Pan Asian Music Festival

Pan Asian Music Festival

This past week, Stanford hosted a Pan Asian Music Festival that did an amazing job of showcasing many sides of the musical spectrum thriving in South Asia.

I was able to get myself to Sunday's Qawwali and Tuesday's tribute to A.R. Rahman. The Qawwali was a new experience for me and it was pretty neat. The tribute to A.R. Rahman, was particularly interesting because Mr. Rahaman himself attended and gave an interview on stage.

For those who don't know him, A.R. Rahman is credited as composer who sparked the most current trends in Bollywood music. In other words, if you were to pick your top 10 favorite songs in the past 15 years, 9 of them would probably have been written by Mr. Rahman.

He seemed like quite the humble and personable guy during the interview. He is very grateful to God for his success and doesn't seem to take any of it for granted; impressive considering the impact he's had. His latest project involves being part of a team adapting The Lord of the Rings into a musical! Before that he worked on scores for a Chinese film and the Broadway musical 'Bomday Dreams'. Basically, Rahman's going global and he makes cool music :-)

In any case, thank you to the professors and students that organized the series, it was awesome!

A.R. Rahman at Dinkelspiel Auditorium -- Stanford, CA