Grammy-Nominated Varijashree Venugopal Talks Shows in Colombia and Florence

Bengaluru fusion artist Varijashree Venugopal has been going places on the back of releasing her debut album Vari earlier this year. Prior to earning a Grammy nomination for singing on British artist Jacob Collier’s song “A Rock Somewhere” with sitarist-composer and vocalist Anoushka Shankar this week, Venugopal was at Jazz Al Parque festival in Bogotá, performing at the end of September.

The artist tells Rolling Stone India, “A very good friend of mine and fantastic musician Nicolas Ospina, who is also part of the festival program team invited us to present Vari live. He watched our premiere at GroundUP Music Festival in Miami and was inspired, and felt that this music will fit into this festival beautifully […] There was no language or cultural barrier to appreciation and enjoyment here. It was just music.” The show marked her first visit to the city as well as to Colombia, where Jazz Al Parque has been held since 1995. “Fortunately, I got half a day after the day of the concert to walk around a little bit and experience beauty of the city,” Venugopal adds.

At the festival, she was joined by bassist Rodner Padilla, keyboardist and synth player Jason Alexandre, mridangam artist Tarun Bangalore (all based in the U.S.) plus bringing India-based collaborators like percussionist Pramath Kiran (a co-producer on Vari with fusion act Snarky Puppy’s bandleader Michael League) and violinist Apoorva Krishna. Venugopal adds, “We had a brilliant sound engineer from the U.S., Dani Munoz, who was also the festival front-of-house engineer, who added so much more magic to our performance. The album’s music was adapted to a live format and directed by Michael League last year, before we went on tour.” In addition to the festival set, Venugopal also conducted a masterclass at the University Sergio art department. “I got to meet a bunch of students who were very curious to know more about the fundamentals of Indian classical music,” she says.

Indeed, these international shows come alongside her India tour promoting Vari, which also brought the likes of League on stage. After Colombia, Venugopal traveled to Florence in Italy where she featured as a soloist for an opera titled Mahabharata – Mantras, Fights and Threnody written by composer Riccardo Nova, a longtime collaborator, on Oct. 20, 2024. The opera also brought in Indian percussionists/soloists B.C. Manjunath and G. Guruprasanna, with German orchestra Ensemble Musik Fabrik and Italian ensemble Icarus.

Venugopal says of the experience, “Nova has been an avid explorer of Indian classical music, its rhythmic and melodic fundamentals, and has studied the form for over three decades. It is fascinating to see how he is adept with a language such as Sanskrit and the Vedas.” Her work on the opera started as far back as 2016, building upon knowing Nova ever since she was a child and was reintroduced by Manjunath. She says about their performance in Florence, at the Zubin Mehta Theatre, “This project has been on the road for the past couple of years, and the music is very different from anything that I have played before – it demands a very high amount of focus, to be able to understand and execute the intricacies of the composition. The concert was very well-received and we were thrilled to receive a six-minute-long applause.”

With more spotlight coming her way for the Grammy nomination in the Best Global Music Performance category, Venugopal perhaps hopes to turn more heads towards her album Vari. She says, “I am currently working on a live performance presentation with video, from Vari. The future plans are definitely to make more original music and to write new songs, which have roots from my land musically and culturally, bringing together many musical cultures from across the world and churning out new sounds.”