Weightless Album Release Concert at Kuumbwa Jazz
An evening immersed in the muse, celebrating the album release of Marya Stark‘s Weightless!
This concert will feature Marya Stark’s well-loved anthems, intimate ballads, and enchanting art-song demonstrating a unique fusion of cinematic world-building woven throughout her most recent release.
Marya will be joined on stage by Grammy Award-winning cellist Barry Phillips, along with the talents of Daniel Berkman, Joshua Penman, and Fa Jun, offering a rich, layered texture bringing these compositions alive in a realm of their own.
”Marya’s persona and performance is extraordinary. There is a clarity, joy, and ecstatic energy she embodies in your her which is rare and valuable. Visceral, courageous, and beautiful, Marya’s music shimmers, dives deep, and ascends… such a rare quality for an artist in these times. She is hunting an expression of her muse in an enchanted forest of her own making, her mystical Broceliande.”
– FAECON
Opening the night is Local Storytelling Pillar, Sirena Andrea.
Giving life to mystic worlds within stories, dances, and universes born of the heart, Marya Stark creates from someplace profound; she makes the invisible visible. Carrier of myth, mystery, and medicine songs. Sometimes melodies manifest from spaces esoteric, others through the untold intimacies of a messy interpersonal relationship. Marya Stark understands and communicates archetypal voices, assigning them their own personalities in her songs; she sings hymns for nature guardians, serenading the great mythic heroes that live inside our collective memory.
In September 2023, Marya released her fifth solo LP, Weightless; an exquisite collection of songs soft and vulnerable, human and dreamy. Something of a departure from 2020’s grandiose Sapphire, on Weightless Stark’s trademark celestial tones swim and soar atop delicate, barebones arrangements, basking in the dark heart of the cello, courtesy of collaborator Barry Phillips.
A baptism in surreality summoned from the depths of political and cultural unrest, Weightless was recorded at the end of 2020 and into the next year, just before Marya moved away from her beloved, longtime homebase of Santa Cruz, CA. Unpacking paradoxes of longing and wonder, reclaiming creativity in a time of chaos, and elegantly side-stepping the oncoming apocalypse, Weightless is Stark’s latest in a string of stirring sonic ceremonies, another lucid excursion through the caverns of the soul.
– B.Getz
Marya Stark is a California-based performing artist. She is a vocalist, composer, producer, and instrumentalist. As a multi-media enchantress, she creates the way she breathes; without choice or hesitation. She is a carrier of myth, mystery, and medicine songs with which she embarks to create a ceremony of the human experience, taking her audience on lucid journeys through the caverns of the soul. Her most recent release Sapphire has seen airplay from NPR and was picked as one of the Top 25 Featured Artists on Echos. This concept album, in collaboration with Joshua Penman, has been described as “One of the most inspiring performances I’ve listened to in 2020. I don’t believe you’ll find another album with the message we so need in these troubled times. A superbly crafted musical adventure that is MOST HIGHLY RECOMMENDED ”- Contemporary Fusion. When she is not on stage or composing music, Marya teaches as a mentor in the art of voice, cultivation of the muse, and song craft. She is the founder of the Temple Of The Muse, leading inner alchemy through immersive transformational expressive arts containers. She is a chaser of waterfalls, a lover of bulletproof coffee, and is a huge fan of the Parade Of Flamingos from BBC’s Planet Earth II.