Steve Gorn’s bansuri has been described as capable of “re-aligning the cells” — not a claim the uninitiated might take seriously until the bamboo flute begins moving through a raga, and the instrument does something that resists easy description. On Saturday, August 8, Gorn performs with santoor player Vinay Desai and tabla maestro Samir Chatterjee for an evening of Indian classical music at Maverick Concert Hall in Woodstock.
About the Show
Gorn came to the bansuri through a path that has defined his musical life. Drawn early on to Indian music through the work of John Coltrane and Charles Lloyd, he traveled to India in 1969 and made his way to Calcutta, where he studied under the renowned master Sri Gour Goswami. His flute appears on the Grammy-winning recording Miho – Journey to the Mountain with the Paul Winter Consort and in the Academy Award-winning documentary Born into Brothels; he has also recorded with Paul Simon, Jack DeJohnette, and Krishna Das.
Vinay Desai plays santoor, the hundred-stringed instrument that Padma Vibhushan Pandit Shivkumar Sharma introduced to Indian classical music in 1955. Desai studied directly under Sharma during the maestro’s final years, and since Sharma’s death in May 2022, he is among the few musicians carrying that specific lineage forward. He is based at Shanti Mandir, an ashram in Walden, making him as local to the Hudson Valley as this genre’s performers tend to get.
Samir Chatterjee anchors the evening on tabla. A master of the Farrukhabad gharana and an A-rated artist on India’s national radio and television, Chatterjee has accompanied Ravi Shankar, Vilayat Khan, and Bhimsen Joshi; he performed at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo in 2007. He holds faculty positions at the Manhattan School of Music, the University of Pittsburgh, and the New School for Jazz. Together, the three produce what the event page describes as “music that is warm, grounded, and deeply engaging” — the bansuri’s breath moving against the santoor’s shimmer, with tabla providing “a steady, energizing rhythmic foundation.”
Venue & Logistics
Maverick Concert Hall in Woodstock is a historic outdoor pavilion, open to the summer air in a way that suits the meditative demands of North Indian classical music particularly well. The concert is part of the Maverick Saturday Nights series. Showtime is 8:00 p.m.
Tickets
Reserved hall seats run $35–$55, with partial obstruction seats at $27–$30. General admission and outdoor/uncovered seating is $20; students pay $10. Buy tickets