Who is drummer Anmol Mohara?

No? Well thanks to drummer, composer and band-leader Anmol Mohara, now you can, as that’s exactly how his debut album was described by Songlines – an album which he performed live here at the Southbank Centre on 1 July 2026.

But ahead of that Purcell Room gig, part of our latest South Asian Sounds series, we wanted to offer you a more detailed introduction to this young drumming talent, who has drawn on global influences to present an album that is very much a connection to home.

He’s been playing the drums as long as he can remember

Anmol Mohara’s musical journey began at just five years old when, alongside his uncles, he took part in a local cultural festival in his home town of Dharan in south eastern Nepal, playing the congas. He was hooked. In the following years he showed such promise and aptitude for percussion that his parents applied for him to take a place at the Nepal Music Centre in Kathmandu. Winning a scholarship he joined the school at the age of nine, but it wasn’t easy, the Nepalese capital is 350 kilometres from Dharan, meaning Mohara had to leave his home behind and board at the school.

His musical education spans continents

In 2015 the teenage Mohara and his family relocated from Nepal to the UK, but thankfully his drumming didn’t stop. His studies continued, firstly under drum tutor Danny Mullowney at school in Aldershot, then through enrolment at the Academy of Contemporary Music in Guilford and a two-year junior jazz course at the Royal Academy of Music, before moving onto Guildhall School of Music and Drama where he specialised in jazz drums. He also gained experience in the US too, as one of only three UK musicians to be offered a place at the prestigious Brubeck Institute Summer Jazz Colony in California in 2018.

He won his first drum kit

Though drumming may have been Mohara’s life, it wasn’t until he was in his late teens that he owned his first drum kit. Itself a recognition of his burgeoning talent, Mohara’s fist kit was his prize for winning the Yamaha Futurebeat competition in 2018. But then he was no stranger to winning competitions, even as a teenager. He’d been crowned Young Drummer of the Year in 2017 (below) and had won prizes at Kathmandu’s AFK Music Contest prior to his move to the UK.

His influences are as global as his musical education

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Mohara’s musical influences and inspirations are decidedly global. He cites the Hari Maharjan Project and the new-school folk band Night as two of his key Nepali inspirations, while he has named Ifrikya, by the Algerian percussionist Karim Ziad as his favourite album for its ‘seamless and fresh’ blend of Gnawa music and jazz. Among the other drummers and percussionists to influence Mohara are Dave Weckl, Anika Niles, Vinnie Colaiuta, Zakir Hussain and Trilok Gurtu, while his desire to merge the traditional with the contemporary is something he shares with Malian singer Oumou Sangare and the British composer Nitin Sawhney.

He uses jazz ‘as a sort of glue’

In 2025 Mohara released his debut album Across the Sea, a work which explores themes of tradition, identity, migration and belonging, and blends traditional Nepali music with more contemporary jazz and other groove-based sounds. Speaking about the album in an interview with Presto Music, Mohara explained, ‘when I write music, I don’t specifically think of it in a way that I’m going to blend one style of music with another – I let it happen naturally. The music I’ve written on this album is very rooted to the tradition and culture from Nepal, but the musicians involved in the project all have the background of studying jazz. I also studied jazz, so in a way I use it as a sort of glue.’

The seeds of his debut album were sewn at Guildhall

Though he released Across the Sea in 2025 many of its tracks started taking shape several years earlier during his final years at Guildhall, where studies in composition gave him greater confidence to write. ‘Living away has deepened my appreciation for my roots, while also exposing me to music from around the world, especially during my time at Guildhall,’ Mohara told Jazz Views in 2025. ‘That experience inspired me to begin composing my own music, and I wrote this album during my final year there.’

And Guildhall also gave him a band

It’s not just a confidence to write music, an exposition to different influences and a degree that Mohara left Guildhall with. He also emerged from the institution with a network of fellow musicians, several of whom now appear in his band. Vocalist Tereza Catarov, flautist and saxophonist Simeon May, guitarist Dan Fawcett, bassist Rory Hudson and pianist Cody Moss are all fellow Guildhall graduates. And beyond his own ensemble Mohara has performed with other Guildhall alumni, including Egyptian singer Amena and pianist Will Hobson.

However he’s still quite an introverted guy at heart

Which is not something you often get to say about drummers. But being a musician, Mohara has still managed to channel this introvertedness into song, and one of his catchiest songs at that, ‘A Rhythmic Guy’, as he explained in an interview with Presto Music. ‘Sometimes I struggle to express myself with words, so I wanted to write a fun song about that introverted side of me. The chorus goes, ‘I wanna Dha Dha Te Te, Dha Dha Tin Na…,’ which might sound like gibberish to most people, but it’s actually the language of the tabla’.