Ritika and Shinjan
As cultural carriers of Bengali folk music, Ritika and Shinjan connect global story listeners with rich traditions of oral musical storytelling in South Asia. Through the intimacy of language, the duo invites adventurous audiences to their genre-bending conversations with music. They are known and loved for drawing the listener into familiar, future, and faraway worlds as they connect our everyday with 200 year-old songs and poems in Bangla. Along with their chosen musical immersions, they share a love for high elevation, long leaf tea.
Ki Bolibo - Jasimuddin
Ritika: “I first came across Bengali poet Jasimuddin's songs when I was traveling through rural West Bengal a few years ago. I remember getting sucked into one superb rendition after another of his works by various polli shilpi (rural artists / musicians) from both sides of the border. I'm thrilled that we got to sit under a tree by the Minneapolis Institute of Art in Minnesota and work this song out some ten thousand miles away and about one hundred years after it was written. I love how songs journey.”
Shinjan: “A classic from poet Jasimuddin, and a collaboration across space and time. I am so delighted to share this!”
Bajaaye Bnashi - Bangla Folk
“We heard this tune live 4am-ish at a 6 hour play that ran from midnight through dawn. We were under the stars, and the time was just before moonset, surrounded by heavy foliage and sculptures at the Academy of Fine Arts, Calcutta, as a feminist re-telling of the epic Mahabharat (Urubhangam) unfolded.
The tune came right back to us in the thick of the quarantine. This is a remembered version of the song we heard, reconstructed in the city of Minneapolis that is some version of home to us.”
Bondhu Roho -Rabindrasangeet
“The thing we love the most about sharing our rich musical heritage in the midwest is to see it being actively interpreted by musicians who share no prior listening history of this heritage, and yet, can expand it in profound ways.” This was recorded on a very cold evening in Minneapolis with a cellist friend, Drew Kellum.
Ami Opar Hoye - Lalon
“Lalon Fakir - the prominent Sufi / Baul poet - preempted every tiny detail of our current reality hundreds of years ago. Here’s an appeal to get us all to the other side.” Recorded in the first week of the COVID quarantine, and the first of many sharings of this song in the Twin Cities.
Gaanger Jol
Commissioned by the Cedar Commissions, this is a video production of an original composition in Bangla folk by Ritika of her mom’s poem on the river Ganga.
Shinjan: “This is my most favorite song from the entire repertoire.”