My Compelling Story

Folk Tree is real, rustic and it's from the heart.We are a group of musicians who would like to not have any boundaries to the music we produce. Folk Tree is a sound of the soul. It is a band of six passionate musicians who love to fuse various forms of music and create a beautiful sound. It is a progressive folk fusion band, based out of Bangalore, India.  They are a six piece band. Diwas Gahatraj is the vocalist; Rahul Sanadhya play the rhythm, Abhishek Kumar plays the lead guitar while Sonu Gupta plays the bass. Sanil Shankar is the percussion man of the band. Manu Suvarna plays many beautiful instruments like melodic a, morchang, mouth organ and keyboards. Their inspiration comes from Indian folk, blues, funk, rock and jazz along with Indian film music. The music of Folk Tree encompasses variety of sound and songs from across the world. For instance, have you heard songs of the mystic mistrals of Bengal, Bauls being fused with reggae beats? Or a breezy Nepali mountain song quietly blending in with a fiery folk song of Rajasthan? They create such music.  They mostly like to play folk fusion with a generous amount of rock beats added. Frankly, unlike many popular bands they don’t want to “genre box” their band and hence they call it free style music. Since they all are from different place, they all bring in their own sense of music and culture. From the Indian shore they love folk, Hindustani classic music, Rabindrasangeet, Baul, Bhatiali, Qawwali and Sufi. And from the foreign land Rock, Jazz, Blues and Hindi film music heavily inspires them. A year back, few of them (Diwas, Rahul along with few other friends) used to go to Cubbon Park on Sunday mornings for some music jamming. They found a huge, old rain tree and made it their spot.  Many park regulars and new visitors started noticing them and stopped by them for some music. Some became their avid listeners and used to wait for near the tree on Sunday mornings. So when they decided to form a band and to have a name for it, they decided to name them Folk Tree as they used to largely play rustic, earthy folkish songs and it was all under that grand old tree.  Then Sanil (Cajon) and Abhishek (lead) joined in after they took a form of a band. Manu (keys and melodica) and their former bassist Arjun followed them. Arjun left for Delhi after 6 months and he was replaced by Sonu- their new kid on the block! Influences All music from the soothing Baul from north east to mainstream Indian Cinema OSTs to Pink Floyd, Clapton to One Direction Genre Indian Folk Folk Rock Fusion Soft Rock Hard Rock Band Members Diwas Abhishek Rahul Sanil Manu Sonu