GANNA
JazzLab, Sunday 8 March 2026
By Des Cowley
Ukrainian singer Ganna Gryniva, who performs under the name GANNA, personifies an expansive and sweeping approach to global music, as intent on exploring her Ukrainian folk roots, as she is dabbling in electronica, indie pop, Latin grooves, West African kora music, or pushing into improvised territory. Having grown up near Kyiv, she moved with her family to Berlin – where she still resides – forming her first band, the GANNA ensemble, in 2014. Four albums in, spearheaded by her latest, the masterful Utopia (2025), she’s a regular fixture on the international festival circuit, scooping up new fans in thrall to her extended vocal techniques and experimental take on folk traditions.
For her sold-out Melbourne appearance – her second following her debut at JazzLab in January 2025 – GANNA unveiled her current solo project, melding her stark, unembellished voice with live loops, electronics, and synths. It makes for a heady brew, integrating rhythmic and percussive backdrops, ethereal electronic washes, dreamy effects, and vocal acrobatics. Of course, if it was just technical prowess on display, I’d be less enraptured; but trust me, there’s a whole lot more going here.
Just a few short weeks back, a lamentable milestone was passed, four years since Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022, outpacing even the longevity of the First World War. For most of us, the reality on the ground is unimaginable. GANNA has long been committed to researching and recasting the time-worn folk heritage of her homeland, and the events of the past four years have merely compounded the urgency and need to preserve and celebrate her ancestral stories. The songs that make up Utopia – generously sampled on the night – are heavily indebted to her Ukrainian roots. She has said of the album: “Hope is sometimes the only thing that keeps us going. The Ukrainian folk songs are part of my Utopia: a space for my country and to help make my culture visible.”
Standing behind her synths and electronic equipment, GANNA began by unleashing swirling torrents of vocal sounds – chants, trills, tongue-clicking, yells – seamlessly merging these, via loops, into choir-like choruses, underpinned by beats, rhythmic patterns, percussive effects. The upshot was intense and visceral, a passionate cri de coeur for her homeland, and a celebration of the ancient wisdom found in the stories and folk songs of her childhood.
Her songs – sung in her mother tongue – touched upon love, harvests, village life. Frequently, her lyrics stem from interviews she carried out during her research travels to Ukraine in 2018, meeting with folk singers and troupes, hearing stories, immersing herself in Ukrainian literature and poetry.
Her JazzLab performance coincided with International Women’s Day, and she especially paid homage to the mothers and grandmothers who today hold families together, while husbands and sons are away at the frontlines. Her songs venerated these strong women, including her own grandmother, of whom she has said: “My grandmother was always the head of the family.”
GANNA described her adaptations of folk songs, like ‘Mermaids’ and ‘Malanka’, as ritual songs, peopled by sundry ghosts and water spirits. ‘Mermaids’ recollects the all-night dances, held in the village of Hayronshchyna near Kyiv, in which participants welcome mermaids and spirits in the belief they’ll stay away for the remainder of the year; while ‘Malanka’ takes its inspiration from an age-old festival, celebrated on 13 January each year, that involves music, theatre, and rites of renewal. With these ‘ritual’ songs, GANNA showed she can respect tradition, while concurrently giving them a radical electronic overhaul.
At times, GANNA’s incorporation of heavy beats conjured the spirit of late-night DJ raves (at one point she had half the audience on their feet, dancing, a rare sight in a jazz club). At other times, she pursued a more mesmeric or ambient spin, especially by her judicious use of the Guitaret, invoking the gentle sounds of a thumb piano, or African kalimba. More than anything, though, it was GANNA’s voice that left us in astonished awe, with its all-embracing capacity to soar and fly, to dip and curve, to emulate bird-song, cries of pain, deep-hearted mystery.
Her final song broached the current state of Ukraine. How do we speak to these things, how do we even ask after our neighbour, she lamented? She recounted having recently asked how a friend was, only to be told: “I lost my brother last week.” GANNA identified a key strand of her music as: “To express the unspeakable.”
Throughout her performance, GANNA generated an intimacy rare in contemporary music, her voice and lyrics ringing with clarity, whether whisper or shout, infusing the space with warmth and heart. With their heady mix of avant-garde and pop, her songs carry shades of Björk, but stronger links can be traced to the minimalist stylings of Meredith Monk, the acclaimed iconoclast whose techniques extended the possibilities for voice. GANNA is barely mid-career, and the opportunity to hear what she produces in the coming years is an enticing one, something worth getting excited about.
P.S. A brief shout-out to Mia Barham, the Naarm-based musician who provided support on the night. Her solo half-hour, fusing flute, sax, and synths, drew upon her recent journeys to the Artic Circle, and to Canada, building on the field recordings she made there – the tranquil sounds of water and ice – alongside her experience of the dazzling son et lumiére of the Northern Lights. Her music proved exploratory, hypnotic and ambient, suggesting the vast emptiness of ice-cold landscapes, ocean currents. A relative newcomer to Melbourne’s improvisation scene, Barham is a talent to watch.