What Does New Roots Sound Like?: Sanjoy Narayan on the Rare Sound of Musician Ganavya

About 10 years ago, when she was still in her 20s, singer Ganavya Doraiswamy (who uses her first name) gave a TEDx talk on the campus of the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Valencia, where she is a former student.

The 10-minute speech wasn’t about music. It was about her first job as a recent psychology graduate in a Florida prison, where, as a 19-year-old, she coached hardened inmates on how to navigate life after prison. Among other things, she coached them on using creativity as an outlet and form of expression.

The concept of creativity was alien to the prisoners, young Ganavya realized. Even when they found ways to fix broken glasses without tools or make a tattoo gun out of a pen, they didn’t see it as creative solutions, but as means to survival.

That story of survival bears similarities to Ganavya’s own path in music.

The Indian-American singer-composer offers a unique fusion of Carnatic vocal tradition with contemporary jazz. Asked to describe her unique 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 mix of classical and electronic music. Accompanied by another single, Ami Pana So’dras, the two tracks, released as an EP, are continuing demonstrations of her ability to use both the spiritual jazz tradition of the late Alice Coltrane and the South Asian classical music of her youth.

Growing up in Tamil Nadu, Ganavya learned to sing in the Indian classical music guru-shishya parampara, repeating verses after her guru rather than studying notes and scales. Her work is marked 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.

Her voice has a deep emotional depth (click here for a short playlist). When Sault, an enigmatic British collective whose music blends R&B, jazz, urban contemporary gospel, house and disco, played their debut show in London last December, Ganavya was among the artists performing with them. At the time, The Guardian wrote that her “voice had a delicate emotional heft that could turn stoics into sobbing wrecks.” The accolades poured in. The Wall Street Journal called her “one of modern music’s most compelling vocalists.”

Ganavya has released three full-length albums to date, including this year’s Like the Sky I’ve Been Too Quiet. She has collaborated with 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 late jazz virtuoso Wayne Shorter composed his jazz opera Iphigenia, he cast Ganavya as one of the featured artists.

She pushes boundaries in ways that are rare in the music world. On the song Karunkuruvi / Blackbird, she does a version of the Beatles song Blackbird, accompanied by a bassist and a harpist, singing 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 words of Nigerian writer Teju Cole: “Forgive me my forgetfulness, no one can forget gentleness.” It’s a gentle spiritual song, accompanied by a tender and moving video. For those unfamiliar with Ganavya’s music, this would be a great track to explore the work of one of contemporary music’s most promising intercultural exponents.

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