Amirtha Kidambi’s Elder Ones
presented in partnership with Saint Louis University’s Department of Fine and Performing Arts
This show has been cancelled
Amirtha Kidambi – analog synthesizer, vocals, compositions
Max Jaffe – drums & electronic percussion
Matt Nelson – soprano sax
Nick Dunston – bass
Amirtha Kidambi is the composer and bandleader of her quartet Elder Ones, with Matt Nelson (Battle Trance), Max Jaffe and Nick Dunston. Her debut recording as a bandleader has been met with critical acclaim. As Ben Ratliff wrote in the New York Times, “the aggressive and sublime first album by the band Elder Ones, Holy Science, is a kind of gauge for how strong and flexible the scene of young musicians in New York’s improvised and experimental music world can be. At the center of it are drones and phonemes. The group’s leader, the composer and singer Amirtha Kidambi, holds forth behind a harmonium, the small keyboard instrument with hand-pumped bellows; it’s commonly used in bhajan, the Indian devotional-singing tradition that was central to her musical experience while growing up in a South Indian family.”
Kidambi formally trained in classical music, singing works by experimental composers including Robert Ashley and Luigi Nono, but the pull of free jazz and Alice Coltrane led her down a different path. The influences of both Alice and John Coltrane are especially apparent, as is her study of Carnatic music. The group’s follow-up album From Untruth was released in March 2019, on Northern Spy Records.
Elder Ones Bandcamp
