Aki Kumar and Matthew Skoller’s Diasporic Blues
By Ren Willis, PhD candidate in English Literature, Logan Center Editorial Intern
28 July 2026
This spring, harmonica player and vocalist Aki Kumar and his band joined Chicago blues musician Matthew Skoller for a breezy Friday evening performance in the Logan Center Performance Penthouse. In the Bay area, where Kumar is based, he’s been dubbed “the reigning king of Bollywood Blues”—a title which reflects the signature musical fusion style that Kumar has been cultivating over the course of more than a decade. Bollywood Blues brings together the blues—a Black American musical tradition rooted in the Mississippi Delta region, to which many Black Chicagoans can trace their family’s origins—with the sounds of Bollywood—a cinematic genre that blends classical Indian music with elements of Western musical styles like pop and jazz, most often performed as song-and-dance routines in Hindi-language films. Kumar’s rendition of the form combines the harmonica and electric-guitar heavy style of Chicago Blues with Hindi lyricism and the big-band sound of Bollywood’s Golden Age.
Skoller, Kumar’s guest for the evening, has long been a fixture of Chicago’s blues scene. Over the course of his career, he has collaborated with a wide range of Chicago-based blues artists ranging from Koko Taylor to Toronzo Cannon to John Primer of the Muddy Waters band, in addition to releasing five albums of his own. For the past 8 years, Skoller has served as a curator for the Blues@Logan program (with the support of the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, and building upon an incredible existing Chicago blues community, the Logan Center has become a hub for live blues music on Chicago’s south side) and he extended an enthusiastic invitation to Kumar to be part of the 2025-2026 lineup. Together, Kumar and Skollers’ partnership highlights just how far the blues has migrated across both borders and genres, while remaining grounded firmly in a spirit of diasporic exchange.
Kumar and Skoller’s partnership also arrives at a moment when fusion music and transnational collaboration are increasingly shaping the music industry. Because streaming platforms and social media have the ability to circulate music anywhere in the world with a mere swipe and a tap, contemporary music production has become significantly more globally-oriented than it was in the past. The growing influence of Latin and reggaeton sounds in American pop music speaks to this trend, as does the recent rise of African and Asian sonic influences in European music. A recent PR Newswire report suggests younger listeners are especially drawn to music that blends traditions and identities, with the multinational girl-group Katseye attracting a massive fanbase among Gen Alpha. Thus, “global music” is steadily becoming quite lucrative in the music industry—yet Kumar and Skoller's performance begs the question: what distinguishes the commercialization of "global music" from the more intimate forms of diasporic exchange through which musical traditions like the blues have always traveled?
Watching their performance from the audience, I was struck by the warm, communal energy of the event; how much it felt less like a concert and more like a neighborhood get-together. A diverse audience consisting of different age groups and backgrounds filled the space, including older South Side residents who I gathered were regular attendees the Logan Center’s public programming, as they seemed entirely at home in the space. Kumar and Skoller maintained an easy and light-hearted rapport with the audience, joking between songs, telling stories, and inviting listeners into the spirit of the performance rather than holding them at a spectator’s distance. The crowd responded enthusiastically throughout the set, but the loudest reactions came whenever Kumar lifted his instrument and launched into his signature rapid-fire harmonica solos. These moments felt like an exchange more in line with the call-and-response practice characteristic of the blues, where the relationship between musician and audience is not mediated through a screen or dwarfed by a stadium, but occurs in the context of intimate gatherings where stories are shared and artists and audiences converse with each other through music.
When I asked Skoller offstage about the enduring importance of live music as a communal experience, particularly during times of upheaval, he had this to say: “I think as artists we all have a voice. And whether it’s music, or it’s film, or it’s painting, or it’s dance, we reach people and we touch people in moments where they’re very open. Because what we do opens them and softens them—hopefully.” Kumar and Skoller’s performance ultimately demonstrates both the value of live music performance and the remarkable adaptability and enduring legacy of the blues as a diasporic tradition that continues to travel through and across geographies, languages, and generational divides. Check out the video below for clips from the duo’s performance and an interview with Kumar himself.
Video credit: Adriana Zavala, Logan Center Communications Manager