Ketan Bhatti

Ketan Bhatti is a composer, drummer, and music producer. He is a crossover artist, moving between different genres and cultural spheres. His works range from contemporary chamber music, experimental music and dance theatre as well as stage and film music to electronic, hip-hop-based productions.

As a composer of stage music, he has worked regularly with his brother Vivan Bhatti since 2003 for Nuran David Calis' productions at many major German-language theatres (including Deutsches Theater Berlin, Schauspiel Köln, Staatstheater Dresden) as well as for the internationally touring break dance shows of the Berlin dance company Flying Steps. Ketan and Vivan Bhatti's music theatre pieces are based on collaborations with authors such as Feridun Zaimoglu and Roland Schimmelpfennig, and often deal with social heterogeneity in post-migrant reality, among other things, and have been premiered at opera houses such as the Neukölln Opera, the Hanover State Opera or the Tischlerei of the Deutsche Oper Berlin.

As a drummer, Ketan has played with various bands, such as Cyminology, which translates Persian poetry into chamber jazz, with whom he has released 3 albums on the ECM label to date, and the Brandt Brauer Frick Ensemble, which plays techno with acoustic instruments.

Ketan Bhatti's works have been performed by various ensembles, such as the Berlin/Icelandic Ensemble Adapter, the Hezarfen Ensemble in Istanbul and the Ensemble Resonanz at various festivals (Wien Modern Festival, the Jazzfest Berlin, Nibelungen Festival in Worms). With Cymin Samawatie, Ketan founded the Trickster Orchestra for contemporary, trans-traditional soundscapes in 2013, which was awarded the German Jazz Prize and the TONALi Award - "Courage to Utopia" in 2022, dealing with questions regarding the decolonisation of contemporary music.

Together, Vivan and Ketan scored the recent film adaptations of Wedekind's Frühlings Erwachen and Büchner's Woyzeck with Tom Schilling.

Ketan Bhatti can look back on numerous publications (including ECM) and international concerts, as well as scholarships and awards from the German Music Council, the Berliner Senat and the Goethe Institute. As composer of a concerto for jazz and new electronic music, performed with Simon Stockhausen, Ketan Bhatti was awarded the Karl Hofer Prize in 2008. In 2023 he received the GEMA German Music Authors’ Award for Intercultural Composition. From January to June 2017, Ketan Bhatti received a scholarship at the Tarabya Cultural Academy in Istanbul; from 2010 to 2012, he was a stipendiary at the Graduate School for the Arts and Sciences at the Universität der Künste (UdK) Berlin. Within this framework, he worked with various ensembles and scientists on experimental, music-theatrical hybrid forms of concert and academical discourse.

Vivan and Ketan's joint orchestral debut album Flying Pictures at an Exhibition was released on Sony Classical by the Berlin Music Ensemble.