The San Francisco Conservatory of Music is feeling a little blue in 2025—and that's a good thing.

Roots, Jazz, and American Music (RJAM) Department freshman Amithav Gautham was recently featured in a video piece by CBS Bay Area news reporter Devin Frehley. A follow-up to a 2022 piece about South Bay blues harmonica player Aki Kumar, the clip showcases Gautham's guitar playing as part of a trio of Bay Area Indian musicians playing classic American blues. 

Frehley's original piece focused on Kumar's story of immigrating to the U.S. to study software engingeer, graduating to a job in the tech industry, and eventually forging his own path as a harmonica player equally inspired by classic Chicago blues and Bollywood music (the catch-all term for  both India's film industry and its music). For a follow-up, he found not only another Indian blues harmonica player, Sonny Kumar, but Gautham, who this year immigrated from Chennai, in India's southernmost state Tamil Nadu, to study at SFCM.

Interwoven with clips of the musicians performing and rehearsing, Gautham explains, "Sometimes blues can be sweet, almost tender in a way, but on the other side, [they] can be aggressive and full of fire. You really can do a lot with just one note in the blues."

Kumar, for his part, is happy to see other musicians who share both his background and his adopted music. "I didn't think there was another Indian person that was gonna come along and pick up harmonica or guitar and start playing this stuff," he says of his younger peers. "Look now, in just the space of two years, we are looking at a different landscape."

Learn more about studying Roots, Jazz, and American Music at SFCM.