Home » Jazz Musicians » Kavita Shah

Kavita Shah

Kavita Shah is an award-winning vocalist, composer, researcher, and educator who makes work in deep engagement with the jazz tradition, while also addressing and advancing its global sensibilities. A lifelong New Yorker of Indian origin hailed for possessing an “amazing dexterity for musical languages” (NPR), Shah incorporates her ethnographic research on Brazilian, West African, and Indian musical traditions into her original repertoire. Her highly-acclaimed 2014 debut album—the internationally-minded project "VISIONS" (Inner Circle Music/Naïve Records)—was co-produced by guitarist Lionel Loueke. Her 2017 Park Avenue Armory premiere "Folk Songs of Naboréa," an interdisciplinary song-cycle for seven voices, was named by Nate Chinen (WBGO/NPR) as one of the Top 10 Jazz Performances of the year. In 2018, she released "Interplay(Dot Time Records) in duo with bassist François Moutin, with legendary guests Martial Solal on piano and Sheila Jordan on vocals; it was nominated for France's Victoires de la Musique for "Album jazz sensation de l'année" (Jazz Album of the Year). Shah is currently working simultaneously on an album of traditional Cape Verdean music based on her ongoing fieldwork on the Atlantic island of São Vicente and a record of original music for her jazz quintet chronicling the journey to her ancestral villages in rural Gujarat. 

Raised in Manhattan, Shah traces her commitment to jazz to the childhood influence of uptown saxophonist Patience Higgins, a former neighbor whose band she would later join at hallowed Harlem spots like Minton’s and the Lenox Lounge. Trained first as a classical pianist, Shah spent her formative years in the prestigious Young People’s Chorus of New York City, absorbing and performing in a vast range of musical idioms. An early and enduring fascination with Spanish literature and Afro-Cuban music helped guide her to major in Latin American Studies at Harvard, where her B.A. honors research on contemporary Afro-Brazilian music and politics, drawing on fieldwork in Salvador da Bahia, won the Kenneth D. Maxwell Prize in Brazilian Studies and the Cultural Agents Thesis Prize. She was also awarded the David McCord Prize for artistic talent. After a brief stint working for The Nation magazine and Human Rights Watch, Shah went on to earn a Master of Music degree in Jazz Voice at Manhattan School of Music, where she studied voice with Theo Bleckmann and Peter Eldridge, improvisation with Steve Wilson, and composition with Jim McNeely and Nils Vigeland. She was named Downbeat's Best Graduate Jazz Vocalist in 2012 and won the ASCAP Herb Alpert Young Jazz Composers Award in 2013.

Read more

Tags

2
Radio & Podcasts

Kavita Shah, Alabaster Deplume, Angelika Niescier, Tomeka Reid, Savannah Harris & More

Read "Kavita Shah, Alabaster Deplume, Angelika Niescier, Tomeka Reid, Savannah Harris & More" reviewed by Ludovico Granvassu


A cosmopolitan edition of Mondo Jazz, which brings India, Cape Verde, Canada, Haiti, England, Sicily, Sardinia, the Great American Rivers, California and Germany to your headphones, wherever you might be, through Radio Free Brooklyn's digital transmitter in Bushwick, NY! Let's call it “jazz without borders!" Happy listening! Playlist Ben Allison Mondo Jazz Theme 0:00 Kavita Shah “Cape Verdean Blues" Cape Verdean Blues (Folkalist) 0:16 Host talks 2:59 Dominique Fils-Aimé “My Mind at Ease" Our Roots Run ...

Read more articles
4

Recording

Dot Time Records Announce "Interplay," An Exciting New Album From The François Moutin/Kavita Shah Duo

Dot Time Records Announce "Interplay," An Exciting New Album  From The François Moutin/Kavita Shah Duo

Source: All About Jazz

Interplay is a meeting of minds and spirits, one that embraces virtuosity, spontaneity, and lyricism through a repertoire of standards and original music adapted to the unique instrumentation of acoustic bass and voice. It features 11 tracks recorded at Sear Sound Studios in New York and Studio le Meudon in jny: Paris. Kavita Shah and François Moutin are also joined by their octogenarian mentors–NEA Jazz Master Sheila Jordan on vocals, considered by many as the pioneer of bass-and-voice duets, and ...

“A polyglot in more than language alone.” - Siddhartha Mitter, The Boston Globe ​

"What she's doing is something completely new.” - NPR

"All Things Considered" “Shah’s music reflects the insatiably curious mind of an ethnographer, the soul of a poet, and the eye of a painter.” - Owen McNally, WNPR

Photos

Music

Recordings: As Leader | As Sideperson

Interplay

Dot Time Records
2018

buy

Steve Newcomb...

Self Produced
2013

buy

Videos

Get more of a good thing!

Our weekly newsletter highlights our top stories, our special offers, and upcoming jazz events near you.