Kavita Shah

Grammy-nominated vocalist Kavita Shah blends jazz, Brazilian rhythms, and global folk traditions into a vibrant, boundary-crossing live set.

When Kavita Shah first visited her ancestral villages on the coast of Gujarat, in northwestern India, they felt strangely familiar — like she had been there before. The teal blue houses, the mangroves, and the guava trees reminded Shah of her travels throughout Latin America, Brazil and West Africa, with their equally vibrant colors and cultures. Shah is an award-winning vocalist, composer, researcher and polyglot who makes globally-minded music that is deeply engaged with the jazz tradition. Her winding path back to her ancestral homeland is embodied in the title of Kavita Shah’s forthcoming album, All Roads Lead to Home, due out in Fall 2026 on Folkalist Records.

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 traditions into her original music, and she regularly tours her music on six continents. Her projects include Visions (2014), co-produced by Lionel Loueke, Folk Songs of Naboréa (2017), named a Top 10 Jazz Concert of the Year by Nate Chinen), Interplay (2018), a duo album with François Moutin nominated for France’s Victoires de la Musique for Jazz Album of the Year, and Cape Verdean Blues (2023), a “quietly riveting” (New York Times) and “gorgeous” (The Guardian) tribute to the legendary singer Cesária Évora.

All Roads Lead to Home is the much anticipated sequel to Shah’s debut, Visions, featuring a global cast of established New York musicians: pianist/ keyboardist Leo Genovese (Argentina), guitarist Juancho Herrera (Venezuela/ Colombia), bassist François Moutin (France), and drummer/percussionist Varun Das (India/USA). The band’s performance credits collectively include the biggest names in jazz and world music, including Esperanza Spalding, Wayne Shorter, Lila Downs, Milton Nascimento, Miguel Zenon, Rudresh Mahanthappa, Jack Dejohnette, Claudia Acuña, and Lionel Loueke. The Quintet has performed at such venues as the Kennedy Center, Central Park SummerStage, MASS MoCA, Rubin Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Winter Jazz Fest, San José Jazz Festival, Rochester Jazz Festival, Melbourne Jazz Festival, Brisbane Jazz Festival, Blue Note, Jazz Standard, and Joe's Pub.

The Quintet’s music is brimming with complex rhythms and soulful songs that carry stories of the natural world and the hidden songlines connecting seemingly disparate cultures — from a Gujarati lullaby about sparrows to an Argentine novelist in exile in Paris; from a Brazilian sea goddess to the peacocks roaming freely on Shah’s ancestral farmland. All Roads Lead to Home marks a clear arrival of Shah’s lyrical and compositional voice — one that seamlessly blends global folk music into the language of modern jazz.