This article is reprinted from the Bandish Network. It’s a 7,400-member collective that champions and brings traditional heritage genres of the Indus Valley, Southeast Asian, and South Asian cultures to wider audiences.
There is a moment in a raga performance before the first note truly lands, before the melodic phrase has fully shaped itself in the air, where all that matters is the quality of attention in the room. Hriday Buddhdev lives in that moment. It is where his music begins, and where it continually returns.
“When you think you have listened enough, listen closer.”
– Ustad Alam Khan, to his student Hriday Buddhdev
Born and raised in Coquitlam, British Columbia, Hriday is twenty-one years old. He is a recent computer science graduate of the University of British Columbia, a three-time Advanced Instrumental Scholarship recipient at the Ali Akbar College of Music, and one of CBC Music’s Top 30 Classical Musicians Under 30. This June, he makes his international debut at the Nehru Centre in London, one of the United Kingdom’s most storied South Asian arts venues, presented by Sama Arts Network, an organization that has shaped the cultural landscape for over four decades.
That a young Canadian artist arrives on that stage is not incidental. It is, rather, the culmination of a life shaped by extraordinary mentorship, deep lineage, and a sustained belief held by Hriday, his teachers, and the organizations that have supported him, that the classical arts are not relics to be preserved under glass. They are living, breathing architectures of human experience, and they deserve the widest possible audience.
A lineage carried with care
Hriday’s musical inheritance is precise and storied. He belongs to the Maihar gharana, the lineage of the late, great Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, among the most celebrated sarod masters the world has known. His advanced training unfolds at the Ali Akbar College of Music in California under two giants of that tradition: Grammy-nominated sarod maestro Ustad Alam Khan, son of the Ustad himself, and legendary tabla virtuoso Pandit Swapan Chaudhuri. To train within this lineage is to inhabit a living transmission, one passed from body to body, ear to ear, generation to generation.
His path into it began simply and early. He first touched the tabla at age four, learning rhythm as a first language under Sri Parathi Sarathy Mukerjee, Jaspal Randhawa, and Sunny Matharu. At nine, he was introduced to the sarod by the late Dr. Thomas Hunter, a Sanskrit lecturer at UBC and a direct disciple of Ustad Ali Akbar Khan. Dr. Hunter’s influence was foundational, opening a corridor of understanding that Hriday has been walking ever since. The very sarod in his hands today was crafted by David Trassoff, also a direct disciple of the Ustad and one of the few luthiers trained in the Maihar tradition of sarod-making. The instrument is not merely a tool. It is a continuation.
Canada’s quiet contribution
What makes Hriday’s emergence meaningful extends beyond his own considerable gifts. He represents something rarer: proof that Canada is producing world-class artists within the Indian classical tradition, and that organisations here are doing the patient, essential work of nurturing them toward the global stage.
Hriday has been a committed participant in the Bandish CHAI Initiative, the Classical and Heritage Arts Initiative with CAPACOA. It’s a framework designed to advance culturally informed programming, artist development, and audience engagement across Canada. As an artist of the Bandish Network, he has contributed to a dynamic ecosystem: mentorship pathways, institutional capacity-building, seasonal programming, and conference platforms that speak to the evolving needs of a diverse cultural sector. He has also been deeply embedded in Vancouver’s Indian classical music community through Arts BC, Canada India Network Society, LSA, VSO Day of Music 2023-2025, PJSOM, Raga Echoes, Evergreen Arts, ICMSV, Vancouver Baithak Circle, ATI Vancouver, and The Baithak.ca, all organizations that sustain the intimate, knowledge-centred environments in which raga transmission truly lives.
This is how heritage arts endure. Not through a single virtuoso talent, but through a lattice of relationships, institutions, and shared commitment. When Hriday performs in London this June, he carries not only the Maihar lineage with him. He carries the collective effort of a Canadian arts community that chose to invest in him and in the music itself.
