“GANAVYA creates a lush twine out of American and South Asian traditions, and on “Aikyam: Onnu,” this vocalist and scholar’s majestic debut album, the upshot feels more like an expansive invitation than any definable hybrid. GANAVYA has populated jazz standards with lyrics from Tamil poetry and songs of anticolonial resistance . . . No matter the language or the content, GANAVYA’s voice is a thick ephemera, like smoke as dark as ink, just coming off the fire.” – New York Times
Tamil Nadu-raised and New York-born critically acclaimed vocalist GANAVYA lives, learns, and loves fluidly from the nexus of many frameworks and understandings. Hers is a deeply profound and rooted voice. A multidisciplinary creator, she is a soundsmith and wordsmith. Trained as an improviser, scholar, dancer, and multi-instrumentalist, she 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. Much of her childhood was on the pilgrimage trail, learning the storytelling art form of harikathā and singing poetry that critiques hierarchal social structures. She is a co-founder of the non-hierarchical We Have Voice Collective.
Hers is a life of nonlinearity, and singularity. Despite not 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.”
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