Hyderabad, 15th June 2026: Fourteen jazz musicians from the United States and India will take the stage together on June 24 at Hyderabad’s RNR Auditorium for Swing City Jazz, a one-night-only big band concert that marks the first time an ensemble of this format and international calibre has performed in India.
The concert, conceived and curated by Timothy Marthand, concert pianist and founder of ArtHome Foundation, brings together three American artists and eleven of India’s finest jazz players in a full-scale big band formation – saxophones, trumpets, trombones, bass, grand piano, electric guitar, and drums, performing in a 500-seat auditorium in Film Nagar selected for its intimate scale and acoustic quality.
Leading the ensemble is Dr. Jared Sims, a saxophonist named Boston’s 2025 Jazz Artist of the Year at the Boston Music Awards. Sims has released more than twenty albums as a leader, and has performed across five continents at festivals including Newport, Montreal, and North Sea. He is joined by trumpeter Doug Olsen, who has shared stages with Aretha Franklin and performed at Jazz at Lincoln Center, and trombonist Reggie Watkins, former musical director for the Maynard Ferguson Big Bop Nouveau Band and a performer on Grammy-nominated recordings.
The Indian contingent is anchored by Ryan Sadri, widely recognised as the country’s most prominent jazz saxophonist. Based in Mumbai, Sadri has performed at platforms such as the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and also hosts Mumbai’s longest-running weekly jazz jam.
The concert is the brainchild of Timothy Marthand, concert pianist and Adjunct Professor of Creative Thinking at IIT Hyderabad. Marthand trained at the International Piano Foundation in Lake Como, Italy, under Leon Fleisher and William Grant Naboré. Over the past decade, he has produced more than 50 sold-out classical music concerts in Hyderabad featuring over 150 international classical music artists. He is the founder of ArtHome Foundation, which is currently building India’s first acoustically uncompromised concert hall.
Speaking about the concert, he said: “The performing arts are not a luxury. They are how a society reminds itself what it is capable of when human beings are in a room together, fully present, doing something difficult and beautiful. Hyderabad deserves to be a city where that happens regularly, at the highest level, with artists from around the world..”
Ryan Sadri added: “Jazz in India has been building quietly for years. To share a stage with musicians of this calibre, in a proper big band setting, in front of a Hyderabad audience that genuinely cares about the music – this is a milestone for the Indian jazz community.“
