Tucson native Mitzi Cowell is a singer, songwriter, bandleader, session and performing lead guitarist and bassist, producer, recordist, visionary, visual artist, writer, gardener, and contemplative.
Mitzi’s music is intelligent, revealing, imaginative, playful, and spiritually uplifting, with a rhythmic and aesthetic grounding in blues, R&B, and other American roots music, and the high-bar musicianship of a session player. Imagine Lyle Lovett on mushrooms, or Jane Siberry if she were born in Clarksdale, Mississippi and hired the Meters as a rhythm section.
Mitzi originally learned folk-blues fingerpicking as an adolescent from master Ken Tucker, and honed her electric chops gigging and recording with numerous blues, R&B, classic rock, funk, variety, and original projects. She learned New Orleans-style sensibilities and groove through immersion, gigging and recording in the Crescent City in 1989-90, and brought all it back to the desert to create a style of her own.
Influences? Imagine a blonde-haired, sun-bronzed little girl laying on her back beneath the family’s stereophonic Grundig console taking in a steady aural diet heavy with Big Band swing, Janis Joplin, and Joni Mitchell, and going to sleep at night with an FM transistor radio by her pillow squawking 60s and 70s album-oriented rock. She’s studied formal music theory and structure intensively, and still prioritizes groove, soul, and spirit.