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.”
“Jain breaks open the image of the swaggering American cowboy with his acidic, twangy, propulsively hypnotic songs. It’s an inspired cinematic concept that conjure kaleidoscopic images. Jain has crafted a masterful, robust celebration of America’s immigrant cowboy soul.”
The career of Sunny Jain is a celebration of cultural diaspora: deep-rooted tradition that ripples outward, changing – and being changed by – the cultures that it touches. He is a composer, drummer, dhol player and thought leader. Songlines (UK) called him “One of the leading figures in North America’s burgeoning Asian music scene. A global musical alchemist and cultural agent provocateur.”
Jain’s varied creative outlets have seen him announced as 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. In 2022, he joined Planet Drum for their first show in 15 years, playing alongside drumming legends Mickey Hart (The Grateful Dead),Zakir Hussain, and Giovanni Hidalgo. 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 work they do.
Jain is most known for founding the pioneering band, Red Baraat, but it’s Sunny Jain’s Wild Wild East (Smithsonian Folkways Recordings) that is seeing him rise to new levels. 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.”
Encompassing 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, Sunny Jain’s Wild Wild East 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 Harlem Stage 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.
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