Sadiq Khan leads call urging Muslims to stay home during Ramadan

Highlights:

• Started sitar at 16, after growing up surrounded by music at home.
• Learned both Indian guru–shishya tradition and Western conservatoire methods.
• Writing ragas in Western notation is tricky because of micro-slides and phrasing.
• Works with non-South Asian musicians by giving notes and showing the logic of ragas.
• Every piece, for him, is about balancing Indian and Western musical worlds.

Jonathan Mayer says he started with the sitar at 16, after growing up in a home filled with music. “My father was a composer from Kolkata. My mother was a piano player. My grandfather was a violinist on my mum’s side,” he explains. From an early age, he learned violin and piano, and the sound of the sitar was always around him through his father’s work. But his own path wasn’t automatic. Mayer says the sitar became his voice only when he realised he could build an identity that wasn’t just an extension of his father’s work.

Jonathan Mayer on the sitar and beyond Instagram/the_sitarist/ @sat_sim