Kavita Shah and Cape Verdean Blues

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“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
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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. In September 2023, after seven years of immersing in the traditional mornas and coladeiras of her idol Cesária Évora on the Atlantic island of São Vicente with Évora’s former musical director and virtuoso guitarist Bau, Shah released her latest album Cape Verdean Blues (Folkalist Records) which The Guardian has called “gorgeous” and The New York Times “quietly riveting.”

She has been an artist-in-residence at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France, and the Hermitage Arts Retreat in Sarasota, FL. Shah credits tradition, as embodied in its elders, for grounding her own personal and artistic identity and her vision of music as not just pursuit of virtuosity, but cultural work.