Max ZT + Kane Mathis

Spiral Music presents acoustic music every Wednesday evening at the base of the Museum’s spiral staircase. Artists who specialize in music from the Himalayas and South Asia are invited to forge a connection between their music and the art in the galleries.

About the Musicians

Max ZT (dulcimer), lauded as the “Jimi Hendrix of Hammered Dulcimer” by NPR and a “force of nature” by NY Music Daily, is an innovator on his instrument. Taking his roots from classical Irish folk music, Max ZT has transplanted his compositional techniques to both Senegal, where he studied the Mandinko technique with the Cissoko Griot family, and to Mumbai, India, where he received a grant to study under the great santoor master Pandit Shivkumar Sharma.

Kane Mathis (kora, oud) began his musical career at age 16 playing blues clubs in Chicago before studying jazz and classical guitar at the Lawrence Conservatory. Hehas repeatedly traveled to The Gambia, Africa, for the past fifteen years, to live with a family of hereditary musicians. . In 2011 he became the first non-African to be endorsed by the The Gambia’s National Center for Arts and Culture. Mathi is also one of the leading interpreters of Ottoman classical music, having studied at Istanbul’s ITU conservatory before a five-year apprenticeship with oud virtuoso Münir Beken.