Music as architecture, sound as space
To listen to Hriday perform is to understand why the Indian classical tradition speaks of raga as something that is not composed but revealed. His melodic lines emerge gradually, as though lit from within. Rhythmic cycles gather and release with an elasticity that recalls breath, tide, and the long unhurried cadences of seasonal change. There is a spatial quality to his playing, a sense that the music is not filling a room so much as constructing one, slowly, note by note.
His recent interdisciplinary work reinforces this. In The Indus Sings at Evergreen Arts, he performed alongside a poet, a vocalist, and a Spanish guitarist in an exploration of Indus Valley cultural expression. Here, the tabla took on a generative, architectural role not as accompaniment, but as dialogue. His rhythmic presence listened, responded, and guided, contributing to an exchange that was as much conversation as performance. In the upcoming production Raga Echoes: The Ostads at the Evergreen Cultural Centre, he will appear as part of an intergenerational gathering of artists, weaving eastern and western musical traditions into a framework that honours lineage while actively encouraging evolution.
He is a rare young artist who carries his tradition not as a weight but as a living inheritance. It’s something he has genuinely absorbed, and is now beginning to offer outwardly.
A season of arrival
The scope of Hriday’s 2026 performance calendar signals something more than activity. It signals recognition.
JUNE 2026 Nehru Centre London, UK – presented by Sama Arts Network
AUGUST 2026 Festival of Tabla Soka Performing Arts Center, California
SEPTEMBER 2026 St. Francis Centre Toronto – The Terrace Concerts
Each venue is distinct in character. Sama Arts Network has curated over a thousand events since 1977, establishing itself as one of the U.K.’s most authoritative South Asian arts presenters. The Terrace Concerts prize intimacy and depth of listening, the very conditions in which raga most fully reveals itself. The Festival of Tabla at Soka brings together international percussion practitioners in a gathering that positions rhythm as both tradition and living innovation.
Roots, inheritance, and the widest horizon
Hriday’s family heritage spans Gujarat, Kenya, and the United Kingdom, a transnational lineage that has shaped both his sensibility and his values. From his grandparents comes a philosophy that continues to orient his path: ‘Whatever you earn in your life is secondary to education. Vidya is your truest wealth.’
That commitment to knowledge is evident not only in his formal study of computer science, where his interest in artificial intelligence and software points toward future intersections between tradition and technology, but in the quality of attentiveness he brings to every musical encounter.
Hriday, son of Nina and Sanjeev Buddhdev, from a young age started tabla as a form of speech therapy and then owned the art form as his own for its deep healing power and intrinsic regulation. His parents have surrounded him with art, culture and community from a very young age.
He draws inspiration, too, from artists who navigate the tension between depth and openness with grace: Yo-Yo Ma, whose cross-cultural collaborations expand rather than dilute classical integrity; Jacob Collier, whose synthesis of wildly diverse influences coheres into a singular voice. In both, Hriday recognizes something he is himself learning to embody: the freedom that comes only after complete fluency in a tradition.
He is, in this sense, exactly the kind of artist the world needs more of. Not despite his age or his Canadian origins, but because of them. He is a young man from Vancouver who learned to sit with a centuries-old raga, to give it his full and unhurried attention, and to carry it changed and unchanged into rooms where it has not yet been heard.
✦ ✦ ✦
When he takes the stage at the Nehru Centre this month, a lineage will travel with him across the Atlantic. So will a tradition of support from teachers, luthiers, community organizations, presenters, and fellow artists who believed that this music mattered, and that this young man was the right person to carry it forward.
Listen closer. It is just beginning to unfold.
The Nehru Centre in association with Sama Arts Network will present Hriday Buddhdev on sarod in A Debut Recital with Himmet Singh Bahra on tabla at 6:30 p.m. on Wednesday (June 3). Follow Hriday Buddhdev on Instagram @hriday.buddhdev and listen to his music on his YouTube channel.
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