Silkroad Up-Close offers a closer look at some of the extraordinary artists who make up the Silkroad Ensemble and at the ideas, traditions, and relationships that shape their work. Created as an intimate counterpart to Silkroad’s large-scale concert presentations, this flagship series gives Ensemble members the space to lead: inviting collaborators, tracing musical lineages, and developing programs rooted in their own creative lives. The result is a portrait of Silkroad from the inside, revealing not only the breadth of traditions represented within the Ensemble, but the curiosity and exchange that continually transform them.
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PROGRAM 1
Silkroad Up-Close featuring Shaw Pong Liu
A Golden Seam: Of Birth, Breath and Becoming is a solo performance project that invites audience participation and reflection on unspoken experiences. Musician and storyweaver Shaw Pong Liu brings audiences on a deeply personal musical journey with her violin, erhu and voice, exploring birth, loss, and the re-making of one’s identity.
Blending intimate narrative with moments of collective sound-making, the piece invites audiences to move from individual reflection toward a sense of connection and community. With original compositions by Liu, as well as improvised music and composed music from multiple musical cultures. Theatre direction by Giselle Byrd.
PROGRAM 2
Silkroad Up-Close featuring Sandeep Das
Raga, Rhythm, and Rasa
Shastriya Sangeet, the classical music of the Indian subcontinent, is renowned for its soul-stirring emotion, highly-developed melodic system (Raga), virtuosic improvisations, complex rhythms, and philosophical depth. It is both a modern, living tradition and an icon of the ancient world, stemming from over 4,000 years of innovation and cultivation. Curated by tabla maestro and Guggenheim Fellow Sandeep Das, this intimate chamber music concert will explore the emotional sentiments of Indian Classical Music known as the Navarasa. From the heroism of Veer Rasa to the sweet romance of Sringara, a mesmerizing dialogue of exotic rhythms, intricate compositions, expressive phrasing, spontaneous improvisations, and joyful folk melodies will unfold. Come join us for an evening to remember!
Program to be announced from the stage.
Over five Wednesday evenings at National Sawdust, Silkroad artists and special guests come together in performances that cross generations and geographies, moving freely between inherited forms and new composition, improvisation and experimentation.
The intimate setting of National Sawdust brings audiences closer to the individual artists of the Ensemble, creating space for the musical connections, discoveries, and moments of spontaneity that can only emerge when artists and audiences share an intimate musical experience.
Join us for the other events in this series:
ABOUT SILKROAD
Yo-Yo Ma conceived Silkroad in 1998, recognizing the historical Silk Road as a model for cultural collaboration—for the exchange of ideas, tradition, and innovation across borders. In a groundbreaking experiment, he brought together musicians from the lands of the Silk Road to co-create a musical language founded in difference, thus creating the foundation of Silkroad: both a touring ensemble comprised of world-class musicians from all over the globe and a Boston-based non-profit organization working to make a positive impact across borders through the arts.
Today, under the leadership of Artistic Director Rhiannon Giddens and President and CEO Director Ben Hartley, Silkroad leads social impact initiatives and educational programming alongside the creation of new music by the Grammy Award-winning Silkroad Ensemble.
To learn more, please visit silkroad.org and @silkroadproject on social media.
This is a seated performance. If you require accessibility accommodations, please email boxoffice@nationalsawdust.org.
ABOUT SHAW PONG LIU
Violinist, educator and community-builder Shaw Pong Liu (she/her) creates transformative listening spaces for dialogue and healing. From playing music in wintry bus shelters, to inviting the public to share “songs from home” and migration stories, to creating participatory nature art-and-soundscapes, Shaw Pong seeks to connect people to one another through collaborative creative practices. As City of Boston Artist-in-Residence in 2016 she created Code Listen, a five-year project collaborating with mothers who have lost children to homicide, Boston police officers, and teen artists to share stories and create original music together. Code Listen also filled concert halls, city streets, and Boston’s City Hall with musicians and memorial portraits of loved ones lost to homicide, raising community consciousness of the inequitable impacts of violence on the city.
A multifaceted musician and improviser on the violin, erhu, singing bowls, and voice, Shaw Pong is a composer of deeply personal, reflective, storytelling music. She performs, teaches and foments musical justice uprisings in the Greater Boston area. A mother of two young children, Shaw Pong is fired up about supporting families in their sacred journeys, working from 2023-2025 to help build Boston’s first Black-led birth center, the Neighborhood Birth Center, through creative arts-based community engagement. She performs with groups including the Silkroad Ensemble, Sonic Joy, and Soul Yatra Trio, and her compositions have been commissioned by Silkroad Ensemble, A Far Cry, Lorelei Ensemble, Anikaya Dance Theatre, Community MusicWorks, Hub New Music and the Celebrity Series of Boston. She holds a MM in Violin Performance from the New England Conservatory of Music. Liu is a 2018 Kennedy Center Citizen Artist Fellow, and a 2020 Boston Celtics’ “Heroes Among Us” honoree.
ABOUT SANDEEP DAS
Hailed as a “creator of myths with Houdini-like skills” (The Sydney Morning Herald, Australia), Sandeep Das is one of the leading Indian tabla virtuosos in the world today. A disciple of the legendary Pt. Kishan Maharaj ji of the Banaras Gharana, he debuted at the age of 17 with renowned Sitar maestro Pt. Ravi Shankar ji and has gone on to lead a prolific international career that now spans more than three decades.
Das performs globally with luminaries such as Yo-Yo Ma and The Silk Road Ensemble , and has played with top orchestras like the New York Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony, and the Chicago Symphony to name a few. His cross-genre collaborations span five continents: he has performed for Pope John Paul II, Queen Elizabeth II, and the UN General Assembly, and his original compositions have been performed in over 50 countries at venues like China’s Forbidden City Concert Hall, Australia’s Sydney Opera House, and the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, California. As a committed educator, Das has led learning initiatives at Harvard University, Juilliard School of Music, Berklee College of the Arts, Stanford University, Dartmouth College, and beyond.
Das is most likely the first and only Indian musician rooted in Indian Classical music to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship for composition, which he received for Delhi to Shiraz, a composition exploring the crossroads of traditional Indian and Persian music as part of his Transcending Borders One Note at a Time project series, which received international acclaim as a “roadmap for irresistible aural adventures” (Downbeat Magazine, USA) and “flawless playing” (Songlines Magazine, U.K.). Driven by a vision for a brighter future, Das is the founder of Layālaya, a nonprofit arts organization in the US creating arts experiences that connect people across time, place, and culture. In India, he founded the nonprofit Harmony and Universality through Music (HUM), which has promoted global understanding through music performance and provided learning opportunities and scholarships for visually-impaired children with artistic potential since 2009. He is also an active public speaker, and has presented at The New York Encounter, The EG Conference, TEDx events, and multiple university residencies. In 2015, he established Das Tabla School, where he currently trains musicians from 6+ countries both online and in-person in Woodstock,CT. To learn more about him, please visit www.sandeepdas.com
ABOUT JAY GANDHI
A multifaceted artist, Jay Gandhi - Bansuri’s music is a reflection of an eclectic array of musical influences and many years of training under the inimitable legend of the bansuri, Pt Hariprasad Chaurasia. He is an international performer, educator and a founding member of the Brooklyn Raga Massive, a groundbreaking NYC musicians' collective. Jay was immersed in Hindustani classical music since his childhood, and through the years he has been fortunate to perform with many renowned artists from India and beyond, such as Ravi Coltrane, Reggie Workman, Jeff “Tain” Watts, and Pharaoh Sanders. He has also been featured on numerous acclaimed albums.