Rajna Swaminathan

A leading practitioner of the South Indian percussion instrument mridangam, Rajna Swaminathan first gained attention in the 2000s playing a hybridized mix of Indian classical music and jazz. A protégé of mridangam master Umayalpuram K. Sivaraman, Swaminathan has worked on projects with Vijay Iyer, Amir ElSaffar, and Ganavya Doraiswamy, to name a few. In 2019, she released her debut album featuring her RAJAS ensemble, Of Agency and Abstraction. Born in 1991 in Maryland, Swaminathan grew up in a musical family with a mother who sang and a father who played the mridangam. Along...