ganavya

Described by Wall Street Journal as “among modern music’s most compelling vocalists,” New York- born, Tamil Nadu-raised singer and transdisciplinarian GANAVYA has announced details of an ambitious new album, Daughter of a Temple, due November 15, 2024. Released by Nils Frahm’s label, LEITER, on vinyl and via all digital platforms, it 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”. Her first single for the label, ‘draw something beautiful’, appeared earlier this year in July.

Daughter of a Temple 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!””

Consequently, the album – which also brings the Hindu tradition of harikatha into the 21st century – draws upon a vast cast of contributors across multiple disciplines, among them esperanza spalding, Vijay Iyer, Shabaka Hutchings, Immanuel Wilkins, Peter Sellars, Rajna Swaminathan, Charlotte Braithwaite, Chris Sholar, Darian Donovan Thomas, and Bindhumalini Narayanswamy. Her mother even helped cook for participants. The results, an innovative and deeply moving blend of spiritual jazz and South Asian devotional music, were initially recorded and edited by Ryan Renteria, then further edited and mixed by Nils Frahm at LEITER’s Funkhaus studio in 2024.

Keen to emphasise the manner in which rituality resides in spirituality, GANAVYA began the first day by presenting everyone with customized prayer beads, then washed their feet with honey, turmeric and warm water before they improvised around Coltrane’s ‘A Love Supreme’. “After that,” she recalls, “people started realising that they knew each other.” What followed was an extraordinary experience in pursuit of a common goal, a coming together of people, beliefs and musical styles as much as a mysterious, unfathomable coming home. “We were moving with the contour of a village, deciding in real time to make music which sometimes involved forty people singing, then suddenly the entire group was doing a version of The Rite Of Spring and dancing.”

And this magic isn’t restricted to participants. Daughter of a Temple’s purpose, GANAVYA will tell you, is that people “know there’s a village for you, always in the ether. The worlds we dream of are possible when we come at it with the right amount of discipline and devotion. I hope that’s what resonates with them, that it tells the story of this random girl who dreamed of this world and then it manifested itself. I hope it makes them feel less alone, because that’s what it did for me. I think of it as proof that prayer works and love exists…”