Maya Solovey

Maya Solovéy was born in Philadelphia, then raised in western Massachusetts after her parents vamoosed with the family to follow an Ashram. “Perhaps it’s odd, but my earliest memories of life are of people dressed in white, dancing around singing Hindu chants, and offering marigolds to an Indian Guru. Kind of funny for a white Jewish girl growing up in the woods of New England.” In her teens she spent time living abroad in Ecuador and Spain, and developed a love of the Spanish language and the people who spoke it. Kicked out of Spain, (that’s another story) she decided that was a perfect time to record her first album, at 17 years old. Playing, working, and traveling through Asia and New Zealand for a couple years, she came back to record her second record at age 19, a piano pop EP with an Indian flair. As soon as it was done, she moved to New York City, where she has resided ever since. Not knowing a single person upon moving there, she worked as a nude model, a belly dancer, and spent many nights discovering the diversity of the NYC music scene, and the people that were creating it. “I spent a good portion of my first year here at the old Bulgarian Bar, on Broadway and Canal Street. It was a wild combination of Eastern European punks, South American rastas, Pakistanis with crisp bright button down shirts who would bend their heads back and dance with chairs in their mouths, and me. Though it was a wild and fun time, it did not of course yield any lasting friendships. My first friend in New York came when a guy I knew in LA told me that his friend Bob wasn’t calling him back. He asked me to go knock on his door and tell him to call him.” This man whose door she knocked on was the famed jazz musician and arranger Bob Belden, and they became friends. “Bob is the first person that introduced me to Bossa Nova and Brazilian music, which has had a huge impact on my life. I began listening to it every day for weeks. At some point, I began hearing songs in my head that I believed needed to be in Portuguese. Of course I didn’t speak Portuguese at the time, which was a small issue, so there was nothing for it except to go to Brazil. I knew Richard Bona (the bass player and singer) and some guys in his band who were down there on tour, so I hopped along their tour bus for a while, till I went up to Salvador, Bahia. There, I squatted in an abandoned hostel with a leaky roof, played the surdo drum and danced in parades, and drank beer in crowded bars where everyone watched the world cup of 2006. Almost everything I had was stolen, but I learned Portuguese, and bought the 7 string classical guitar that I play and write on till this day.” In 2007 she met multi Grammy winning producer Bassy Bob Brockmann. He fell in love instantly with her voice and her music, and they began working on her self-titled trilingual album, “Maya Solovéy”. Its release garnered much acclaim, especially in Europe, where she toured frequently. The album also made it onto the radar of Jason Sigal of WFMU NYC, who named it one of the top 10 albums of 2011, and put it on the Free Music Archive under the creative commons license, where she has since had almost 100,000 downloads. Brockmann and Solovéy went on to produce more music together, and in 2012 she released her EP, Forte. Soon after they teamed up with a few members of MGMT, James Richardson and Hank Sullivant, and Maya’s longtime drummer Robert “Chicken” Burke, of Parliament Funkadelic, and together the band produced her forthcoming album, “Blue Heart”. While this was still in post production, having a moment of holiday inspiration, Maya recorded her solo Christmas album, “Midwinter: On Christmas Eve”, released in November 2014. Constantly working on new projects and collaborations, Maya plays concerts locally and internationally, in addition to writing and recording continuously. She lives in Brooklyn in a plant filled apartment with two cats and her husband, musician Vitor Gonçalves. Maya Solovéy ropes together an unusual combo of humor, sensuality, and an impeccable beauty-- possessed of a voice that is as haunting as it is soothing.