Red Baraat To Headline Sag Harbor American Music Festival

Sunny Jain often tells his wife, Sapana Shah, that she has changed his life.

“So many things sprung from that relationship,” he said, “and still do.”

During a recent interview, the musician was certainly referring to their two children, Kaiden and Monami, and the home base they have created in Brooklyn. But he was, more specifically, talking about their wedding.

If they had never married, he would have never had a baraat — which is, in Indian culture, a celebratory wedding procession for the groom, with dancing and live music traditionally led by a brass band and dhol drummers.

And if Jain had never had a baraat, he would have never formed the band that has defined much of the percussionist’s musical career.

On September 23, Red Baraat will headline the main stage of the Sag Harbor American Music Festival, melding hard-driving North Indian bhangra with elements of hip-hop, jazz and raw punk energy on stage — with Jain at the front, wearing a dhol slung over his shoulders and a wide smile, tucked under his signature curled mustache.

“I like to make that line between band and audience disappear,” he said. “We rely on the audience and their energy, their engagement, as much as their coming to see a show. We bring high energy and we bring in-the-moment improvisation, and just being together with everyone in that community, at that moment, so we can all experience, you know, just some joy.”

Growing up in Rochester, Jain straddled two cultures. On one side were his parents, who emigrated from India and brought their devotional songs and classic Bollywood soundtracks with them. And on the other were his two older siblings, who introduced him to American Top 40.

“My brother was an avid music listener and also a guitarist and violinist, so he had a wide collection of music that I would sneak into before he got home from school,” Jain said, “anything from Ice-T to Rick Astley, with Miles Davis in the middle. That’s where I heard Rush, the prog-rock band from Canada. He had some record of Rush, and I fell in love with that group also at a young age.”

At 10 years old, Jain started taking lessons from a bebop jazz drummer “and then jazz entered my life,” he said, drawing inspiration from giants like Elvin Jones and Max Roach. Eight years later, he began learning tabla — a pair of Indian hand drums — and it was during a trip to India to buy a new set that his attention shifted toward dhol.

“I honestly came to it because I was a frustrated tabla player,” Jain said. “I started tabla very, well, in my head, what I thought was late. I started when I was 18. So I always had these roadblocks in my head that like, oh, I’m too old to play this instrument, everyone starts when they’re 4 or 5.”

He grabbed a dhol, as well, and immediately fell in love with it. It was liberating to come out from behind a drum set in front of the band, he said, and he gravitated toward the freedom it afforded him.

But it took some time to accept this path forward, he said. He was applying to law schools up until age 27.

“There was the cultural baggage of you’re supposed to become a doctor, or a lawyer, or a banker, or do something else. That kind of stuck with me until I was 30 — oh my God,” he said with a laugh of realization, “and I was already touring a bunch and doing perfectly fine at that point, but in my head, I kept thinking, ‘When is this gonna end? I should prepare to something else.’”

Eventually, Jain pulled himself out from underneath the baggage by reflecting on pivotal moments throughout his career — among the first was at age 19. He was en route to the administration building to drop out of college when he bumped into his guitar teacher, Ted Dunbar, who invited him to play a gig in place of jazz drummer Ben Riley, who was well known for his work with Thelonious Monk.

“There were things like that, that would stop me, or just give me inspiration to keep going. But honestly, why did I keep going? It was just time — time kept going on —and I love playing music,” he said. “So I was there. It just took me a long time to realize that no matter how many times I kept on trying to pull away with it, I was bit by the bug early on, and you can’t pull away from it.”

After his wedding in 2005, it would be another three years before Red Baraat found its place in the world — playing upwards of 40 weddings per year in the meantime.

“I decided I want to make this a proper band,” he said. “I want to add a stationary drum set, I want to add a sousaphone player and I want to make this into a festival club band and just develop this into a new project.”

Over 10 years later, the group has allowed Jain to travel the world, build a second family, and continue to pursue what he deeply loves — on the stage, and off.

“It was really just something to write for and play dhol for and just kind of head in a different musical direction,” he said. “It’s just changed my life.”