“The indefatigable drummer and dhol player Sunny Jain is an unrepentant maximalist.”

“Jain makes everything fire and flow, roll and combust. His drumming is never static or simply ‘in the pocket’; it’s in constant go mode: rolls rattling, beats careening, grooves always pressing, pushing for ecstatic release.”

Top 10 Best Albums 2020: Global Fusion 

5/5 stars

“Epic in every sense, Wild Wild East deserves to put Jain up there alongside Nitin Sawhney as a global musical alchemist and cultural agent provocateur. One of the leading figures in North America’s burgeoning Asian music scene.”

“Jain manages to find a work that in some way demands the listener and in that interaction he is able to give notions of truly novel music and soundscapes.”

9/10 stars

“Sunny Jain paints a rich canvas...whether mingling rhythms from Pakistan film soundtracks with spaghetti western motifs (‘Immigrant Warrior’) or spicing ragas with twisting, turning time signatures (‘Osian’; ‘Baaghi’) the energetic, groove-riding results prove utterly compelling throughout.”

“The Best Party Band In Years.” Listen and watch Red Baraat on NPR: Tiny Desk Concerts, All Songs Considered, Mountain Stage, World Café, globalFEST 2011 + more.

“Red Baraat’s celebratory Festival of Colors”

Wild Wild East is a tremendous document of the immigrant’s multifaceted identity, bringing generations together in a joyful noise.

“Genre-crossing soundscapes of Wild Wild East, which incorporates everything from jazz rhythms to shoegaze guitars to Middle Eastern brass and beyond.”

“Jain purposefully recontextualizes these ideas on Wild Wild East, breaking open the image of the swaggering American cowboy with his acidic, twangy, propulsively hypnotic songs. It's an inspired cinematic concept that conjures kaleidoscopic images from filmmakers like Alejandro Jodorowsky, Quentin Tarantino, and Robert Rodriguez; filmmakers who similarly throw music, pop culture, and their own distinctive cultural backgrounds into a blender to create something new.”

4.5/5 stars.

"Red Baraat frontman Sunny Jain is back with his first solo album in nearly a decade, Wild Wild East, out now on Smithsonian Folkways, and this time he’s paying special attention to the concept of American westward expansion. Jain, whose parents are Indian immigrants, pulls from his heritage as well as a wealth of influences to mold Wild Wild East, a record that spans Bollywood to the Wild West to crowded jazz clubs.”

The tunes directly taken from his parents are some of the album’s most affecting, but Jain is also interested in using his musical heritage and making something new out of it. The album is indebted he says to the compositions of R.D. Burman, whose famous 1975 Bollywood Western soundtrack Sholay was inspired by Ennio Morricone’s Italian (or Spaghetti) Western scores.

“Creatively and ideologically, this is a perfect storm for Jain. Even in his already formidable body of work, Wild Wild East stands out as an album that not only deserves to be heard, but needs to be listened to. An understanding of the stories he tells here with such musical brilliance is liable to change hearts and minds for the better. Sunny Jain is the cowboy we need today, blazing new trails ahead into a sonically marked sense of community.”

“Sunny Jain, the drummer who leads the Red Baraat brass band, vastly expands his palette on ‘Wild Wild East,’ a furiously propulsive song. Bollywood meets New Orleans, new age, rock and whatever else it takes to make this five-minute track hurtle forward with a new fusion at every junction.”

Watch the music video to Wild Wild East.

“It sounds like the middle ground between a Western score and a Bollywood score, with a little free jazz in the mix too, and Sunny Jain fuses these things to the point where they sound like one focused style of music.”

“The funk, ska-punk, and other American forms that make their way into the music are layered intricately within the same threadwork as the ragas on which these songs are pulled from. Each piece is a gesture of cultural harmony, rendering not only genre irrelevant, but the geographic placement of those sounds.”

“A Big Band for the World.” 

The New York-based “bhangra funk dhol” band

“They're irresistible: serial party-starters.”

“The open-air rendition of ‘Tunak Tun’ at the Lincoln Center is not just infectious, it’s visual heroin – just watching them make music is a shot of pure adrenalin.”