It wasn’t long into ganavya’s Oct. 3rd concert at National Sawdust before she had the whole audience singing together, joining her in repeating the last line of one of her newest songs: “There is so much beauty and comfort… in being in love and just being.” And towards the end of every other piece, she re-sang that refrain and cued us in. This feeling of community strengthened throughout the evening as ganavya thoughtfully wove together language, poetry, prayer, family, sisterhood, jazz, Tamil arts influences, and an immense love for humankind. The performance left no doubt as to why National Sawdust wanted to give their audiences this experience as part of their celebratory 10th anniversary season.
For this New York City-born, South India-raised singer songwriter, music-making is perhaps less about the performance than it is about leading a communal experience of togetherness. Along with a distinctly spiritual meaning to most of ganavya’s lyrics (many drawn from ancient Sufi poetry), her jazz background was also at play; the hall was packed, yet the concert felt intimate, the metaphorical veil between stage and audience thinning and softening every time she took a moment to go over the origin story of a song or translate the meaning of the words she had just sung.
And ganavya’s voice is stunning. In the handful of songs that bookended her on-stage interview with John Schaefer for WNYC radio, she delighted with tremendous feats of melodic maneuvering as her hands bent, pushed, and wove unseen energy in the air in front of her. There were moments when her voice was so quiet, every word seemed to drift out of and seep back into the ambient noise of the hall. And there were times where she stepped away from the microphone as her voice easily filled the space with the solid resonance of her spiritual jazz. Bass and piano supported her intuitively with a steady canvas of vivid drones, sparkling high-pitched piano licks, and crystalline dampened strings. The patient unfurling of the songs and the flow of the concert itself added an extra sense of peace to the whole evening.
The familial way that ganavya treated the audience seemed to be in keeping with her life-long experiences singing with her family. In two different songs, she welcomed a special guest to the stage. The first was her cousin, who spoke of how their family showed appreciation and affection for each other, sharing, “When we love each other too much, it flows out of us as a song.” The second was a piece about sisterhood, performed with her guitarist friend: towards the end of the work, ganavya asked us to call out the names of our sisters. After a moment of group hesitation, I called out “Elizabeth,” and suddenly a torrent of sisterhood filled the space as audience members called out their sister’s names. I immediately choked up so deeply I couldn’t have said another name out loud even if I’d had another sister.
ganavya — Photo by Massinissa Selmani
This is part of ganayva’s magic: to gently lead our awareness to the simple truths that go often unnoticed, these aspects of the human experience that are worth shining our love and focus upon. And every time ganavya asked us to participate, she helped us get back to what music is at its heart: a way to bring people together. No stage, no audience – just being, and sharing that feeling with each other as a way of moving forward together.
“One more time like we could actually change the world,” ganavya said as we repeated that haunting refrain from her new song. And we sang louder and with more heart. These words weren’t those of a Sufi poet; they were from a poem written by Khaliifah ibn Rayford Daniel, also known as Marcellus Williams, while on death row before being executed just a week before the concert. And this intent to utilize music to help us all become more aware of our real need for each other was elegantly codified during the mid-concert interview when she was asked what music has meant for her. Her answer? That, at its best, “music is a village-making technology.”
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