On Daughter of a Temple, New York-born, Tamil Nadu-raised singer Ganavya offers up cultural fusion of spiritual jazz, Indian traditions and devotional music that is rooted in collaboration and a free-flowing approach.
Many of the tracks feature notable collaborators. On intro track A Love Chant, the listener gets forty seconds of Ganavya and Esperanza Spalding intoning the word “a love supreme”, the key mantra of John Coltrane’s storied spiritual jazz classic of the same name.
Om Supreme sees Vijay Iyer provide an engaging piano accompaniment for the fluid sax improvisations of Immanuel Wilkins to weave around before Ganavya’s delicate but powerful, almost trance-like vocals come into the mix. At over ten minutes, it’s the album’s lengthiest cut and also its most exploratory.
One of the most delicate and beautiful combinations of instrumentation comes on Prema Muditha, which combines delicate acoustic guitar with sitar, electronic touches and clarinet courtesy of Shabaka Hutchings, while Ganavya delivers her characteristic raga inflected vocals.
Prayer and meditative practice are a continual theme throughout the record. The track Elders Carolina and Wayne is a recording of a prayer that that Wayne and Carolina Shorter made at their home, seemingly with a few embellishments.
The spectre of Alice Coltrane looms large across the set, but most notably in the form of the track Journey In Satchidananda/Ghana Nila, which is an edited down version of a forty-five minute jam by over thirty musicians based around the bass-line from one of Coltrane’s most recognisable prayers.
The real epicentre of the record is the four-part A Love Supreme. Each part is dedicated to a different person. Part one is for Wadada Leo Smith, who recorded a memorable interpretation of part of John Coltrane’s seminal piece in the mid 90s featuring a kalimba. Here Ganavya echoes his work, tapping out the theme on the instrument herself.
The second part features a reading from the Buddhist text ‘The Vimalakirti Sutra’ by the theatre director Peter Sellars, which is a meditation on love. The third part, dedicated to Alice Coltrane herself returns to the original “a love supreme mantra” over a suitably textured and relaxed accompaniment before the final part, which is dedicated to IONE, who is the wife of American composer Pauline Oliveros. IONE delivers a poem that she composed for the piece.
The record features beautiful composition and delicate combinations of instrumentation throughout. It serves as a meditation on the musico-philosophies of Alice Coltrane while and acts as a tribute to the classics of spiritual jazz, while all the time being imbued with a keen spirituality and sense of the devotional.
For some, the use of mantras and the nature of the spiritual intention of the record might be a bit much. Some of the references and touch-stones within the piece seem a bit shoe-horned in. That being said, this is a thoroughly enjoyable record that pays homage to great records past, while offering up its own distinct combinations of style, instrumentation and aesthetics.
