Aman Mahajan started writing the music that would become Refuge in 2005. It took him fourteen years to release it as an album. That gap says something about the pianist's relationship with his own work — a piece that is at the same time evolving and performance-ready. "I played the music for a few years in order to decide on how it should take shape," Mahajan told Explocity.

Mahajan trained formally on piano from the age of four. He eventually made it to Berklee College of Music in Boston, where he absorbed the jazz tradition in one of its most rigorous institutional settings. Back in Bangalore, he became a sought-after accompanist — performing with jazz vocalist Radha Thomas, cross-cultural band Mystik Vibes, and others — before making the pivot that most sidemen contemplate but few actually execute: leading his own project.

Founded in 2013, Refuge is his personal musical project, paying homage to inner journeys and exploring an ever-evolving sense of home. The 2019 solo piano album of the same name was the first time that project took a fixed, documented shape. Although entirely piano-based, the album drew on ideas that had been gestating since 2005, and took root in different instruments along the way — Mahajan eventually deciding that the music needed to be heard unadorned, just the piano and the compositions. The restraint paid off. Critics noted that his syncretic approach did not belong to any particular style, yet as one listens, the music grows quite special as the pianist weaves a dense yet liberating spell.

Jazz musicians have described Refuge as “unusual” in its structural openness. Because the same music has been performed in configurations ranging from solo piano to an eight-piece band, across India and parts of Europe, with a rotating cast that has included some of the more interesting names in the country's jazz, jazz-adjacent and world music scenes. The compositions — among them The Ten Thousand Questions, Load Shedding, Leifmotif, and a particularly evocative piece, Sitaphalmandi; they serve as a kind of flexible architecture; “accommodating whoever is in the room”.

Now, Mahajan will perform Refuge at Jagriti (see link to event listing at the end of his article).

For the Jagriti Theatre concert, Mahajan is joined by drummer Rohit PS, a musician known for his restraint — his playing tends toward dynamics and nuance rather than assertion. It is a pairing that suits the material. 

Mahajan has described taking refuge in music as a way to break from genre-based thinking and focus on pure expression. That ethos is audible in the compositions: pieces like Sitaphalmandi and Load Shedding are rooted in specific autobiographical geography — both are, in some sense, portraits of Hyderabad, Mahajan's hometown — while the broader project draws on Indian classical and folk traditions, jazz, and a philosophical undertow shaped by Buddhist thought. The music is personal without being private. It invites the listener in without explaining itself too much.

At a venue like Jagriti, with its compact, considered acoustic, the conditions are right for the kind of listening Mahajan's music rewards. This is not background music, and it is not spectacle. It is, as the project's name suggests, something closer to shelter.

Here is the event listing: https://bangalore.explocity.com/events-in-bangalore/aman-mahajan-presents-refuge/