The first time Richard Anderson attended the Ragas Live Festival in 2018, he spent most of the show’s 24 hours in a chair.
“That is just something my body did not care for,” Anderson said.
After making the same mistake in 2019, he now comes prepared with a blanket, soft clothes, two pillows and a toothbrush.
Anderson hasn’t missed a Ragas Live since he started going, and stays for the full 24 hours every time. When the event went virtual during the pandemic, he hosted a small gathering at home, where he streamed the entire show live.
Ragas Live is named for the Indian music tradition – a raag, or raga, is a sort of musical mode over which improvisations happen. There are different ragas, many codified centuries ago, for different moods and seasons and times of the day, which is one reason the Ragas Live Festival takes place over 24 hours.
But the festival, which began in 2012 as a 24-hour radio broadcast on WKCR and then became a live event in 2016, features many styles of live transcendent music, from Georgian polyphonic choral singing to John McLaughlin-style jazz, often of an ambient or spiritual bent.
Manisha Brahmachary, a host of WKCR’s weekly Indian classical radio show “Raag Aur Tal,” says that while Indian classical or folk music comprises much of the festival, the resonance with other global genres is what makes it so popular with a wider audience.
“Vicky Chow, David Cossin and Mark Stewart are known for their work with Bang on a Can All-Stars,” Brahmachary said. “But they’ll be playing works from Brian Eno.”
Anderson says the “classical” label can be misleading, as it can evoke the Western connotation of placid string quartets and piano concerti. “The reality is the opposite of that,” Anderson said. “The vast majority of Indian classical music is incredibly percussive, rhythmic and entrancing.”
The waking hours of Ragas Live feel like a regular concert, with people dressed to go out, standing rather than sitting, and hitting the bar or the food truck and bonfire in the backyard of Pioneer Works, the cavernous red brick warehouse space in Red Hook that hosts the festival each year.
In the midnight hours, the music gets much more downtempo and ambient – and that’s when people start to break out the sleeping bags. The audience space is decked out with layers of rugs and cushions; the lights are dimmed to warm colors and the music invites a trance-like state.
“Last year there was this like, truly ambient situation happening with a throat singer and a man playing trumpet and some electronics,” Anderson said. “There’s 40 to 60 people sleeping all around me, and my buddy who was really feeling the vibe was like, doing pirouettes in the back corner.”
WKCR still presents the full 24-hour festival live on air. Station Manager Alé Diaz-Pizarro loves carrying the radio broadcast, but says nothing compares to the live experience.
“To be there at 11 at night, and it’s dark and the space is lit in pink and purple, you’re tired because you’ve been there a few hours but there’s this amazing rhythm coming from the stage…it’s sort of hypnotizing,” Diaz-Pizarro said.
“I’m a concertgoing freak and have been my whole life,” Anderson said. “And this is the festival in the world that I look forward to the most every year.”
This year’s Ragas Live Festival starts Saturday, Oct. 14 at 8 p.m. Doors open at 7 p.m. Single day tickets are sold out; festival passes start at around $75.
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