ganavya is an extraordinary vocalist, composer and bandleader whose music weaves together South Indian classical tradition, jazz, and devotional expression. With a voice that is both ancient and immediate, she blurs boundaries between genres, languages, and worlds—offering sound as ritual, as refuge, and as radical presence.
ganavya was raised in the Hindu tradition of *harikathā*, a storytelling art form in Southern India that blends music and poetry and critiques hierarchal social structures. For this very special night, she’ll be joined by acclaimed jazz harpist Charles Overton and bassist Max Ridley.
A multidisciplinary creator, soundsmith and wordsmith, ganavya was trained as an improviser, scholar, dancer, and multi-instrumentalist who maintains an inner library of “spi/ritual” blueprints offered to her by an intergenerational constellation of collaborators, continuously anchoring her practice in pasts, presents and, futures.
Hers is a life of nonlinearity, and singularity. Despite not being schooled traditionally as a child, she carries degrees in theatre (Broward Community College) and psychology (F.I.U.), with graduate degrees in Contemporary Performance (Berklee College of Music), ethnomusicology (UCLA), and Creative Practice and Critical Inquiry (Harvard). Both as an educator and student, she “wishes to study and bring liberative techniques into this world… study certain dyads: what empowers, who is disempowered; what heals, who is ailing— and wishes to wed the two.” She is a co-founder of the non-hierarchical We Have Voice Collective.
“most enchanting…” -NPR
“And, her latest NY Times review
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/20/arts/music/ganavya-daughter-of-a-temple.html
ganayva’s critically acclaimed new album *Daughter of a Temple* is a 48-minute set of meditative chants and devotional hymns and features Esperanza Spalding, Shabaka Hutchings, Immanuel Wilkins and Vijay Iyer, was released by Nils Frahm’s label Leiter and follows her appearance at Sault’s 2023 live debut in London where, The Guardian wrote, her “voice had a delicate emotive heft that could turn stoics into sobbing wrecks”. The album was recorded over a week in 2022 at the Moore’s Opera House in Houston, Texas, after ganavya had reached out to friends and associates over the preceding months to join her for “a gathering in and for devotion”. This was to draw on studies of what she terms the musico- philosophies of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda, and she’d even promised herself she’d invite anyone who brought up Turiyasangitananda’s name around her. “You really shouldn’t do that,” she chuckles. “It turns out a lot of people talk about her!”
***This date is rescheduled from May 31.***