Join UC San Diego for our Intersections Concert Series at Park & Market in the Guggenheim Theatre featuring Mamie Minch and Mara Kaye – Beyond the Blues. 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 1930’s 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. Mara Kaye “For too many years, young jazz singers all but ignored the blues, but the attention now being paid to the form by outstanding young artists such as Mara Kaye is proof that things are getting better. This vivacious young Brooklynite studies the classic blues the way the better cabaret singers of her generation studied Sondheim and invests 80- and 90-year-old texts with the force and spirit of her own considerable charisma.” [The Wall Street Journal] ” Imagine a new artist with deep roots. One with the emotional power and swing of Billie Holiday, the deep-blue joys and sorrows of Bessie Smith and always leavened with Brooklyn spice. A joyous phenomenon, she becomes her songs. Her heart is in her music and there is no pretense, no distance as audiences from here to Moscow, Jazz at Lincoln Center and Brooklyn dives have found out. Mara Kaye is one of New York’s great gifts to the world.” [Jazz Lives] “A voice that sounds like Louis Armstrong’s trumpet at a rent party” [ Jimmy Vivino] Her debut single, the forever iconic love song, IT HAD TO BE YOU, off of her recent Ep release with BIGTONE RECORDS features incomparable roots and blues piano legend Carl Sonny Leyland and can be heard on steady rotation on LA’s premier jazz station, KJAZZ 88.1 FM. Her second single, DYSTOPIAN BLUES, an original tune, was featured on ‘The Kelly Clarkson Show’ and performed live on CBS News in 2020. She most recently lent her writing and voice to Brooklyn hip-hop legend AZ’s track, NEVER ENOUGH featuring rapper Rick Ross. She is a proud faculty member of Centrum Foundation’s Voice Works program and a past instructor at their Acoustic Blues Seminar in Port Townsend, WA teaching voice master classes alongside some of the country’s top blues and voice artists. She continues to teach in San Diego and Los Angeles, leading voice workshops and coachings in both cities. After a lifetime in New York, Mara is thrilled to call California home. She will be joined on guitar by expert blues man and San Diego treasure, Nathan James at her Intersections Concert Series Performance at UC San Diego Park & Market: Beyond the Blues with Mamie Minch, her Brooklyn blues sister. Schedule: -Senses Bistro will offer a cash bar & dinner starting at 5 p.m. -Venue doors open at 6:30 p.m. -Performance starts at 7:00 p.m. For more information visit: parkandmarket.ucsd.edu
