Aditya Balani

Aditya Balani is an eclectic guitarist, composer and songwriter from New Delhi, India. He has worked with bands like Advaita, Aritistes Unlimited, Crimson, Think Floyd and Incognito as a songwriter and guitar player. His performance credits include international artists like Kenwood Dennard, David Fiuczynski, Carl Clements, Dhruv Ghanekar and Shubha Mudgal to name a few. Aditya is constantly looking for ways to break new ground and broaden his artistic sensibilities. In 2006 he moved to Boston to study at the Berklee College of Music, where he received the Berklee Achievement Scholarship and has performed at various celebrated events like the International Folk Music Festival and Guitar Night. In 2007 he won the Kenwood Dennard artist competition and performed live with Kenwood at the Cambridge Arts Festival.

In 2004 he co-founded Advaita (with Abhishek Mathur), a musical outfit featuring some of the finest musicians from India combining western concepts of songwriting and harmony, with Indian Classical music elements. Today Advaita has grown to become one of the most respected acts on the Indian music scene, and released their debut album 'Grounded in Space' with Virgin/EMI records in March 2009. Aditya is also a passionate music teacher, having taught guitar performance, music theory and music technology at two prestigious schools in India, Peformer’s Collective and Gurgaon School of Music for over seven years.

Aditya Balani Group, is a world-jazz ensemble which brings together talented musicians from countries across the globe. The group has included musicians from India, Spain, Serbia, Chile, Bulgaria and US. Aiming for true artistic expression and drawing from their ethnic roots each musician adds a unique color to their sound, which is an exciting blend of the spontaneity and harmonic interplay of Jazz with the sheer intensity of melodies and rhythms influenced by Indian Classical/Folk music, and various other musical traditions of the world. Aditya is one of the rare guitarists who perform microtonal music, and some of his tunes feature a unique approach to fretless guitar, developed from sarod and sitar playing techniques. Since 2008 Aditya Balani Group has been performing regularly in India and the US. In January 2010 the band went on their second tour of the Indian sub-continent, which was extremely well received and featured Aaron Bahr on trumpet, Will Cafaro on bass, Tarun Balani on drums , Sharik Hasan on piano, and Aditya Balani on fretless/fretted guitars. The group has been chosen as one the featured artists for Jazz Revelation Records for 2010, and will be releasing their full length album this year as well.

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