About Kevin and Maia

We co-founded Salastina in 2010, and continue to direct it together. 
And no: we’re not married (to each other).

Thanks for your interest in learning more about us!

We met sharing a stand over a decade ago.
We hit it off both temperamentally and artistically.
As our friendship grew, we realized we shared similar musical visions and were energized by using each other as sounding boards. 

Salastina is the result of our partnership.

Maia Jasper White, Executive Director and Co-Artistic Director

Hi there! I’m Maia. I'm a musician because I'm a beauty junkie, a transcendence chaser, and someone who needs to commune. With others, with myself, and with the ineffable. I am fascinated by how music gives shape, meaning, and beauty to abstractions, allowing us to connect, open up, and marvel.

As a kid, I was completely obsessed with the violin, and chamber music more specifically. At the same time, I resisted the pressure to fully commit to a career as a violinist as young as was expected of me. Some of that was due to curiosity about other things; some was fear of failure.

I ended up going to Yale, where I could study both music and the liberal arts. I experimented with a few summer jobs that, in retrospect, all had to do with producing hoidy-toidy content. I worked for Martha Stewart (pre-prison), the LA Opera, and Charlie Rose. One such summer, I met a woman who had started a successful chamber music series. It blew me away to learn that this was something one could just do. From then on, I knew that was what I wanted to work towards as a musician.

In my twenties, I not only needed to build experience and "street cred" towards this goal; I also needed to make a living. I was a member of the Pacific Symphony for ten years. I joined the LA Chamber Orchestra in 2010. Kevin and I met during this time. Meanwhile, we started working in Hollywood’s recording studios.

I also became more and more involved in teaching. For a while, I taught chamber music at the Colburn School, where I'd trained as a child myself. Now, I'm the Director of Chamber Music at Caltech. At Caltech as at Salastina, I have the privilege of connecting curious, passionate people to the art form in a way that provides both inspiration and a sense of personal ownership.

I began my professional life muscling my way into the world of "violin jocks." That was a point of pride until it wasn't. In my early thirties, I traded chasing the proverbial carrot for following my curiosity in related areas. This is something that was inspired, encouraged, and validated by so many colleagues, mentors, family, audience members, and friends.

Perhaps the greatest surprise of my career has been how much I love the non-performance side of running Salastina. Kevin and I constantly remark on how every little thing we do informs everything else. This integration suffuses music-making with a more defined, expansive sense of purpose for me. I therefore look at my musical practice as inclusive of playing the violin, teaching, writing, and running a business.

My husband, composer Philip White, and I have two kids: Galen (7) and Naomi (5). I'm a Francophile, a knitter, an armchair social psychologist, and a staunch political centrist. If you’ve read this far, I hope to geek out with you somewhere, somehow sometime soon.

Kevin Kumar, Co-Artistic Director

Hi! I’m Kevin Kumar, co-founder and co-artistic director of Salastina.

Music-making has always led to my most intense sense of being, a weirdly focused and expanded awareness where you lock onto the atomic rhythm of love and swim in the great mystery of existence. It’s like a springboard for diving into a completely different, way more fulfilling mode of operation than usual. And as an artist, that’s what I want to be for others: a springboard for others to jump away from old patterns and into a universe that vibrates with wonder, but which also feels completely natural and strangely like our true home. (Yes, I’m kind of corny.)

As a violinist, I’ve been lucky enough to be a soloist with orchestras like the Los Angeles Philharmonic and guest concertmaster of orchestras on the U.S. West coast and around Europe. I also get to work as a studio musician on Hollywood movies, tv shows, and a variety of albums. I play on two recently made instruments: a violin by Mario Miralles and a bow by Cody Kowalski.

Because of an injury, I had to spend years away from the violin. During that time, I got my B.A. from Stanford, then worked as a songwriter/producer with my brother Sean, mainly for major label pop artists in East Asia (like this one).

Life kind of led me back to the violin, and I realized that chamber music was pretty much the ideal art form. If there were a Venn diagram showing where all the best parts of being a soloist, orchestral musician, and human being meet, that overlapping area would be chamber music. I also think there’s a lot we can learn from how a handful of people with individual voices work together to create something astonishingly beautiful to share with others.

I’m a dad, husband, lover of sci-fi/fantasy/guacamole, and decent idea generator always working on raising my follow-through game. No man is an island, and I can’t really talk about myself without being grateful for the amazing family, friends, and teachers I’ve had and have in my life. They’re all part of shaping a person who partnered with Maia to create this forward-looking, artist-led organization.

So really, Salastina was started by hundreds of people. We present a down-to-earth concert experience that satisfies your heart’s needs and intellectual curiosity, and we’d love to welcome you to Salastina!