Wild Wild East
| Sunny Jain
Wild Wild East
Sunny Jain (born 1975) is an American dhol player, drummer, and composer. He is recognized as a lead voice in the burgeoning movement of South Asian-American jazz musicians. His seven albums have all received international acclaim for their "groundbreaking synthesis" (Coda Magazine), as he brings together the ancient sounds of his cultural heritage, America's greatest original art form and a host of other sounds.-Wikipedia
Critic Reviews
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All Music
He brings all of these influences to bear on his fourth solo album, 2020's potently realized Wild Wild East. Drawing inspiration from Bollywood and Spaghetti Western soundtracks, surf rock, hip-hop, and avant-garde improvisation, Jain paints a vivid, cross-cultural musical portrait. It's a sound that has specific roots in '70s Bollywood "curry westerns" like Sholay and Khote-Sikkay, where directors brought American cowboy archetypes and themes to stories set in India. Jain purposefully recontextualizes these ideas on Wild Wild East, breaking open the image of the swaggering American cowboy with his acidic, twangy, propulsively hypnotic songs. It's an inspired cinematic concept that conjures kaleidoscopic images from filmmakers like Alejandro Jodorowsky, Quentin Tarantino, and Robert Rodriguez; filmmakers who similarly throw music, pop culture, and their own distinctive cultural backgrounds into a blender to create something new.
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Folkways
Sunny Jain’s Wild Wild East encompasses myriad facets of Jain’s identity both as a first-generation South Asian–American and as a global musician, from his own family’s immigration story to his eclectic musical upbringing.
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Brooklyn Vegan
It sounds like the middle ground between a Western score and a Bollywood score, with a little free jazz in the mix too, and Sunny Jain fuses these things to the point where they sound like one focused style of music.
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NPR
The album revolves around the themes of cowboys and immigrants, with a song called "Immigrant Warrior."
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Closed Captioned
Mixing multiple tones, their composer and bandleader Sunny Jain has a similar sound that’s hard not to like. Now with a new solo album Wild Wild East coming in February, the Brooklyn based composer just dropped a new single, and “Wild Wild East” should leave you in a state after you hear it.
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Pitchfork
In “Wild Wild East,” shimmering walls of sound feel like floating face-down in a pool and watching light patterns dance on the floor. These small moments of peace feel more radical than any grand statement.
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Opsikpro
Something of the museum’s humble approach to memorializing—accumulating the residue of ordinary life, building it into something consequential—is expressed in Sunny Jain’s Wild Wild East, the first release in the Smithsonian Folkways’ Asian Pacific America series. Like several recent albums by artists of color that reimagine the American cowboy, it discards the romantic myth of a white gunslinger galloping across Western plains. Instead, it claims that the true spirit of the cowboy—his courage, resilience, and relentless pursuit of freedom—is embodied by immigrants.
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Pop Matters
Sunny Jain is unstoppable on new album Wild Wild East, where he mixes jazz, a multitude of Indian folk and classical traditions, cinema sounds, and surf rock.
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Metacritic
The fourth full-length solo release for the Brooklyn-based drummer features influences from Bollywood, spaghetti Westerns, Indian folk, jazz, psychedelic and surf guitar music.
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Green Man Review
Wild Wild East is the first release in the Smithsonian Folkways’ Asian Pacific America series. I can’t imagine a better way to introduce such a project than with Sunny Jain, exploring the interconnectedness of global styles and the arbitrariness of borders, and finding in the histories of America’s marginalized peoples – African American, Native, immigrants of various ethnicities – parallels with the stories of his own immigrant parents and ancestors. This is an important record, but it’s also a great one
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The Kurland Agency
Sunny Jain’s Wild Wild East encompasses myriad facets of Jain’s identity both as a first-generation South Asian–American and as a global musician, from his own family’s immigration story to his eclectic musical upbringing. In recasting the immigrant—steeped in the courage to leave a familiar homeland for a new beginning—as the modern-day cowboy and cowgirl, Jain sources musical inspiration from the scores of Bollywood classics and Spaghetti Westerns, Indian folk traditions, jazz improvisation, and rollicking psychedelic and surf guitar styles. Wild Wild East is an album rooted in the contemporary American soundscape, singing in a new voice.
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The Quietus
Wild Wild East is a thematic exploration of his parents’ lives as Indian immigrants to America. This tale of immigration is the bedrock of Wild Wild East, which is actually, under all those other ideas, a deeply personal album for Sunny. It has a loose narrative around his parents’ struggle with being forced out of their native home upon the 1947 partition of India, and their decision to emigrate to New York – leaving everything and everyone they knew behind.
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Flipboard
The composer and jazz multi-instrumentalist explores the myth of the American cowboy through an immigrant's lens on his genre-blending latest.
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Key Mail Records
The trailblazing Indian-American, Sunny Jain is internationally recognised as a musician with a distinct and recognisable sound and his new album ‘Wild Wild East’ encompasses myriad facets of Jain’s identity both as a first-generation South Asian-American and as a global musician, from his own family’s immigration story to his eclectic musical upbringing.
