Al Gore was dancing. The Nobel laureate and former vice president — who still has a reputation for stiffness — was moving his feet like a Soul Train dancer. And the reason Gore’s feet were shimmying was Sunny Jain and his band Red Baraat. The moment occurred on February 28, 2012, when Red Baraat performed at the TED Conference in Long Beach, where Gore and other luminaries were in attendance. No one — not even Al Gore — can resist Red Baraat’s music, which is an infectious hybrid of brass funk, hip-hop, jazz, go-go, and North Indian bhangra rhythms.
“We gave a quick performance in between TED talks on the main stage,” Jain tells me, “and we saw him out there to the left, kind of mid-center, dancing to our music, which was very cool.”
When Red Baraat performs a free concert in San Francisco at the Stern Grove Festival on Sunday, July 21, and another concert on July 22 in Santa Cruz, Jain will be where he always is: Drumming on the “dhol,” the big South Asian instrument that produces a voluminous sound; and speaking to the crowds that inevitably say they’ve never seen anything quite like Red Baraat.
The band’s brass section alone is staffed by soprano saxophone, two trumpets, trombone, and sousaphone, while Jain is joined on percussion by two other drummers. Red Baraat’s distinctiveness extends to its ethnic composition, with members who have roots in India, Africa, Japan, and elsewhere. Red Baraat, which formed in 2008, the same year of Barack Obama’s first presidential election, embodies as much as Obama does the idea that America is becoming, through steps both forward and backward, a “post-racial society.” Jain, 38, grew up in Rochester, New York, the son of practicing Jains, followers of Jainism, which believes in nonviolence and a shared humanity. Jain is also active in the faith, and believes music is a chance to express universal emotions that bring out the best in people. Jain played jazz for many years after studying the musical form at Rutgers and NYU.