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 […]
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 [...] 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 [...] Sambath Pich
Sambath Pich first trained on his instrument, the takhe, in a Thai refugee camp after fleeing the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Pich had studied other instruments and learned many songs from his grandfather, Dr. Los Sourn Mar, a teacher and musician in the royal palace, until the war separated him from his family. Passed down […]
Pirayeh Pourafar
Pirayeh Pourafar began her musical life at the age of nine when she entered the Royal National Music Conservatory of Tehran. In addition to her study of the radif, the basis for traditional Persian music, Pourafar chose the tar as her instrument. Made of mulberry wood with a double-bellied body, its two and a half […]
Jagan Ramamoorthy
Jagan Ramamoorthy is a violinist in the North Indian classical style called gaayaki-ang (singing through the instrument, a playing technique which emulates the flexibility of the human voice). Both his father and grandmother taught him the violin at an early age and then he began studying with Dr. N. Rajam, the foremost violin virtuosa in […]
Frank Simpson
Frank Simpson plays the Irish tin whistle, an instrument which has been a part of Celtic traditional music from its inception and which has played a significant role in the developing and sustaining of the genre of traditional Irish music throughout its history. Simpson has been playing the tin whistle for 25 years and began […]
Ivan Varimezov
Ivan Varimezov was born and raised in a small town in eastern Bulgaria. As a young child he began to play the most important traditional folk instrument of the country, the bagpipe, called the gaida. It consists of a melody pipe, a drone pipe, and a blow pipe, all tied into a goatskin bag. Varimezov [...] Mani Bolouri
Mani Bolouri is a composer and virtuoso player of the kamancheh (spiked fiddle) and gheychak (bowed fiddle). Mr. Bolouri began his musical studies at the age of ten under the guidance of his grandfather who was an ashough (a popular, traveling musician) and who taught him Armenian folk music. He has also studied with many […]
Cesar Castro
Cesar Castro both plays and builds the requinto jarocho or guitarra de son, the melodic lead instrument of traditional music from Veracruz Mexico known as son jarocho. Son jarocho is a mix of indigenous Mexican, African, Spanish and Arabic sounds. Mr. Castro began training in son jarocho at age 11, joining the pathbreaking group, Mono […]