All Things Live Italy, in collaboration with Chullu Agency, brings GANAVYA – Daughter of a Temple (live concert) to Milan for a single Italian date: Saturday, October 12, 2025, at the Church of San Nicolao della Flue. A singer, composer, and multi-instrumentalist educated across the U.S., India, and South America, Ganavya merges spiritual jazz, South Asian devotional music, and improvisational practices, turning the concert into a listening experience suspended between sacredness, experimentation, and performance. At the heart of the evening is the project Daughter of a Temple, an intimate exploration of spirituality, diasporic identity, and collective memory, performed with an ensemble of international musicians. The church — a hidden gem of Milan’s modernist architecture — was chosen for its acoustics and contemplative atmosphere.

Described by The Wall Street Journal as “one of the most captivating vocalists in modern music” and by The New York Times as “a singer whose work feels like a prayer,” Ganavya studied at Harvard, UCLA, and CalArts, with roots in Carnatic music. She has collaborated with Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Terri Lyne Carrington, and Esperanza Spalding, and performed at venues including the Lincoln Center, Serpentine Pavilion, Barbican, and Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Foundation. Her work bridges the ancient and the contemporary, the spiritual and the urban.

Starting from these themes — place, ritual, and voice — we spoke with Ganavya about her new project and the way it takes shape in live performance. The following is our conversation.

Ritamorena Zotti: Daughter of a Temple: is there a track where you feel the devotional language truly became your own? If you like, tell us what you chose to leave out to stay honest.

Ganavya: I think the general difficulty is that virtuosity is often defined as a mastering of a language. And what is “mastering” if not an attempted ownership? Musical language—or anything, for that matter—in this world is perhaps like the earth: no matter the constructs we convince ourselves are real, a deed to a house does not mean we own the ground upon which it stands. I cannot say that a musical language, or a devotional language, is truly my own. I can only say that I have reached out to many traditions as many traditions have reached out to me, and in this process I have learned the contours of my own voice.

RZ: Your voice moves through languages, whispers, and silences. Could you walk us through one track and explain how you built its emotional arc?

G: The first track, “A Love Chant,” is actually from the middle of a concert we all gave on the last day of a week-long gathering. I didn’t build its emotional arc—the week-long gathering did. It was a quiet moment of seeking, of being guided, and the process of going back months later to listen to it and realizing that the guiding was still happening.

RZ: You sometimes record in “living” spaces. Is there a place (a hall, a temple, a street) that changed a piece more than the writing itself? How can listeners perceive that on the record?

G: When Daughter of a Temple was recorded, we had six houses all on the same three streets. It was like the construction of a small village. The fact that we were all so close—that I could hear the music they were making at one o’clock in the morning from my house two streets down—this love, this right-sized and right-scaled love, a love that is not virtual, can be heard on the record.

RZ: When you work with others, what do you protect about your direction, and what do you allow to transform? If you can, share an example from a specific track.

G: Generally, nobody I work with tries to position me. For the most part, I do not have to protect myself. The musicians who are in my “band”—a band truly in the fullest sense of the word—are my family, my tribe, my teachers, and my close friends.

RZ: For you, today, what does a “ritual song” mean? What are two or three non-negotiable elements—and where do you draw the line so the rite remains a living gesture rather than just aesthetics?

G: Aesthetics is ritual, too, when it is born from necessity—when the self must produce a form, without which the self truly believes the world would be incomplete. A ritual loses something when its form is guided by what a practitioner thinks it needs to look like, rather than the form being something the practitioner desperately needs for themselves and their community.