What do new roots sound like?: Sanjoy Narayan on the rare sound of musician Ganavya

The 30-something singer melds Carnatic vocals with jazz. Her voice has been described as one that ‘could turn stoics into sobbing wrecks’.

About 10 years ago, when she was still in her 20s, the singer Ganavya Doraiswamy (who goes by her first name) gave a TEDx talk at the Valencia campus of America’s prestigious Berklee College of Music, of which she is an alum.

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The 10-minute speech was not about music. It was about her first job as a freshly minted psychology graduate, at a Florida penitentiary, where as a 19-year-old she coached hardened inmates on coping with life after prison. Among other things, she coached them on the use of creativity as an outlet and a form of expression.

The concept of creativity was alien to the inmates, young Ganavya realised. Even when they found ways of fixing a pair of broken eyeglasses with no resources or shaping a tattoo gun out of a pen, they didn’t think of those as creative solutions but as means of survival.

That story about survival has a parallel with Ganavya’s own path in music.

The Indian-American singer-composer offers a unique melding of Carnatic vocal tradition with contemporary jazz. Asked to describe her singular style, she told Headliner magazine: “Children of the diaspora have been taught that we have to be a certain amount of ‘unique’ to survive or stand out in this world.”

Her music is undeniably unique. Earlier this month, she released a single, Draw Something Beautiful, co-produced by Nils Frahm, a German producer known for his blending of classical and electronic music. Accompanied by another single, Ami Pana So’dras, the two songs, released as an EP, are continuing demonstrations of how she is able to draw upon both the spiritual jazz in the tradition of the late Alice Coltrane and the South Asian classical music of her youth.

Growing up in Tamil Nadu, Ganavya learnt to sing in the Indian classical music’s guru-shishya parampara, repeating verses after her guru rather than studying notes and scales. Her work is characterised by a deep reverence for her Indian heritage, combined with a fearless approach to musical innovation.

Many of her compositions also have deep roots in Indian folk music from different regions. She sings in multiple languages: English, Tamil, Sanskrit, Marathi, Bengali. Years of training in Carnatic music have given her voice a substantial range that allows her to explore both the lower and higher registers with clarity and control.

There is a deep emotional depth to her voice (click here for a short playlist). Last December, when Sault, an enigmatic British collective whose music is a mix of R&B, jazz, urban contemporary gospel, house and disco, staged their debut show in London, Ganavya was one of the artists who performed with them. At the time, The Guardian wrote that her “voice had a delicate emotive heft that could turn stoics into sobbing wrecks”. Accolades have been pouring in. The Wall Street Journal has called her “among modern music’s most compelling vocalists”.

Ganavya has released three full-length albums so far, including this year’s Like the Sky I’ve Been Too Quiet. She has worked with the legendary record producer Quincy Jones (who, incidentally, wrote her a recommendation for Harvard), American bassist and composer Esperanza Spalding, British electronic music producer Floating Points (birth name Samuel Shepherd), and British jazz bandleader and composer Shabaka Hutchings, who also produced the album Like the Sky… In 2021, when the now-late jazz virtuoso Wayne Shorter composed his jazz opera Iphigenia, he cast Ganavya as one of the performers.

She pushes the boundaries in ways that is rare in the music world. On the track Karunkuruvi / Blackbird, she does a version of the Beatles song Blackbird accompanied by a bassist and a harp player, and sings the lyrics in English and Tamil. Her first album, Aikyam: Onnu, released in 2018, translated jazz standards into her native Tamil.

Her song Forgive Me My, which appears on Like the Sky…, is built around the Nigerian writer Teju Cole’s words: “Forgive me my forgetfulness, no one can forget gentleness.” It is a gentle spiritual song, accompanied by a tender and touching video. For those unfamiliar with Ganavya’s music, this would be a great track with which to start exploring the work of one of contemporary music’s most promising cross-cultural exponents.

(To write in with feedback, email sanjoy.narayan@gmail.com)