Some friendships begin with a conversation and others begin with a photograph. When a mutual friend introduced me to Nadja, she spent much of our first afternoon together guiding me through the images on her phone, and I remember feeling that I was being shown a life lived with rare devotion: village weddings in places whose names I could scarcely pronounce, musicians captured at the instant their eyes closed into the song, landscapes that seemed to exist only for those willing to cross great distances to stand inside them. Nadja travels in order to dissolve into cultures, and she seeks music in its most elemental condition, played by the families who have carried it for generations. Of all the places she has given her heart to, India holds the largest share, and within India, the Manganiyars of the Thar Desert hold the deepest.
The Manganiyars are hereditary musicians of western Rajasthan, guardians of an oral tradition in which songs of devotion, lineage, love, and the turning seasons pass from father to son across centuries, carried by the bowed lament of the kamaicha and the bright percussion of the khartal. For generations they have sung at the births, weddings, and celebrations of the families they serve, so their music has always lived at the center of human life, present for its most consequential passages.
This November, Nadja is realizing a dream she has nurtured for years. She has placed everything she has into Caravana, a gathering of 250 personally invited guests at Suryagarh, a palace rising from the desert outside Jaisalmer, from the second to the fifth of November. The Maharaja of Jaisalmer is opening his private venues exclusively for its concerts and dinners, so the ancient sites of the city become the backdrop for three days of music, philosophy, and art. I have watched Nadja build it with the conviction that belongs only to someone who has already seen the finished vision, and I am honored beyond measure that she invited me to perform.
My path toward this desert began last December at Wonderfruit in Thailand, where I shared the stage with five Sufi musicians from this very region. We had no rehearsal and no common language, and within minutes we discovered that we required neither. The ancient cadence of their voices met the searching tones of my instruments, and the audience witnessed a conversation none of us could have predicted. I have carried that evening with me ever since.
Caravana allows me to continue that conversation where it was born. I am arriving a week before the festival so that I may live alongside these musicians, eat at their tables, sleep beneath the same sky, and share the unguarded hours in which trust is formed. From those days I will choose the artists who will perform with me, guided by affinity and by whatever the desert chooses to reveal. Everything we play at Caravana will be composed in the moment and heard once, by those present beneath that sky, after which it will belong to memory alone.
The programme Nadja has shaped follows the arc of the desert day with extraordinary care. Indian classical music greets the sunrise, including a concert composed specifically for the festival and rehearsed for months, performed at one of her most cherished hidden places. The following dawn brings music within the grounds of a remote temple. Sufi devotional song accompanies the sunset, and as darkness settles, rhythm carries everyone into nights of dancing under the stars, culminating in a final celebration in the open desert.
Between those hours, the palace becomes a sanctuary. Tulåh, the clinical wellness sanctuary rooted in Kerala, is bringing its Ayurvedic doctors and therapists north to care for guests throughout the festival, while the days hold talks on consciousness, a curated souk in the courtyard, and long unhurried hours beside the water. Throughout my life I have sought to unite celebration, consciousness, wellbeing, and presence within a single experience, because I believe they belong together. Caravana is the most complete expression of that belief I have yet encountered.
When the festival closes on the fifth, India will be preparing for Diwali, the festival that honors the victory of light over darkness and of knowledge over ignorance. Those who remain will witness the subcontinent illuminated by countless oil lamps and candles, a fitting benediction for everything the desert will have given us.
Caravana is intimate by design, and every guest arrives by personal invitation. Consider this letter mine. If you have ever longed to hear music in the place where it was born, among the families who have preserved it for centuries, I would be profoundly moved to share these days with you.
Caravana 2026
2 to 5 November · Suryagarh, Jaisalmer, Rajasthan
