Varijashree live with Snarky Puppy at GroundUp Music Festival 2026 in Miami. Photo: Leeanne Drucker
In the last month or so, Varijashree Venugopal has had her music rearranged by the likes of American fusion act Snarky Puppy, Serbian veteran artist Slobodan Trkulja as well as her own band as she treks across Europe, the U.S. and South Africa.
The Bengaluru-based singer-composer and flautist kicked off her travels with a residency at the mainstay jazz venue Blue Note in New York City in January 2026. “I came back and was home for a while. Every chance I get, I go back home,” she says with a laugh.
Venugopal, who released her debut album Vari in 2024 and then put out Vari (The Live Sessions) in 2025, is taking her Carnatic-based jazz-fusion in Kannada and English across the world, wrapping up at the Cape Town International Jazz Festival on Mar. 28 and 29, 2026.
Touring the world and performing with different artists on stage, Venugopal says it’s one of the best ways that “any piece of music” can expand and “exist in different ways.” She also says she’s mostly performing to audiences who have no understanding of Kannada, in places like the GroundUp Music Festival in Miami and at the Silk Road Festival in Belgrade. “They don’t come with any expectations, they’re open to anything, and they welcome all good things. It feels great to see the potential that music and all the ways in which it can be presented, celebrated, decorated and enhanced,” the artist says.
She recalls how someone heard “Teardrop” for the first time and came up to her after the concert to say that they had instinctively shed a tear. “They don’t even know what the lyrics are describing, but then they look it up and realize what the song is about and then it all makes sense to them,” she says of her melancholy song that explores the depth of human emotions.
Varijashree at GroundUp Music Festival. Photo: Leeanne Drucker While she’d been joined by band members Jayachandra Rao and Pramath Kiran on percussion, keyboardist Vivek Santhosh, and violinist Apoorva Krishna for stops in Luxembourg, Budapest and now in Cape Town, the shows in Belgrade and Miami were different.
At the Silk Road Festival, she got to perform with Trkulja and his band, going on to join fellow Bengaluru fusion artist Raghu Dixit (for the first time internationally since they got married in October 2025) for his set. “It was a very big festival, but at the same time, it was very much fun. I played flute on some of Slobodan’s songs as well,” Venugopal says.
Dixit was traveling along with Venugopal, watching most of her concerts. He witnessed the songs shifting shape at each stop, and a metaphor came to mind. Venugopal explains, “He was saying about, ‘It’s like you have a child, and you dress it up differently every day, different outfits, and then you admire. That was a beautiful way to relate to it, because the song is like the artist’s child, no?”
Out in Miami, she performed with the Nu Deco Ensemble on Mar. 12, followed by joining Snarky Puppy’s famed Family Dinner set between Mar. 13 and 15, 2026. “All interpretations were superb, because the Nu Deco Ensemble had a string section and horns, so it sounded really big,” Venugopal recounts. There was also an 11-minute composition by Snarky Puppy bandleader Michael League (who was part of Vari as producer, bassist and synth artist) that Venugopal added Kannada vocals to, a piece commissioned for the concert. With Snarky Puppy, songs ranging from her evocative Kannada songs “Summaniru,” “Teardrop” and “Harivaa Jhari” were performed alongside more agile jazz-fusion tracks like “Ranjani,” “Chasing The Horizon.”
Varijashree with Raghu Dixit at Silk Road Festival in Belgrade, Serbia in February 2026. Photo: Alex Dmitrovic & copyright Balkanopolis CMT These experiments are taking place even as Venugopal has begun working on new ideas and material, although she stresses that she won’t be moving on from the Vari material so much as she’ll be adding newer songs to her set. She says, “Sometime this year, I should start indulging more in that. I’ve been putting on some new ideas. So I want to get into that this year.”
The touring continues regardless, with another album coming up this year as a collaboration with French jazz band EYM Trio, comprising pianist Elie Dufour, double bassist Yann Phayphet and drummer Marc Michel. “We should be getting into the studio and playing a bunch of concerts in Europe and the U.K.” Then, she heads back to New York City to be part of a four-day event called The Rabbit Hole with Snarky Puppy, featuring “a very unique music workshop” and live experience.
Through it all, true to the spirit of an improv-ready artist, Venugopal says she just stays open to everything that comes her way. “I don’t have any expectation… that way, it feels even more special because you did not plan for it, you’re just letting it organically happen. So that is a more fulfilling experience for me, because only things that the universe thinks that I am capable of, or that I fit in… only those things will come my way,” she says.