CO-PRESENTED BY SPACE
Ganavya with Miriam Adefris

Blessed with a voice “that could turn stoics into sobbing wrecks” (The Guardian), Ganavya blends South Indian devotional music and spiritual jazz, and appears at SPACE, co-presented by the Portland Chamber Music Festival, in a special duo setting with harpist Miriam Adefris.

Described by the Wall Street Journal as “among modern music’s most compelling vocalists,” the New York-born, Tamil Nadu-raised singer and transdisciplinarian Ganavya released an ambitious new album, Daughter of a Temple, in November, 2024. Austrian-Ethiopian sound artist, harpist and composer Miriam Adefris is an active part of a musical scene that is forming between jazz, experimental electronics and club sounds. As a solo musician, she develops impressionistic, immersive atmospheres that are reminiscent of Alice Coltrane’s Afrofuturistic soundscapes and draw on the artist’s East African musical heritage.

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"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