Before collaborating with 30 artists of various disciplines for her new album, Ganavya made a practice of kneeling to wash the feet of her guests. They’d often break down at the gesture.
“Everyone cried,” she recalled. “It comes back to a grammar of care. In the tradition that I was raised, you can’t actually pay your teacher enough for what they’re giving you. So you do things around the house because you understand that there’s no amount of money that you could ever give that would ever make this make sense.”
The 33-year-old vocalist, composer and bandleader was raised in the Hindu tradition of harikatha, a type of storytelling that blends music and poetry. A who’s who in jazz and experimental music — artists including Esperanza Spalding, Shabaka Hutchings, Immanuel Wilkins and Vijay Iyer — sat in over the course of a week in Houston to record “Daughter of a Temple,” her 48-minute set of meditative chants and devotional hymns released last week. The LP features one of Wayne Shorter’s last recordings, the track “Elders Wayne and Carolina,” on which he and his wife recite the Buddhist chant “Nam Myoho Renge Kyo.”
The album is an example of community building as art. Born Ganavya Doraiswamy in Flushing, Queens, and raised in Tamil Nadu, a state in South India, Ganavya came up in a creative family, where, as a child, she studied the harikatha along the Varkari pilgrimage route. She and her family would walk and sing poems called abhangs — nonstop devotional poems — for several days on end.
“By the time I was already born, the whole family on my father’s side were musicians; I was born into the eye of the storm already,” she said. “It was just what we did, it wasn’t a thing, it wasn’t a statement. We learned how to cook, do the laundry, and music.”
Ganavya, whose name means “one who was born to spread music,” and her family moved back to the United States when she was 14. They landed in Florida, where, she said, the lack of community compared to India was striking. “I had moved from a life where, for better or for worse, if you need something, you can call 10 people; you’re never alone,” she said between long pauses. “And then suddenly the field was empty. I didn’t know who my neighbors were.”
After earning a psychology degree from Florida International University and graduate degrees in contemporary performance (Berklee), ethnomusicology (University of California, Los Angeles), and creative practice and critical inquiry (Harvard), she set about her path to recorded music. Her career has encompassed a series of small feats — a feature here, an indie album there — that have recently nudged her onto larger stages.
She performed in London with Sault, the mysterious British soul collective, at a rare live show, in December 2023. Of her cover of Monsoon’s “Ever So Lonely,” The Guardian wrote, “Many wondered who this beguiling presence was, whose voice had a delicate emotive heft that could turn stoics into sobbing wrecks.” Since, she has steadily drawn growing crowds, appeared on late-night TV and drawn fans like Peter Gabriel and Brian Eno into her orbit.
Throughout an hourlong interview, Ganavya delved deeply into her process of making music that lands with broad groups of fans despite its potential for challenging listeners. A stick of incense burning, she accessed her emotions quickly and earnestly, all while fixing her hair incessantly — in a bun, then down, then swooped to one side, then in a bun again — her voice rarely rising above a whisper. She was reluctant to cast herself as a singular artist, emphasizing her place in an ecosystem of left-of-center artists crafting alternative music.
“I don’t even know what the norm is,” she said between sips of tea. “Maybe it’s just simple, as simple as washing your band members’ feet.”
Spalding, in a separate interview, pointed to musicians like Tyler the Creator, Janelle Monáe and Thundercat as priming a new generation for music that blurs classifications. “Some of the younger contemporary musicians who are hybridizing all of their beloved influences, including jazz and gospel and funk, have made a lot of headroom for advanced listenership,” Spalding said. She added: “Is it world music? Is it jazz? I don’t think anybody really cares about any of that. As soon as you hear Ganavya’s voice, you want to hear it some more.”
Listeners are similarly lured to “Daughter of a Temple,” which has the air of an intimate field recording steeped in gospel, ambient and South Asian devotional music, not unlike Alice Coltrane’s ambient works of the late 1970s and early ’80s.
Though a bevy of Coltrane-referencing songs and albums have been released in the past five years, Ganavya’s album perhaps best captures the creative intimacy around Alice and John. The arrangement of the covers on “Daughter of a Temple” are just slightly off the originals, leaving the bones of the songs intact while reaching toward something new and inventive.
On “Om Namah Sivaya,” the noted jazz harpist Charles Overton plays while Ganavya’s parents sing emotively (her mother also cooked meals for the album’s collaborators). Iyer and Wilkins play a pensive ballad on “Om Supreme,” an Alice Coltrane cover, while an ensemble choir sings behind them. Then there’s “A Love Supreme,” a four-part epic that features the trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith alongside the theater director Peter Sellars reciting a meditative poem and the singer Ione. Over nearly 18 minutes, Ganavya and her band run through several different movements: Sellars’s hushed declarations of love, a cascading metronome of acoustic bass, harp, backing vocals and drums, then ending with a subtle chime that brings the album to a soft, rightful close.
“Her work is genre-bending, imbued with so much spirit and power,” Wilkins, the saxophonist and a frequent collaborator, wrote in a text message. “Ever since we met it’s felt like kindred spirits. It feels like prayer when we work together.”
After an afternoon interview with Ganavya, she took center stage at Brooklyn’s National Sawdust, wearing comfy black and white sneakers and a flowing white dress. Her hair pulled back, face stoic, she delivered a set above the soft strum of a harp and light flickers of piano. Between songs, she unwound long stories about her upbringing and the origins of her music with dry humor.
The crowd sat rapt for a set that demanded patience and stillness. There weren’t many phones out during the show’s 90 minutes, and despite her being the lone vocalist onstage, the audience’s attention didn’t waver. They listened, laughed and applauded in a communal performance that did not seem to adhere to time or form.
Ganavya said she is doing what she can to stay grounded in the work, the quiet, the spiritual practice, the collective. Everything else she’s figuring out in real time, onstage, behind that microphone, with listeners hanging onto her every word.
“Life has always felt like it was a series of miracles,” she said. “I firmly believe that there is only love, and it could be so much simpler. I sing because I genuinely think that if I don’t, I will die. The only thing that gives me relief is this. It’s the only thread I have back to that state of simple joy …”
She paused again: “Of singing with people.”
The post The Singer Whose Work Feels Like Prayer appeared first on New York Times.
