Heaven knows, the US likes its foundational myths – and it’s into this mythological landscape that Sunny Jain gallops. His mission? To re-insert the historical cowboy for what he (or sometimes, she) actually was: a person of multiple identities – African American, First Nation, Latino – and to introduce the figures of more recent migrations.
Based in New York – his family emigrated to the US from Punjab before he was born – Jain is a drummer/percussionist, composer and bandleader. Migration is at the heart of his family’s story – one shadowed by the violence that came out of the Partition of India in the late 1940s. Wild Wild East’s ambition superimposes two migratory themes – that of the American West and the dislocations of the Indian subcontinent – to draw similarities between human stories.
