MUSIC FOR HOPE - The three members of India's premier Sarod-playing family Amjad Ali Khan and the the Bangash brothers partner here with Chinese pipa player Wu Man. The cultural dominance of China and India in Asia stretches back thousands of years. Their musics are quite distinct though they share many significant features, especially highly developed modal systems. Because these find their most sophisticated expression in single melodic lines, it is often asserted that they lack harmony, but that is an over-simplification, as this recording demonstrates. Harmony means so many different things, not only within music theories, but also on a human level. These musicians, from diverse musical traditions, are already seeking harmony by coming together to make a new music, and are finding it by responding to each other in their musical creativity. Harmony is a joining together of peoples and cultures, not just musical phrases and responses. The principal aim of this project is to support the AAPI movement and raise awareness of it's struggle, which can be seen as the restoration of harmony amid the discord created by discrimination. The musicians expressing this power of music, transcending national boundaries, are leading virtuosi on their instruments, and all have ventured extensively into cross-cultural collaborations. Both Wu Man and Shane Shanahan are founding members of Yo-Yo Ma's Silkroad project. Amjad Ali Khan and his two sons, Amaan Ali Bangash and Ayaan Ali Bangash, represent the sixth and seventh generations of a family of sarod masters. The Indian sarod and Chinese pipa (Wu Man's instrument) are leading members of the plucked lute extended family. The pipa is made of wood, pear-shaped, with a fretted fingerboard and four strings; the sarod has a narrower wooden body, covered with goatskin, and a fretless metal fingerboard, the key factor in enabling the slides that are essential to Indian music. In addition to the playing strings there are drone strings and sympathetic strings. Hope, looking to a better future, is expressed by these five artists through this coming together; their harmony is immediate.