Sunny jain
“Epic in every sense. One of the leading figures in North America’s burgeoning Asian music scene. A global musical alchemist and cultural agent provocateur.”
Sunny Jain is a composer, drummer, dhol player and thought leader. While growing up with a deep cultural connection to his South Asian heritage, Jain also fell in love with jazz music and prog rock. His eclectic musical upbringing has brought him to perform with percussion legends Mickey Hart & Zakir Hussain and Planet Drum, to pop icons Ed Sheeran, David Byrne, Jon Batiste and Italian Pop Star Jovanotti, to many jazz luminaries. He has been at the zeitgeist of America’s South Asian sounds for the past 2 decades. He founded and plays dhol in the pioneering Brooklyn band, Red Baraat, and has drummed with some of the top South Asian artists out there (Ali Sethi, Ganavya, Arooj Aftab, Vijay Iyer, DJ Rekha, Heems, Karsh Kale and Junoon). He was the music producer for Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding Musical, to boot.
The band, Sunny Jain’s Wild Wild East, encompasses a myriad facets of Jain’s identity and sonically paints the journey of his own family’s immigration story. He sources musical inspiration from the scores of Bollywood classics, Punjabi folk traditions, jazz improvisation, and rollicking psychedelic styles. His 5 piece band (drums, vocals, sax, guitar, bass) delivered a fiery NPR Tiny Desk Concert in 2024 and followed it up with an electric live KEXP session in 2025. They toured North America appearing at the iconic Monterey Jazz Festival, Calgary Jazz Festival, Victoria Jazz Festival, The Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center, National Museum of Asian Art, and the historic Bryant Park in NYC. In 2022, the band made a milestone tour to Pakistan headlining Music Mela in Islamabad, the Lahore Jazz Festival and performing with master Sufi dhol drummers Nasir Sain Wajdani and Sain Tanveer. Just months prior to that, Sunny Jain’s Wild Wild East performed on the National Mall in Washington D.C. for the renowned Smithsonian Folklife Festival.
Jain’s varied creative outlets have seen him become a 2025 commissioned artist by Soho Repertory Theater, a cultural pillar of NYC, notable for producing avant-garde plays by contemporary writers. You might have also seen him acting as “Mr. Tambourine Man” in the Oscar nominated “A Complete Unknown,” starring Timothée Chalamet. Jain was 2023-24 Visiting Scholar and Artist-in-Residence at Wesleyan University developing his first theatrical play, called Love Force. It will premiere in 2026 as part of the Under The Radar Festival in NYC. During the pandemic, Jain released “Phoenix Rise”, a collaborative effort featuring over 50 artists such as Grammy winners Arooj Aftab, Michael League (Snarky Puppy), Adrian Quesada (Black Pumas), and Endea Owens (The Late Show with Stephen Colbert). Accompanying the full digital album is a 72-page physical book that combines music, art, photography and planet-based recipes, all in the name of social justice. As executive producer and music producer, Jain partnered with Center for Constitutional Rights to fundraise and advocate for the organization.
The New Yorker said this of Jain: “The indefatigable drummer and dhol player Sunny Jain is an unrepentant maximalist-were he a visual artist, one imagines bright-hued paints splattered across his canvas, his floor, and perhaps his ceiling. Think of a genre, and it’s probably somewhere in his compositions, yet the musician’s hullabaloo stands on considered conceptual ground.”
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