Sameer Gupta hasn’t exactly been hiding out since he returned to the East Bay last July, after his impressively productive 15-year stint in New York City. But Saturday’s Color Your Mind Festival serves as a banner announcement that the Fremont-raised drummer and inveterate scene-maker is back, and he’s ready to make things happen.
Building on his longstanding relationship with the Yerba Buena Gardens Festival, Gupta has curated an afternoon featuring an array of classical Indian musical encounters with a variety of idioms. In many ways, it’s an extension of the collective he co-founded back east, Brooklyn Raga Massive, which became a creative hub for a wide community of musicians and composers.
A series of family losses brought the Fremont-raised Gupta back to the Bay Area. But he’s also come to miss the region’s art-for-art’s-sake milieu. Brooklyn Raga Massive was the rubric under which he spearheaded previous YBGF productions, like 2022’s tribute to Alice Coltrane, featuring bass legend Reggie Workman, and 2017’s epic collaboration with Classical Revolution, reimagining Terry Riley’s “In C.” But, by the time he left the borough, BRM “got swept up in a lot of ambition,” Gupta says.
“When I came back to the Bay, it was refreshing to feel like that wasn’t the energy,” he says. “There was no need to be in a rush and put myself in front.”
Indeed, the new music seems built around collaboration. The centerpiece of Saturday’s festival is “Jupiter,” a new work by Gupta featuring New York jazz pianist Marc Cary, Henry Hung on trumpet and effects, Marcus Stephens on tenor saxophone, effects and samples, Pawan Benjamin on bansuri and shehnai, vocalist Tiffany Austin, and Kash Killion on electric bass.
The group is a fascinating mix of longtime and new collaborators. A brilliant accompanist who spent 12 years touring and recording with the influential jazz vocalist and songwriter Abbey Lincoln, Cary introduced Gupta to the national scene with his Focus Trio, a group that’s performed and recorded intermittently since the turn of the century. (They perform as a duo in Focus Trio-1 Friday at the California Jazz Conservatory, and Cary performs solo Sunday at Oakland’s Piedmont Piano Company).
The most recent connection is Killion, a near legendary figure who’s worked with some of jazz’s most adventurous improvisers, including Horace Tapscott, Pharoah Sanders, Butch Morris and Sun Ra. (His 2014 album of duets with Marshall Allen, “Two Stars In The Universe,” received a new burst of attention in May when the Sun Ra saxophonist turned 100.)
“I’ve grown to love Sun Ra’s music via David Boyce, who really exposed me to Ra, Albert Ayler and Andrew Hill,” Gupta says, referring to his saxophonist bandmate in The Supplicants, a spiritually charged jazz group that performed widely before he moved to New York in 2008.
Boyce curates the long-running Friday music series Other Dimensions In Sound at the Mission’s Medicine For Nightmares Bookstore & Gallery, which will have a pop-up stand at the Gardens, as will vocalist Valerie Troutt’s Because of Black Music I Am festival.
The genre-blurring, says Gupta, is part of the point. “Not everyone has to be representing Indian classical music,” he says. “I’m using this as a way to go beyond the borders.”
Gupta wrote “Jupiter” as an evocation and communion with loved ones he’s lost in recent years. The samples and effects take the place of the drone role usually filled by the four-string tanpura, “and feel like echoes of previous sounds and people,” Gupta said. “My sound is also informed by the golden age of Bollywood and my love of Meshell Ndegeocello.”
Tiffany Austin, a similarly inspired mover and shaker, is another recent connection. The West Oakland art space she recently launched with saxophonist Nora Free, Wyldflowr Arts, also hosts Gupta’s weekly Rootstock Arts sessions, which often feature musicians versed in Indian classical music.
Color Your Mind brings all of those activities together outdoors. The program includes duo sets by Carnatic vocalist Roopa Mahadevan accompanied by violinist Sruti Sarathy, and sarod master Alam Khan accompanied by Afghan tabla player Eman Hashmi. Activating the various spaces in the Gardens, the festival also features several brief sets by a kathak dancer with cajón and violin, and a Carnatic percussion throwdown.
One motivation for Color Your Mind, says Gupta, was breaking classical Indian music out of formal settings. “I love hearing music in [traditional venues], but there’s a side that puts it behind museum glass, and the music I love shatters that,” Gupta says. “Putting Indian music in a bar, like with Brooklyn Raga Massive, pushes it outside of that zone. This is in the middle of downtown San Francisco.”
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The Color Your Mind Festival takes place Saturday, July 27 from noon to 5 p.m. at Yerba Buena Gardens in San Francisco. Free; more info here.