhaps his ceiling. Think of a genre, and it’s probably somewhere in his compositions, yet the musician’s hullabaloo stands on considered conceptual ground. ”
— THE NEW YORKER
“Creatively and ideologically, this is a perfect storm for Jain. Even in his already formidable body of work, “Wild Wild East” stands out as an album that not only deserves to be heard, but needs to be listened to. An understanding of the stories he tells here with such musical brilliance is liable to change hearts and minds for the better. ”
— POP MATTERS
“Many of these composition are intellectually thrilling to unravel. In “Wild Wild East,” shimmering walls of sound feel like floating face-down in a pool and watching light patterns dance on the floor.”
— PITCHFORK