Singer Mali is a singer/songwriter, performer/composer based in Boston, MA. Her work blends and juxtaposes the familiarity and accessibility of pop music with elements more often associated with jazz, classical, musical theater, world music, and the avant-garde. For over a decade she has been the primary songwriter, lead vocalist, and frontwoman for the avant chamber pop/art rock band Jaggery. Jaggery has garnered national and international praise for their “exquisite, lush . . . audacious aesthetic” (Stereogum). With Jaggery, Mali has released six albums and two EPs, and toured nationally. Other Jaggery accomplishments include selection for Boston’s Outside the Box Festival (2013, 2016), and a commission to create a Leonardo da Vinci-inspired song cycle, by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2015).
Mali trained in the expressive arts modality Voice Movement Therapy, and her uncanny vocal range exhibits this therapeutically expressive approach to sound-making, moving from “new-age songbird to woman scorned to woodland fairy to blood-thirsty werewolf to sultry lounge singer” (Boston Herald). She has featured as the lead vocalist for works composed specifically for her voice (2020’s song cycle Having It Out with Melancholy by Michael J. Veloso, 2015’s aria You Will Have The Moon, by Mary Bichner).
As a solo artist, Mali has toured internationally, and composed works for dance (Luminarium Dance), experimental theater (Liars and Believers), and in collaboration with painter Steven Bogart (Ten Paintings, Ten Songs). In 2018, she was a featured speaker for Princeton composition PhD students, and served on a panel for a New England branch of NPR Music’s Tiny Desk Contest. From 2015 – 2020, she was the music curator for the annual publication event of BU’s award-winning literary magazine, AGNI. Mali was composer-in-residence at Marble House Project in Dorset, Vermont in 2017. She is currently preparing to release her first solo album, Lodestone, on 9/22/23.
