Neel Murgai

Neel Murgai is a Brooklyn-based sitarist, overtone singer, daf player, composer, and educator, and a Co-Artistic Director of the South Asian music collective Brooklyn Raga Massive, hailed by The New Yorker as "leaders of the raga renaissance." He began studying Hindustani music and sitar with Pandit Ravindra Goswami in Banaras in 1994 and has trained for over two decades under Pandit Krishna Bhatt. He learned overtone singing from Timothy Hill of the Harmonic Choir and from Batuvshin of the Buryat group Uragsha, and studied the Persian daf with Soheil Zolfonun. A graduate of Goddard College's MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts program, he released his first album with the Neel Murgai Ensemble on Innova Records in 2010, followed by "Reorientation" in 2020. He has collaborated with artists including Karsh Kale, Vijay Iyer, Cyndi Lauper, Wyclef Jean, and Bill T. Jones.