Barely a year old, Indian percussion ensemble Tarang is making their way across the U.S. for the first time as a group.

The ensemble will perform Friday at the Ames City Hall Auditorium. The concert is being presented by the Indian Cultural Association of Central Iowa.

Abhijit Banerjee, a tabla player, founded Tarang while recording a solo album last year.

“This group I put together last November 2002, at the time I was recording for a German company,” Banerjee says. “I hired some musicians, that’s how the whole thing came about, it was a long session — a couple of months. We built up a relationship and I thought why don’t we make a group, they said yes. That’s how it happened.”

The group’s debut tour in the U.S. is a two-month, 16-date tour, beginning in San Francisco and ending in Atlanta.

Banerjee says he started playing music when he was quite young.

“I started when I was only four years old,” Banerjee says. “I didn’t come from a musicians’ family — my father was a businessman.”

Although he started studying music when he was young, Banerjee says he didn’t make it his career for several years.

“I was first a journalist for a magazine in eastern India,” Banerjee says. “While I was very much connected with the classical music society, I was not proficient at that time.”

Gradually, this began to change as he realized music was what he wanted to pursue in life.

“I found less time for journalism and realized music was the path I wanted to follow,” Banerjee says. “At the time I was doing mainly Indian classical music.”

After leaving journalism, his musical studies broadened to include voice and violin.

Tarang is composed of three other men. Somnath plays the ghatam, Rajsheker plays the morsing and Snehasish Majumder plays the mandolin.

Banerjee’s chosen instrument is the tabla, but it’s more than just the name of an instrument. Tabla is a complex system of rhythms and tones. A person learns tabla from a guru, or teacher, and this relationship is extremely important.

Tarang plays the North Indian genre, which provides the most systematic theoretical base for tablas performance practice.

This system is based upon two main concepts: “rag” and “tal.” Rag can be roughly translated as “color or passion.” It refers to the melodic aspect of the music. Tal, which directly translates as “clap”, is the rhythmic portion of the music.

Another important concept, “bol,” is a mnemonic system, a memory device, where each stroke of the drum has a syllable attached to it. These syllables are known as bol and commonly considered synonymous to the actual stroke.

The group will be playing pieces from their self-titled debut CD. There will also be a few Banerjee has composed since the album was released.

Banerjee says he does not intend to leave the music industry anytime soon.

“What I am planning now is to work with more musicians from other cultural backgrounds,” Banerjee says. “What I am thinking is to involve more and different colors into the music.”

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Who: Tarang

Where: Ames City Hall Auditorium

When: 6:30 p.m., Friday

Cost: $6 students, $12 public