Jog Blues will perform at National Sawdust to explore the composition and improvisation. An integral part of both raga and blues, composition provides form, improvisation grows out of the space of musicians to listening deeply to each other, inviting the audience to do the same. What results is a communal journey into the suffering, joys and liberation of the human experience.

Pheeroan ak Laff: Drums

Andy Biskin: Clarinet, Bass Clarinet

Joel Bluestein: Electric Guitar

Naren Budhkar: Tabla

Jake Charkey: Cello

Abhik Mukherjee: Sitar

Siddhartha Mukherjee: Vocals

Jonathan Rose: Bass, Harmonica

This is a seated performance. If you require accessibility accomodations, please email boxoffice@nationalsawdust.org.

Pheeroan akLaff – Drums 

Pheeroan akLaff believes that his music is driven by ritual and imagination. He has been a contributor to creative music and interdisciplinary mediums since 1976, building arts as a way to give thanks and work for change. His performances and residencies have occurred throughout Africa, Asia, Australia, New Zealand, and Europe. His recorded works are voluminous and include projects with Wadada Leo Smith, Oliver Lake, Anthony Davis, Amina Claudine Myers, Henry Threadgill, Sonny Sharrock, Yamashita Yosuke, Jay Hoggard, Liu Sola, Andrew Hill, Mike Nock, James Newton, Anthony Braxton, Don Byron, Marty Ehrlich and Tom Pierson, Rob Reddy, Aska Maret-Kaneko, Ray Anderson, Bobby Zankel and the list continues.   

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Andy Biskin - Clarinet, Bass Clarinet

Andy Biskin is a clarinetist, composer, and filmmaker whose musical vocabulary resides between western classical chamber music, new music, jazz/improvised music and non-Western traditions. Each of his projects is created for specific players and personalities, and he sometimes adds film and animation in unique multimedia projects. A student of American folklore (and former assistant to Alan Lomax), he often focuses on American genres and dialects, reimagining them in a highly personal approach. Andy has released six CDs which have received acclaim in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Downbeat, Wall Street Journal, among other publications, and have also been and reviewed featured on NPR.   

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Joel Bluestein – Electric Guitar 

Joel Bluestein plays electric guitar.  Joel opened Dreamland Recording Studio in response to the recording studio climate at the time, which he found to be a mostly hostile working environment.  His goal was to create a socially-responsible business that treated its employees like family, and was an overall better place to work and record.  

Recording studios were mostly male-dominated at the time, and Joel wanted his studio to challenge that precedence.  He focused on hiring women and bringing in new ideas and ways of working.  They continue their mission of maintaining the family-oriented, comfortable, create vibe of Dreamland.

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Naren Budakhar - Tabla

Naren Budhakar was born and brought up in the Indian classical music tradition. He began performing Tabla at a young age. A disciple of Tabla Maestro Ustad Shabbir Nisar, Naren has played with prominent instrumentalists, vocalists and dancers including Pandit Birju Maharaj, Ustad Amjad Ali Khan, Pandit Jasraj and Shaed Parvez. He has performed at prestigious venues in the U.S. and Europe, providing Tabla accompaniment for various musical genres. He is also a disciple of Shri Aditya Khandwe, a virtuoso vocalist of the Gwalior style of classical Indian vocal music. Naren is co-director of the East-West School of Music at Ananda Ashram and as a faculty member teaches and performs regularly.

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Jake Charkey – Cello 

Recipient of the 2023 New Music USA award and hailed by The Jazz Journal as "a heart-wrenching cello" and by New York Daily Music for his "darkly slithery, microtonally bristling solos" cellist Jake Charkey enjoys an eclectic career bouncing between various realms of music. From MTV specials with Armaan Malik and sold-out shows at the Microsoft Theater with Arijit Singh to stints at the Carnegie Hall with Grammy winner composer Eric Whitacre, arranging strings for several TV Series and films, including Emmy-nominated Netflix Sacred Games, recording with Zakir Hussain and Hariharan and composing music for celebrated choreographer Parul Shah.

Jake has performed as a soloist at the Kennedy Center, Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, and Eastman School of Music and, as part of an ensemble, has played at National Sawdust, Rubin Museum, and the NCPA in Mumbai.

He has performed around Europe, the Middle East, North and South America, and Asia; Jake has collaborated with today's forward-thinking musicians, including Layale Chaker and Sarafand, Adam Rudolph's Go Organic Orchestra, and the Brooklyn Raga Massive.

As an educator on a mission to establish the cello as an Indian instrument, he has taught on the music faculty at Marlboro College, given workshops on Indian cello playing at the New Directions Cello Festival, UMass, Berklee College of Music, and presented the Indian cello as a TEDx speaker and The Violoncello Society of NY.

Jake holds a B.Mus from Shepherd School of Music at Rice Univ in cello performance, where he studied under Norman Fischer. He received his MFA from CalArts in N. Indian music, where he learned with Aashish Khan, Swapan Chaudhury, and Jagan Ramamurthy,

As a recipient of the Shastri Indo-Canadian Arts Fellowship in 2010, he received advanced training in Mumbai in N. Indian music under the legendary violin virtuoso Dr. N. Rajam.

