Beyond the Blues with Mamie Minch & Mara Kaye

You are invited to the Intersections Concert Series featuring Beyond the Blues with Mamie Minch and Mara Kaye (08.10.23). Join UC San Diego for our Intersections Concert Series at Park & Market in the Guggenheim Theatre hosted by UC San Diego and New York-based violinist Yale Strom, one of the world’s leading ethnographer-artists of klezmer and Romani music and history.

MAMIE MINCH

Mamie Minch is a longtime staple of New York City’s blues scene. Listening to her sing and play is like unpacking a time capsule of American music that’s been stored in her 1930s National steel guitar for decades and filtered through a modern femme sensitivity.

Mamie’s honest, deep singing voice and old school guitar walloping become a vessel for her toughness and pathos as she delivers timeless performances that can rile, groove, sooth, and understand. If you’ve been lucky enough to see Mamie perform in New York City or somewhere else in the wide world, then you know: there are some things a person is simply meant to do.

After graduating from art school in non-traditional printmaking techniques, Mamie came to New York City where she fell in with a crowd of 78 record collectors, some of whom had contributed rare recordings to the same reissue labels she loved. It was a mind-expanding time for her and she connected with a crowd who were interested in early American music. Soon, she was playing around the city in small clubs with her first band, Delta Dreambox. She met Meg Reichardt (Les Chauds Lapins, Low Down Payment), another guitarist and singer who could sound like she’d jumped off of an Edison wax cylinder, and they founded the four-piece, all-woman harmony group the Roulette Sisters, who played together for a decade and recorded two full-length albums.

In 2008, Mamie released her first solo album, "Razorburn Blues," in collaboration with bassist/engineer Andy Cotton. Through the community of musicians centered around Barbes, Mamie connected with beloved singer/guitarist Dayna Kurtz. They toured together as a duo—two altos performing show-stopping, full-bodied harmony over layers of guitar—and made a 10” record, “For the Love of Hazel.”

MARA KAYE

The blues flows through San Diego. It has for a long time. Sometimes it has been obvious, flowing on the surface, and other times it has tunneled underground from far, far away just to bubble up underneath our feet. But, improbable as it may sound, a continuous stream of one of the greatest branches of American music flows through our city. Sam Chatmon, member of the legendary Mississippi Sheiks and possible author of the blues standard “Sittin’ on Top of the World” spent his summers here in the 1970s playing coffeeshops and folk festivals. Players like Robin Henkel and Tomcat Courtney have gigged constantly here for decades and made themselves into blues institutions. And still younger generations of musicians like Nathan James, Ben Powell, Whitney Shay, and Sarah Rogo have taken up the mantle.

So, when a new blues voice appears in San Diego, it had better stand out. Over the last year, Mara Kaye’s voice has been doing just that. I’ve been watching it happen in real time as I back her up on mandolin and fiddle. When Mara starts singing in bars and dining rooms across the city, folks with their backs turned to the stage turn around. They smile, they applaud, like nice audiences do, but a lot of them become transfixed—like they’re seeing something they can’t believe, or something they didn’t know existed but hoped it did. When she sings, there is a kind of freedom that you can hear and see. And, at some subconscious level, that’s what every audience member wants to see—someone being free.

The blues is a vast tradition, with important and distinctive branches spreading out over more than a century of evolution. Some of us love the old acoustic stuff from the Mississippi Delta; some of us love the later electrified stuff from Chicago. Some of us study it and stay close to the old styles; some of us draw from the old ways to create something new. Mara’s blues are deeply rooted in the old ways but remixed in a way that still feels novel—like some last pocket of the blues that never got explored in the old days, all wrapped up in a ball of 21st-century Brooklyn-bred attitude. (Written by San Diego Troubadour, 2020)

More info: The Intersections Concert is a new interdisciplinary event series, presented by UC San Diego Division of Extended Studies, taking place at the multi-tenant, mixed-use business, arts, and educational office building in downtown San Diego’s East Village. Intersections offers new, diverse takes on traditional ideas and forms in a variety of disciplines, from artistic performances to educational lectures will take place at Park & Market’s state-of-the-art Guggenheim Theatre. Hosted by UC San Diego and New York-based violinist Yale Strom, one of the world's leading ethnographer-artists of klezmer and Romani music and history.