Pejman Hadadi
Pejman Hadadi is a virtuoso Iranian tombak and daf (frame drum) player who has been hailed as “the finest Iranian percussionist living in the West” (KPFA Radio, Berkeley, CA). Hadadi began playing tombak at the age of ten under the masters of the instrument Asadollah Hejazi and Bahman Rajabi. In 1990, upon immigrating to the […]
Mehrdad Arabi
Mehrdad Arabi plays and teaches the kamanche, the chief bowed instrument in Persian classical and folk music dating back to antiquity. A very popular instrument, the kamanche is almost always present in the make-up of all sizes of classical Persian ensembles. Arabi has been playing his instrument for more than 25 years. He studied the […]
Ian Whitelaw
Ian Whitelaw plays the Great Highland bagpipe, an instrument deeply embedded in Scottish culture. His teachers include Andrew Wright, president of the Piobaireachd Society, and Robert Nicol, former piper to King George VI. Mr. Whitelaw has performed for many film and television programs, and has performed at the Mormon Tabernacle, at The Universal Amphitheatre with […]
Ciro Hurtado
Ciro Hurtado is a Peruvian guitarist/composer who has been actively performing since the early 1970s as a soloist and member of various groups in Peru, Mexico, Cuba, Europe and the United States. He studied in Peru with guitar master Augusto Portugal. Hurtado is currently the musical director and has produced several albums for the group […]
Charles Kaimikaua Jr.
Charles Kaimikaua Jr. comes from a family of legendary Hawaiian musicians and has learned to play several instruments. He is a master of the Hawaiian slack key guitar, a unique style of picking and tuning a guitar that was created by the early Hawaiians sometime after 1850. Kaimikaua has been playing and teaching the slack […]
Liu Qi-Chao
Liu Qi-Chao is a composer and master performer on several Chinese wind, string, and percussion instruments, including the suo na, sheng and gu zheng, among others. He was born in Shandong, China, and is currently one of the most innovative and most sought after Chinese artists living the West. In his two decade career, Liu [...] Kineya Kichikazu
Kineya Kichikazu holds shihan status on the Japanese shamisen. Born in Japan, Kichikazu began to study the shamisen in 1947 with Master Kineya Goso. The shamisen is a 3-stringed instrument played with a large pick and is used to perform a type of music called nagauta, a form of Japanese classical music using the shamisen [...] Francisco Aguabella
Music has been a part of Francisco Aguabella’s life since he was a child growing up in Cuba. Since his beginnings of playing drums with his friends on discarded Carnation cans, Mr. Aguabella has become one of the world’s premiere Afro-cuban drummers. He has been honored by the City of Los Angeles, City of San […]
Lillian Nakano
Lillian Nakano is a master of the Japanese shamisen, a long-necked, three-string lute that is the main instrument of kabuki theater and other classical narrative ballad forms of music. Nakano was raised in Hawai’i and began studing shamisen and classical dance at the age of eight. Her studies were interrupted by World War II and […]
Carlos de Oliviera
Carlos de Oliviera has been playing the Brazilian pandeiro for over 50 years, primarily with the renowned samba school of Mangueira. The pandeiro is a frame drum played with the hands and is one of the most important instruments in Brazilian folkloric music: samba, chorro, forro and the more modern pagodge. It is also an [...]