Josh Bennett

G'Day, I'm Josh Bennett.

I'm a musician. That means I make things vibrate in a very deliberate way so that your ears send signals to your brain that very closely resemble the ones that were in mine. Pretty cool job.

I've been doing this for as long as I can remember, but a starting point I suppose was when I started performing on stage when I was 15. I played Blues back then, and still do, but now it's mixed up with whatever music I find that speaks to me. More often than not that's been culturally significant (or roots I suppose you could label it) music from all over the world, in particular India, Africa and Ireland.

I was introduced to Indian music by Professor Michael Junius, a Sitar and Surbahar player who studied in India for 18 years at the feet of great masters such as Prof. Shushill Branja, Prof. Banwarilal, Pandit Ravi Shankar, Ustad Asad Ali Khan and Pandit Gopal Das. He was an inspirational man, who unfortunately is no longer and will be dearly missed.

I've been playing Sitar for about eleven years. I was taught for six of those by Alan Posselt, who himself learned from Ustad Allaudin Khan and Sri Mohan Maitre, and I studied in India under Smt Manju Mehta, a disciple of Pt. Ravi Shankar. I also play Tabla and Dilruba - a bowed instrument similar to Sarangi. And guitar of course.

I play all over the place, in different guises. These days I'm playing a lot with Dya Singh, a world music group that's been around longer than the term "world music". I play solo, with jazz musos (though not so trained myself--can't sight read to save myself and think super locrian in a comic book hero), blues, folk, experimental, film scores, ... the list goes on, which is why it's so much easier to just say I play music from my soul and leave it at that.