Sunny Jain’s Wild Wild East

Some musicians play music; Sunny Jain lives it. A composer, drummer, and dhol player who grew up steeped in South Asian heritage while falling hard for jazz and prog rock, Jain has spent two decades at the creative heart of America’s South Asian music scene, collaborating with everyone from percussion legends Mickey Hart and Zakir Hussain to pop icons Ed Sheeran, David Byrne, and Jon Batiste. With Wild Wild East, he channels all of it into something thrillingly his own.

• A Sound That Crosses Every Border: Wild Wild East draws from Bollywood film scores, Punjabi folk traditions, jazz improvisation, and psychedelic rock, performed by a tight five-piece band that turns every set into a cultural journey.
• A Story Worth Telling: The music of Wild Wild East is rooted in Jain’s own family’s immigration story, making it as personal as it is universal.
• An Artist at the Center of Everything: Jain is a 2025 commissioned artist at the Soho Rep Theater and a former Artist-in-Residence at Wesleyan University, where he developed his first theatrical play. He appeared as “Mr. Tambourine Man” in the Oscar-nominated film A Complete Unknown starring Timothée Chalamet. The New Yorker called him “an unrepentant maximalist” whose music “stands on considered conceptual ground.”

A night with Sunny Jain’s Wild Wild East is a full sensory experience, music that stretches across continents and generations, rooted in one man’s remarkable story and delivered with the kind of fire that stays with you long after the last note.