In India, the most in-demand touring and studio cellist, his fluency in these two grand music traditions led him to record and perform with many of the most celebrated musicians like Zakir Hussain, Faizal Qureshi, Hariharan, Yesudas, Master Saleem, Arijit Singh, Armaan Malik, and Clinton Cerejo.

His unique sound can be heard on the title theme song of Sacred Games, MTV's Coke Studio, multiple episodes of MTV Unplugged, and in more than 100 Bollywood songs and soundtracks.

His company, Rose Productions LLC, exclusively represents the New York Grand Central Orchestra for India and has contracted, produced, and managed the NYGCO for globally acclaimed singer Arijit Singh's 2017 & 2015 Tour of the USA.

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Abhik Mukherjee – Sitar

Abhik Mukherjee is a Kolkata-born sitar player of the Etawah-Imdadkhani gharana. He was initiated to sitar at the age of six by his father, Sri Tarit Mukherjee, and Sri Bimal Chatterjee, while simultaneously receiving vocal instruction from Sri Kaylan Bose. He has since taken talim from Pandit Arvind Parikh and Pandit Kashinath Mukherjee, themselves disciples of the legendary Ustad Vilayat Khan. He is a gold medalist in musicology from Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata, and has also received a scholarship from the Ministry of Culture, India.

Abhik’s first public performance was at the age of nine at the Governor’s House, Kolkata. He has since performed in ten countries on four continents. Some memorable concerts include performances for the inauguration of the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. memorial (Washington D.C.); at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York City); at the Indian Habitat Center (Delhi); on Doordarshan (Kolkata); and a summer tour of Italy, Germany, and Switzerland. Abhik currently lives in New York City and is a founding member of Brooklyn Raga Massive, an Indian classical music artists’ collective. He is the director of academic affairs at Chhandayan School of Music in New York City.

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Siddhartha Mukherjee - Vocals

Siddhartha Mukherjee, MD, D.Phil. is a physician, researcher, and author, who serves as Associate Professor of Medicine at Columbia University and as an oncologist at the university’s medical center. Dr. Mukherjee trilogy of books has made a vast contribution to the public discourse on human health, medicine, and science.

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer earned the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, and The Gene: An Intimate History won international awards and was recognized by The Washington Post and The New York Times as one of the most influential books of 2016. Both books have been adapted into PBS documentaries by the renowned filmmaker Ken Burns. The Emperor of All Maladies was included among Time magazine’s 100 best nonfiction books of the past century.

As a medical scholar, Dr. Mukherjee has conducted innovative research that signals a paradigm shift in cancer pathology and has enabled the development of treatments that disrupt current pharmaceutical models toward new biological and cellular therapies. He was among the first to make cellular therapies available in India, and among the first to begin developing AI-based algorithms to discover human medicines. His groundbreaking research is now being translated into a record number of concurrent clinical trials across the globe, spanning novel therapies for ovarian, breast and endometrial cancer, leukemias and lymphomas, and a variety of other diseases. Only a select few medical scholars have been able to translate their work into human trials of such depth and breadth. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine.

Dr. Mukherjee writes for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and many other publications. He has received numerous awards for his scientific work and has published his original research and opinions in journals such as Nature, Cell, and The New England Journal of Medicine.

A native of India, Dr. Mukherjee received his bachelor’s degree from Stanford University and was a Rhodes scholar at Magdalen College, University of Oxford.  After graduating from Harvard Medical School, he completed his internal medicine residency at the Massachusetts General Hospital and his hematology-oncology fellowship at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

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Jonathan F.P. Rose - Bass, Harmonica

Mr. Rose has played bass and harmonica for over 50 years, in the last decade performing with the raga-jazz-blues band Jog Blues, and previously as a member of Philip Glass’s Poetry Ensemble. He also performed with Glass and Laurie Anderson at the Ravello Festival, and many others.

In 1979, Mr Rose founded Gramavision Records, a leading producer of the jazz and new music.  He produced the first Kronos Quartet record, Anthony Davis’s Opera X, John Scofield, Taj Mahal, Billy Hart, Oliver Lake, Medeski, Martin & Wood, Jamaladeen Tacuma, John Carter, released LaMonte Young’s Well Tempered Piano, Paul Winter’s Callings and the works of many others.  

In addition, Mr. Rose is a leader in the integration of business, public policy, and nonprofit work, to create more environmentally, socially and economically resilient communities. In 1989, he founded Jonathan Rose Companies, a green affordable housing development and investment manager. In recognition of this work, Mr. Rose was selected as the Urban Land Institute’s Winner of the 2021 ULI Prize for Visionaries in Urban Development, and in 2023, was awarded the Bhutan’s Order of the Beloved of the Thunder Dragon medal for his contributions to the nation’s urban plans.

Mr. Rose was a founding board member of Jazz at Lincoln Center, and oversaw the development of Frederick P. Rose Hall.

He is the author of The Well-Tempered City, What Modern Science, Ancient Civilizations, and Human Behavior Teach Us about the Future of Urban Life.