Australian Music Centre | Breaking sound barriers

Event Details

A “breathtakingly beautiful” new voice in contemporary music (Downbeat Magazine), vocalist/composer 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 in-depth knowledge of diverse cultural traditions into her jazz-based repertoire, placing eclectic songs, instruments, and artists in dialogue with one another.

Raised in Manhattan, she studied classical piano from age 5 and performed regularly at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center from age 10 as a member of the Young People's Chorus of NYC. Shah has performed at venues and festivals around the world, including the Kennedy Center, Blue Note, Jazz Standard, Iridium, NJPAC Winter Jazz Fest, Xerox Rochester International Jazz Festival, Art Basel Miami, Duc des Lombards, Vermont Jazz Center, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Rubin Museum, and National Jazz Museum in Harlem. 

Kavita has a Master's in Jazz Voice from Manhattan School of Music, where she studied with Theo Bleckmann, Peter Eldridge, Steve Wilson, and Jim McNeely and holds a B.A. from Harvard College in Latin American Studies, receiving the Cultural Agents Thesis Prize and the Kenneth D. Maxwell Prize in Brazilian Studies for her ethnomusicology research on contemporary Afro-Brazilian music and politics.

Featured non-Australian music: Kativa Shah

Further information for this event is available online at the event's website

Featured artists

• Jazz/improvisation by Steve Newcomb