He grew up in Arizona.
But the moment he opens his mouth to sing, something shifts. Middle-aged men and women who came of age on these songs sit forward in their seats. Some mouth the words. Some just close their eyes.
A classroom that happens to be a concert
What Navaneeth does on stage is genuinely hard to categorise. It is part performance, part music lecture, and part cultural archaeology. He does not just sing the songs. He takes them apart, explains where they came from, and puts them back together in ways that make the audience hear them differently, according to TOI.
In one segment, he sings the classic Malayalam song Innenikku Pottukuthaan Sandhyakal Chalicha Sindooram, pauses mid-performance, and explains to the audience that the composition is rooted in Miya ki Malhar, a Hindustani raga.
“Miya ki Malhar is a Hindustani raga. It’s very commonly sung in concerts. But you would never have thought of hearing that in a Malayalam film song,” he tells them, according to the Times of India. In another segment, he traces the journey of composer Salil Chowdhury across languages, demonstrating how a Bengali composition became the foundation for a Malayalam film song from 1968. The melody travelled across regions, changed its language and context, but kept its emotional core intact. Navaneeth makes that journey audible.
Kerala keeps calling him back
In a relatively short time, Navaneeth has become a recurring draw for the Bank Employees Arts Movement Ernakulam, known as BEAM, which has brought him to Kochi for three consecutive years.
BEAM president K S Raveendran told the Times of India that the demand came entirely from audiences. “After Navaneeth’s first performance, people demanded that we invite him again. People even started buying our annual membership just to attend his concert. It is due to the craze for his concerts that we conducted his events three years in a row,” he said.
The recognition has not stopped at applause. Navaneeth has received the 49th Kerala Film Critics Award for Best Male Playback Singer for his rendition of Vidaparayam from the film Hridayapoorvam, and the Swaralaya-Devarajan Master Award in 2025.
Music historian Ravi Menon, speaking to the Times of India, said the phenomenon has genuinely fascinated him. “Navaneeth is a self-made musician, highly influenced by Devarajan Master, who died around the time he was born. Yet Navaneeth studied compositions that are over 50 years old, analysing and understanding them, which is no small feat,” he said.
The Arizona home that ran on Kerala time
Navaneeth was born in the US to parents from Kannur in Kerala. His father, Unnikrishnan Vadakkan, is an engineer at a semiconductor firm. His mother, Priya Vannarath, is a paediatrician. They migrated to the US in 1998.
Growing up, the family home ran on Kerala time in almost every other sense. Cassettes and CDs of Indian classical music, Malayalam film songs, devotional recordings and folk traditions filled the house. Those recordings were Navaneeth’s first music library.
He jokes, as reported by the Times of India, that as a child he could read English before he could comfortably speak it, because life at home revolved around Kerala. He applied the same discipline to his pronunciation in Malayalam, Hindi and Bengali, listening to recordings on repeat until each syllable felt right.
The signs of an unusual talent came early. His father told the Times of India that Navaneeth began singing at one and a half years old and could identify songs from their opening notes. By the time he was three, he had memorised more than 2,000 Malayalam, Tamil and Hindi songs.
“By hearing the initial sounds of a song, he could identify the music. That was when we realised he was different from most other children,” Vadakkan said.
His early fascination with instruments was equally striking. “The first name he learnt to write was that of violinist Balabhaskar, not his own,” his father recalled.
Neither parent had a musical background. “We just played music at home. Nothing more than that,” Vadakkan said.
Training that connected two worlds
Navaneeth’s parents enrolled him in Hindustani classical music lessons at the age of four. Carnatic training followed later. But for him, classical music and film songs were never separate disciplines. Every raga he studied sent him back to familiar film melodies with sharper ears, and he began to notice how composers had embedded complex classical structures inside songs that millions could hum without recognising the craft underneath.
His concerts, despite their depth, are not heavily scripted. Vadakkan told the Times of India that in a three-hour performance covering roughly 120 songs, Navaneeth prepares only about ten in advance. The rest live in his head. “He can talk about music for days without preparation,” his father said.
Not just nostalgia
One of the more refreshing things about Navaneeth is what he refuses to do. He does not perform old songs simply because they make people feel nostalgic. He performs them because he believes they reward careful listening, that every composition from that era carries lessons in melody, poetry, orchestration and imagination that still hold up.
He is also clear that the past does not have a monopoly on quality. While he reveres composers like Devarajan Master, M S Baburaj and Salil Chowdhury, he speaks with equal enthusiasm about contemporary composers such as Sushin Shyam and Rex Vijayan, and about Kerala’s thriving independent music scene.
What comes next
Navaneeth recently graduated in data science from New York University and is set to begin a full-time career in the field next month. Music, he says, is not going anywhere.
He plans to go deeper into semi-classical, folk and regional traditions, including North Kerala forms like Theyyam music and Pulluvan Pattu, while drawing connections between different musical styles from across India and beyond.
“In every form of music there’s something to learn from. So, I want to explore that, and go deeper into that and understand the links between different forms of music. That is something I’m very passionate about. That is my dream, to do that more and more at a grander scale,” he told the Times of India.
For someone who grew up in Arizona and learned Malayalam from cassette tapes, that dream does not sound far-fetched at all.
(With TOI inputs)
