LEITER is honoured to welcome ganavya with her latest single, ‘draw something beautiful’, co-produced by Nils Frahm at his Berlin Funkhaus studio. Described by Wall Street Journal as “among modern music’s most compelling vocalists,” the charismatic New York-born, Tamil Nadu-raised singer and transdisciplinarian has won hearts and minds with solo and collaborative projects showcasing her remarkable vocals and a singular style as likely to draw on spiritual jazz as the South Asian influences of her youth. She’s worked with Quincy Jones, opera/theatre director Peter Sellars, Esperanza Spalding, and Shabaka Hutchings, and was seen last December beguiling crowds at SAULT’S debut in London, where, The Guardian wrote, her “voice had a delicate emotive heft that could turn stoics into sobbing wrecks”. ‘draw something beautiful’, shared on July 12, 2024 via all digital platforms, is accompanied by ‘ami pana so’dras’.

‘draw something beautiful’ isn’t a new song. Instead, the template for these strikingly tranquil four minutes, in which her voice floats delicately amid Frahm’s gratifyingly minimalist, spacious arrangement, was one of the first ganavya composed. “I wrote it as a child to say, ‘If I die, could you take the life force in me and redistribute it among the remaining humans to make them happier?’ I genuinely believed this was possible because of the stories and mythology I grew up with.” Despite this, she forgot it until, years later, it rematerialized mysteriously in China’s Dunhuang Caves, where she was visiting the nearly-thousand-year-old Buddhist paintings with, among others, Peter Sellars to prepare for her role as the Goddess in their 2019 piece ‘Vimalakirti Nirdesa Sutra Chapter 7: The Goddess’.

The night before, ganavya had suffered a traumatic injury, and the next day she was deep in the mountainside when Sellars asked her to sing. She found she had no voice. “It was the strangest thing,” she remembers. “I was in physical pain, stunned by what had happened, and couldn’t bring myself to sing a single note. I looked around, unable to speak, and wished the others would sing with me. Somehow, they all started holding a note even though I didn’t even know how to ask for it. I found myself singing ‘draw something beautiful’ for the first time in years.”

‘draw something beautiful’ was the first music Frahm and ganavya ever recorded, and her vocals were captured so quickly that she, Frahm, and Felix Grimm – Frahm’s long-time manager and LEITER’s co-founder – decided to keep going. She recalls being unsure what to sing next, but Frahm “set up his glass harmonica, using a kalimba to apply sustained pressure to one singular note,” she continues of the resulting, otherworldy combination of unforgettable melody and quiet drone, “and I sang an old Kashmiri song I hum to myself all the time when alone. ’ami pana so’dras’ came out of me almost as if I was alone, humming to myself as I always do. Nils has a matter-of-factness to his presence that feels like the opposite of… excessiveness. It was easy to just be.”

Raised in India’s southernmost state, ganavya was withdrawn from school at a young age to study music with her family. Much of her childhood was spent dancing, singing, and on the pilgrimage trail, learning the storytelling art of harikathā and singing poetry. After breaking her knee, however, she had to abandon dance, until then her main focus. She headed to the US where she studied psychology, “then worked jobs no nineteen-year-old should, including as a counsellor in a correctional institution teaching poetry to people on Death Row.” Before long, she was recruited by Berklee College of Music to join their Contemporary Performance graduate program, and this was followed by a graduate degree in Ethnomusicology at UCLA, then a doctorate in music at Harvard.

ganavya didn’t so much return to writing and performing music as music returned to ganavya. It brought with it, too, much to her bewilderment, an A-list eager to work with her. ‘like the sky i’ve been too quiet’, her most recent album, features contributions from, among others, Floating Points, Tom Herbert, Carlos Niño and Leafcutter John, and was recorded with Shabaka Hutchings, who released it earlier this year on his label, Native Rebel. Nonetheless, ‘draw something beautiful’ is arguably the finest thing ganavya has ever recorded. “This,” she concludes, “might be the first time in my life I’m releasing something of mine that I feel fully connected to. I feel like – finally – I can make the music I want to. The second I started speaking to LEITER, I felt like my bones could rest. The greatest gift that they have already given me is that I now believe a bearable, perhaps even beautiful future is possible.”