Maysa, Vocal and Smooth jazz Artist
This week’s Featured Artist is a modern-day jazz vocalist, and is well known around the world by fans of smooth/contemporary jazz for her work as a solo artist, and as a member of the British band Incognito. Early in her career she was a member of Stevie Wonder’s female backup group Wonderlove, and during that same period performed as a vocalist on the Jungle Fever soundtrack and on numerous television shows. Meet singer/songwriter and record producer – Maysa
Born in Baltimore, Maryland, USA
Genre: Jazz, R&B, Soul
Maysa Leak knew by the time she was six that she would be a musician. Unlike many R&B singers, Maysa wasn’t raised in the church, so her musical style wasn’t shaped from the choir loft. Her early influences were her mother’s favorite soul records. “My mother played so much music in the house,” she laughs. “We woke up to it. We went to sleep with it. We celebrated to it. We ate food to it. Music was every day, all day long. We had this big ole console record player. To wake us up in the morning, she didn’t come to our room and say get up. She would play the Gap Band’s `Get Up Early in the Morning’ song and she’d blast that so loud that you had no choice but to get up or have a headache.” “I was six years old when my mom took me to see Purlie,” she recalls. “When Melba Moore came on stage and sang her heart out, I knew at that moment I wanted to make people feel the way she made me feel.”
When she was about 14, Maysa’s uncle took her aside and turned her on to jazz. “I used to listen to Janet Jackson and all of that and he wanted me to stop listening to pop music,” she recalls. “He told me to turn on PBS one night and that’s when Al Jarreau was on and I was like oh my God! What is that? I want to do that!” She then started studying jazz masters ranging from Dianne Reeves and Carmen McRae to John Coltrane and Stanley Turrentine. “I listened to them to get a different sound.,” she adds. “I think all of them are in me somehow.”
The songbird studied music at Morgan State University before heading to California to North Hollywood to join Wonder’s Wonderlove group, with whom she performed for a year, appearing on the Jungle Fever soundtrack and such television shows as Oprah and The Tonight Show.
Biographical information courtesy of Maysa Leak; for more reading see link below.
http://www.maysa.com/biography-2.html
