Mazz Swift via giant steps through a matrix based in the phenomenon placing most of the 7.8 billion of us within 6 or fewer degrees — steps — of each other...
- Steps from Mazz Swift:
I'LL TAKE YOU THERE! ▶
'mātriks / "source" / from "mater", Latin for "mother". We're real mothers for ya!
I'LL TAKE YOU THERE! ▶
- Steps forward by: The Matrix via ↴
Who I Am & Where I Live
- Name: Mazz Swift
- City: Brooklyn, NY
- Country: United States
My Life & Work
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Bio:
Critically acclaimed as one of America’s most talented and versatile performers today, Violin/Vox/Freestyle Composition artist Mazz Swift has engaged audiences all over the world with the signature weaving of song, melody and improvisation that she calls MazzMuse.
Mazz combines elements of classical, folk, rock, jazz, free improvisational music and electronica to create a rich, unique and diverse musical experience. She is a singer, composer and Juilliard-trained violinist who plays electric and acoustic instruments and has, over the years, performed and recorded with a diverse accumulation of artists including Whitney Houston, Perry Farrell, Dee Snider, James “Blood” Ulmer, Vernon Reid, Valerie June, DJ Logic, William Parker, Butch Morris, Jason Lindner, Kanye West, and most recently as string mistress for D’Angelo’s “Vanguard Strings”.
On electric violin, acoustic violin, soulful singing and improvisation, Mazz brings music that speaks directly to your soul. Expect to be transported.
Other performance and career highlights include:
– appearances on the Late Show with David Letterman and the Tonight Show with Jay Leno (Valerie June)
– tour of Africa (Mozambique, Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Cameroon, Senegal) as cultural ambassador for the US Department of State (Matuto)
– travel to Suriname as a cultural ambassador for the US Department of State (The 13th Amendment?)
-featured violinist and singer in “Basetrack Live” national tour, culminating at a weeklong engagement at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival.
– featured appearance in the popular anti-fracking documentary “Dear Governor Cuomo”, in concert alongside Natalie Merchant, Joan Osborne, Citizen Cope, Medeski Martin and Wood, Dan Zanes and many more
– Solo MazzMuse appearance at the National Action Network’s 20th Annual Keepers of the Dream Award Ceremony in 2011, where President Obama gave the keynote address.
– festivals in The United States, Canada, New Zealand, Western and Eastern Europe, and Russia (Valerie June, LaFrae Sci’s The 13th Amendment?, Burnt Sugar, Daughters of Nina, Tamar-kali, Budapest Bar)
– performances in all of the great halls and public arts spaces in NYC (Carnegie, Avery Fischer, Alice Tully, Damrosch Park in Lincoln Center, the Lincoln Center Atrium, Symphony Space, Live at the New York Public Library, BAM Next Wave Festival at the Harvey Theater, Joe’s Pub, Le Poisson Rouge) as well as other well established venues around the world, including The Royal Albert Hall (London), The Queen Elizabeth Hall (London), The Palace of Arts (MŰVÉSZETEK PALOTÁJA, or MUPA – Budapest), and Bimhuis (Amsterdam)
– assisted in conducting workshops and performance with inmates at Sing Sing (NY State Correctional Facility, a Maximum Security State Penitentiary) as a Teaching Artist for Carnegie Hall’s Musical Connections Program
Contact Information
- Email: info@mazzmuse.com
My Media & Markets
- ▶ Buy My Music (downloads/CDs/DVDs): http://mazzmuse.bandcamp.com
- ▶ Twitter: MazzMuse
- ▶ Instagram: mazzmuse
- ▶ Website: http://mazzmusic.com
- ▶ Website 2: http://www.silkroad.org/artists-mazz-swift
- ▶ Spotify: http://open.spotify.com/album/2WiOUz0ZVds8qiqaqkzlZw
More
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Quotes, Notes & Etc.
The Music:
Born of a self described “recovering christian” bisexual woman who as a person of color explored and expressed freely her love of classical music while secretly nurturing a love of rock, metal, punk, pop and electronica, this music is a sonic contradiction – a cognitive dissonance that by the pure fact of its existence, compels a cathartic experience for its performers and audience alike. It is the freedom of Rock and the depth of Soul, brought together with the precision of a classical sensibility.
Clips (more may be added)
The world's artistry via giant steps through a matrix based in the phenomenon placing most of the 7.8 billion of us within 6 or fewer degrees — steps — of each other ...
... a project conceived and built in the fertile, fecund and atavistic ground zero of Bahia, Brazil initially for the discoverability of this singular region's dispossessed genius.
All explained in the window immediately below. Followed — beneath this window — by scores of magnificent artists, each leading to myriads more artists/categories. Inside this window also may be found our Brazilian record store radio, named by British journal The Guardian as one of 10 of the Best Radio Stations Around the World!
IF YOU CAN'T STAND THE HEAT
Brazil is not a European nation. It's not a North American nation. It's not an East Asian nation. It straddles -- jungle and desert and dense urban centers -- both the equator and the Tropic of Capricorn. It absorbed over ten times the number of African slaves taken to the United States of America, and much of its aboriginal population was absorbed into the general population-at-large. Its people have lived under oligarchy, plutocracy, dictatorships and massive corruption, with elements of these still strongly entrenched today.
But!
Brazil has buzz...not the shallow buzz of a fashionable moment...but the deep buzz of a population which in spite of -- or perhaps because of -- the tough slog through life they've been allotted by humanity's dregs-in-fine-linen, have chosen not to simply pull themselves along but to lift their voices in song and their bodies in dance...to eat well and converse well and much and to wring the joy out of the day-to-day happenings and small pleasures of life which are so often set aside or ignored in the European, North American, and East Asian nations.
For this Brazil has a genius perhaps unparalleled in all other countries and societies, a genius which thrives alongside peeling paint and holes in the streets and roads, under bad organization by the powers-that-be, both civil and governmental, under a constant rain of societal indignities...
Which is all to say that if you don't know Brazil and you're expecting any semblance of order, progress and light, you will certainly find the light! And the buzz of a people who for generations have responded to privation at many different levels by somehow rising above it all.
Raimundo Sodré, in a conversation ranging through New Orleans and Harlem and the South Side of Chicago ... and Appalachia and Irish villages and Russian shtetls and the unofficial symbol of Brazil's Bahian-born national music (the pandeiro) almost certainly having arrived in Brazil in the hands of Sephardic Jews (including conversos) fleeing the Inquisition, once remarked: "Where there's misery, there's music!"
A pandeirista on the roof. And it's not just music. And it's not just Brazil.
