“Amazing! What she’s doing is something completely new.” NPR ALL THINGS CONSIDERED
Kavita 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 the Kavita Shah Quintet’s forthcoming album, All Roads Lead to Home, coming in Winter 2026. 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 latest album, All Roads Lead to Home, features a global cast of established New York musicians. Joining her in Virginia are pianist/ keyboardist Leo Genovese (Argentina), guitarist Vinícius Gomes (Brazil), bassist François Moutin (France), and drummer Ferenc Nemeth (Hungary). The band’s performance credits collectively include the biggest names in jazz and world music, including Esperanza Spalding, Wayne Shorter, Milton Nascimento, Miguel Zenon, Lionel Loueke, Rudresh Mahanthappa, Jack Dejohnette, and Lionel Loueke.
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.