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AE Daily
Something of the museum’s humble approach to memorializing—accumulating the residue of ordinary life, building it into something consequential—is expressed in Sunny Jain’s Wild Wild East, the first release in the Smithsonian Folkways’ Asian Pacific America series.
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New Music USA
It sounds like the middle ground between a Western score and a Bollywood score, with a little free jazz in the mix too, and Sunny Jain fuses these things to the point where they sound like one focused style of music.
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Con Safos Magazine
“Wild Wild East” “is about migration. Wild Wild East is the first release in the Smithsonian Folkways’ Asian Pacific America series.
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Jazziz
Drummer/composer Sunny Jain, globally recognized as one of the lead voices of South Asian-American jazz, has announced that he will release his new album, Wild Wild East, on February 21 via Smithsonian Folkways. This will be his first solo album in a decade and his first for the label.
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Album Reviews Site
The fourth full-length solo release for the Brooklyn-based drummer features influences from Bollywood, spaghetti Westerns, Indian folk, jazz, psychedelic and surf guitar music.
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Penny Black Music
At the end of the day, each individual member of the six horn and three drummer Red Baraat band imprint their diverse musical backgrounds into our sound. It’s a special sound that is captured on our debut album, but unmatched when seeing us live.
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Broadway World
Unlike most Indo-Jazz ensembles, Sunny draws inspiration from the musical sensibilities of modern India in addition to ancient classical forms. Jain's Punjabi roots and appreciation for Bollywood classics are audible in the work. Allusions to Indian dance rhythms find resonance with ragtime, swing, and the syncopated jazz canon in the group's performances.
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Presto Classical
Sunny Jains Wild Wild East encompasses myriad facets of Jains identity both as a first-generation South AsianAmerican and as a global musician, from his own familys immigration story to his eclectic musical upbringing.
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ISRBX
Sunny Jain’s Wild Wild East encompasses myriad facets of Jain’s identity both as a first-generation South Asian–American and as a global musician, from his own family’s immigration story to his eclectic musical upbringing. In recasting the immigrant—steeped in the courage to leave a familiar homeland for a new beginning—as the modern-day cowboy and cowgirl, Jain sources musical inspiration from the scores of Bollywood classics and Spaghetti Westerns, Indian folk traditions, jazz improvisation, and rollicking psychedelic and surf guitar styles. Wild Wild East is an album rooted in the contemporary American soundscape, singing in a new voice.
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Sunny Jain
This dynamic — of interrogating American myths to make them fit the reality of our world, of both questioning and rhapsodizing the notion of identity in a contingent world — is at the heart of Wild Wild East, the new album from the Brooklyn-based bandleader, composer, dhol player, and drummer. It’s also at the heart of his story — as the son of immigrants from India, as a kid from Rochester raised on the Cure and prog rock, as a fluid jazz drummer on his own and as a party-starter with Red Baraat, as an American of color.
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Exit Zero Jazz
Wild Wild East explores the symbolism and romanticism surrounding immigration and American cowboys from the perspective of people of color in the United States.
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Public
Sunny Jain’s Wild Wild East encompasses myriad facets of Jain’s identity both as a first-generation South Asian–American and as a global musician, from his own family’s immigration story to his eclectic musical upbringing. In recasting the immigrant—steeped in the courage to leave a familiar homeland for a new beginning—as the modern-day cowboy and cowgirl, Jain sources musical inspiration from the scores of Bollywood classics and Spaghetti Westerns, Indian folk traditions, jazz improvisation, and rollicking psychedelic and surf guitar styles.
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Once DDL
Sunny Jain’s Wild Wild East encompasses myriad facets of Jain’s identity both as a first-generation South Asian–American and as a global musician, from his own family’s immigration story to his eclectic musical upbringing.
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Band Camp
Sunny Jain’s 'Wild Wild East' encompasses myriad facets of Jain’s identity both as a first-generation South Asian–American and as a global musician, from his own family’s immigration story to his eclectic musical upbringin
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Rarely Unable
This dynamic — of interrogating American myths to make them fit the reality of our world, of both questioning and rhapsodising the notion of identity in a contingent world — is at the heart of his new album Wild Wild East. It’s also at the heart of his story — as the son of immigrants from India, as a kid from Rochester raised on the Cure and prog rock, as a fluid jazz drummer on his own and as a party-starter with Red Baraat, as an American of colour. Wild Wild East recognises a world that’s always changing: Today’s cowboy or cowgirl learns how to adapt to their conditions. They see that they’re just as conditional as everything around them.
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Creative Capital
Revolving around two archetypes of American identity—cowboys and immigrants, Wild, Wild East pays homage to the immigrants and indigenous people that built this country, while offering a new perspective of a cowboy—a cowgirl! An immigrant! This musical project finds both inspiration and nemesis in the deep influence these narratives have on our history, and their continued impact on our socio-political landscape today.
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Sonof Marketing
Brooklyn-based bandleader, composer, dhol player, and drummer Sunny Jain announced the release of a new album. Wild Wild East is out via Smithsonian Folkways, on Feb 21st. According to the press release, Behind its idealism, the American myth of westward expansion has always been an irony-caked parable about what happens when you try to escape the known for the pursuit of new beginnings.
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