Bansuri Workshop in London with Pandit Ajay Prasanna

Pandit Ajay Prasanna teaches in London on Wednesday 19 August, the evening before he plays our London Ragas concert at the same venue. Four Grammy nominations, the Global Indian Music Award, a bansuri on the Gorillaz album Parvat (The Mountain), and a diary that leaves little room for teaching. He has made room for three hours here.

He carries the Banaras Gharana flute lineage of his father, Pandit Bholanath Prasanna, whose students include Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia. That is the tradition you will sit in front of at The Tate Institute: bamboo, six holes, and a way of shaping breath into a raga handed down inside one family for three generations.

Open to everyone in the room

Children from around eight, adults who have never held an instrument, students mid-grade, and players with years behind them all sit together. This is how a baithak works: the beginner and the advanced player hear the same teaching and each takes what they can use. Bring your instrument if you have one, on any instrument at all. Bansuri, sitar, sarod, violin, guitar, piano, or voice: the material rests on musical ideas rather than one instrument's mechanics. No instrument and no experience needed to take part.