For any artist, featuring on NPR’s Tiny Desk series is a badge of honor. When it was time for Sunny Jain’s Wild Wild East to shine on the series, they rose to the occasion and delivered a dynamic set led by their Pakistani-born percussionist bandleader Sunny Jain.
Jain has previously featured on NPR’s Tiny Desk as a part of Red Baraat, one of his many other musical collaborations. In that set, he orchestrated a more traditional sound, heavy on the percussion and brass instruments that feature prominently in South Asian wedding processions.
This time however, Jain commandeered the drum set, playing complex rhythmic patterns under tight melodic compositions articulated by a lone guitar and an alto saxophone and occasionally, vocals. After opening with the foot-tapping Immigrant Warrior, Jain introduced the next song Brooklyn Dhamaal as a post-punk twist on the traditional dhamaal rhythm performed by Sufi artists in Pakistan.
The band rounded out the set with their upcoming album’s title track Wild Wild East, followed by the mellow sing-along composition called Blackwell, after the street Jain grew up on in Rochester, New York.
Watch the full set here.
