A “breathtakingly beautiful” new voice in contemporary music (Downbeat Magazine), vocalistcomposer Kavita Shah has been praised by NPR for her “amazing dexterity for musical languages.” A native New Yorker of Indian origin fluent in Spanish, Portuguese, and French, Shah incorporates her in-depth knowledge of diverse cultural traditions into her jazz-based repertoire, placing seemingly eclectic songs, instruments, and artists in dialogue with one another.

Shah grew up next to the United Nations, immersed in her parents' Sinatra and Beatles records, tuned into 90s hip-hop, and in discovery of Afro-Cuban and bossa nova classics. From age 5, she studied classical piano, and from age 10, she performed regularly at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center with the award-winning Young People's Chorus of NYC. It was in the YPC where Shah was frst exposed to jazz, and it stuck. “We sang everything from standards to opera to pop to folk music to contemporary pieces by Meredith Monk,” Shah recalls. “For me, it was normal that all these types of music could co-exist, and I've been trying to replicate that experience ever since.”

Her debut album VISIONS (Inner Circle Music/Naïve Records 2014) fuses a jazz quintet with the Indian tabla and West African kora to create a strikingly original sound all her own. Coproduced by African guitar virtuoso Lionel Loueke, it was dubbed a “sparkling debut" (Boston Globe), “daring and ambitious” (Jazzwise UK), “stunning” (Aquarian Weekly), and Best Vocal & Debut Album of 2014 (Will Hermes, Rolling Stone).

Shah has performed at such venues as the Kennedy Center, Blue Note, Iridium, Jazz Standard, Joe's Pub, Winter Jazz Festival, Rochester Jazz Festival, Vermont Jazz Center, New Jersey Performing Arts Center, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Rubin Museum of Art, and Paris' Duc des Lombards. She has collaborated with Sheila Jordan, Lionel Loueke, Greg Osby, Steve Wilson, François Moutin, Samir Chatterjee, and Yacouba Sissoko. Hailed by Downbeat as Best Graduate Jazz Vocalist (2012) and recipient of ASCAP’s Young Jazz Composers Award (2013), Shah holds a Master’s in Jazz Voice from Manhattan School of Music and a Bachelor's in Latin American Studies from Harvard, where she was awarded the Cultural Agents Thesis Prize and the Kenneth D. Maxwell Prize in Brazilian Studies for her research on Afro-Brazilian music.

http://www.kavitashahmusic.com/

Juancho Herrera (guitar), Bam Bam Rodríguez (bass), and Zack O'Farrill (drums)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6n1xcGLXvzI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LWqbYMxqs0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlXJPuKpeT4

“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

“Kavita is a real, true musician. She's a great singer, but the way she writes music, she's not really thinking just about the voice. It sounds like she could be a horn player, a sax player." - Lionel Loueke, Grammy award-winning guitarist

“What she's doing is something completely new.” - Betto Arcos, NPR “All Things Considered”

Tickets are $15 advance and $20 day of show