Josh Feinberg

Josh Feinberg is an American sitarist of the Senia-Maihar gharana, celebrated as one of the leading sitarists of his generation and hailed as a torchbearer for the Pandit Nikhil Banerjee baj. He began his musical training at age four in New York City, studying Western classical and jazz on piano and bass with musicians including Dave Holland, Kenny Wheeler, and Paul Bley, and performed at venues such as Lincoln Center and Alice Tully Hall. In his teens he fell in love with the music of Ustad Ali Akbar Khan and Pandit Nikhil Banerjee and shifted his focus to sitar and Hindustani music while earning a Bachelor of Music from the New England Conservatory; he later completed a Master of Fine Arts at Goddard College.

His principal guru was Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, and he also studied with Ustad Aashish Khan, Alam Khan, Pandit Tejendra Majumdar, Dr. Peter Row, and Dr. George Ruckert, among others. One of the first non-Indian musicians accepted as a leading performer in the tradition, he has toured extensively across the United States, Canada, India, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Europe, appearing at festivals and venues including the Saptak Festival in Ahmedabad, the Dover Lane Music Conference in Kolkata, the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Mumbai, the Chicago World Music Festival, and Chhandayan in New York. He has performed with leading tabla artists including Pandit Swapan Chaudhuri, Pandit Anindo Chatterjee, and Pandit Kumar Bose, and released the albums Homage (2013), One Evening in Spring (2014), and A Fallen Blossom in the Thorns (2017).

In 2013 he published a sitar method book for the Hal Leonard Corporation. He is the founder and executive director of Jalsaghar, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit he established in 2017 to promote South Asian classical music. He has taught at institutions including Harvard University, the New England Conservatory, Lewis & Clark College, and Reed College, and is based in Oakland, California.