Purbayan Chatterjee + Mark Lettieri
Purbayan Chatterjee + Mark Lettieri Bio
Purbayan Chatterjee, one of India’s most celebrated and exploratory modern sitarists, and five-time GRAMMY Award-winning guitarist, composer, and producer Mark Lettieri (Snarky Puppy) have announced their collaborative debut album Feathered Creatures, set for release on June 5. Throughout the new project, the duo channel their masterful musicianship into a bold new sonic territory – forging a dynamic dialogue between progressive Indian classical sitar and electric guitar. Feathered Creatures is an artistic team-up crafting new and exciting sounds out of pure skillful collaboration, the result of true cross-continental creative kismet.
Alongside the announcement, Chatterjee and Lettieri shared the album’s lead single + video, “Soar.” The track captures the moment when structure dissolves and instinct takes over, unfolding around a suspended rhythmic pulse that continuously lifts and resets. Interwoven phrases between sitar and guitar expand in widening arcs, each instrument responding to the other in a fluid dialogue. As the composition evolves, the rhythm stretches and breathes, creating the sensation of gliding. Anchored by a subtle groove, “Soar” evokes creative flight: the moment when discipline, years of training, and collaboration converges, allowing the music to rise effortlessly on its own wings.
Chatterjee says, “‘Soar’ is less about flight and more about lift – the invisible energy that happens when two musical worlds trust each other completely. That’s what ‘Feathered Creatures’ is about… not fusion, but elevation.”
Purbayan Chatterjee and Mark Lettieri will be performing at a special artist residency in Washington, DC on April 13-15 hosted at MC Live Arts at Montgomery College (Takoma Park/Silver Spring campus). During this creative development period, the cross-cultural collaboration will refine and expand the work in an immersive rehearsal setting. The residency culminates in a public work-in-progress showing for the student and audience communities of greater Washington DC, where live audiences will experience the evolving performance and participate in an open dialogue about the project’s future vision and continued development.
Purbayan Chatterjee was recently featured on WNYC’s All Of It as part of their monthly Get Lit series hosted at the New York Public Library. Chatterjee also recently played to a packed audience at this year’s Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, TN.
Music
Feathered Creatures (2026)
Over the nine expansive tracks on Feathered Creatures, celebrated sitar maestro Purbayan Chatterjee and genre-bending jazz guitarist Mark Lettieri chart a path through myriad subgenres of music – IDM’s skittering breakbeat tension, progressive rock’s epic, flowing sweep, and the entrancing lushness of Indian classical music – making for a true sonic journey that’s remarkable in its effortlessness. Chatterjee and Lettieri make boldness sound easy on Feathered Creatures, and as a result their work sounds like two interlocking pieces of one brilliant puzzle.
The bones of Feathered Creatures were already being excavated by Chatterjee, as he’d been hard at work on some of the music featured on the record before meeting Lettieri near the end of 2023. The pair first came in contact as jazz fusion collective Snarky Puppy’s tour schedule rolled through India, which resulted in Chatterjee sitting in for a performance or two. “He played a couple songs with us and I was totally blown away by his skill,” Lettieri recalls. “I’d never really heard sitar played like an electric guitar. I immediately cornered him in the green room and was like, ‘You got to show me how you do that.’”
A year later, Chatterjee reached out to see if Lettieri wanted to contribute some playing to what would become Feathered Creatures. Along with keyboardist and frequent Chatterjee collaborator Nakul Chugh, the pair worked remotely as they sent parts back and forth, adding their own unique color every step of the way. The creative process was exploratory for both musicians, as Feathered Creatures was partially borne out of a yearning for experimentation after Chatterjee’s collab-heavy record Unbounded from 2021. On Lettieri’s part, the veteran guitarist drew from his progressive rock background – as well as the textures and approaches applied by one of his main inspirations, the legendary Dream Theater – to add his own trippy and luscious sounds to Feathered Creatures’ hypnotic soundscape.
Collaboration was essential to Feathered Creatures’ genesis, and Chatterjee frames the team-up between him and Lettieri in the vein of other esteemed cross-continental collaborations like Ravi Shankar and George Harrison, or Zakir Hussain and Grateful Dead sticksman Mickey Hart. “When I met Mark, that was the first time I felt I was actually making music with a buddy, and that’s very important for a sustained, organic, long-term musical collaboration,” he says while expressing excitement for the pair’s upcoming live dates supporting the record, as well as the possibility of new music that they may inspire.
“I want to do as many cool things creatively as my creative life force balance will allow,” Lettieri reflects while talking about what Feathered Creatures represents in his ever-growing catalog. “It’s about leaving somewhat of a legacy for myself, and this project is a big part of that. In the moment, experimenting feels really dangerous, because you feel like you don’t have an identity sometimes. But for me, having many identities is the identity.” And Feathered Creatures is an expression of unfettered exploration from two adventurous musicians who are just getting started when it comes to their fruitful union.
