Michelle Marie

The hushed ambiance of guitarist Michelle Marie’s compositions, accented with graceful melodic gestures and vocal caresses, seem to extend from the artist’s soft-spoken personality. The depth of Michelle Marie’s guitar playing seems to blur the line of instrument and person. It is as though the guitar is an extension of her personality. A vast array of intricate, inventive melodic lines flows effortlessly. Michelle Marie’s harmonic sense is highly developed with lots of open and sometimes dissonant bi-tonal progressions. The overall sound is very evocative, otherworldly, and challenging to the listener.” Self-taught and one of the female guitar players on the jazz scene today, Michelle Marie’s original compositions and arrangements create an incredible, impressionistic atmosphere. With influences spanning from the music of Debussy and Ravel to Rock, and Brazilian music, Michelle Marie engages in intimate moments with audiences internationally. With her music, she conveys her sense of the external world: “Sound is music: the rain, the wind, the sky. Music is an expression of life as we see it.”

Michelle grew passionate about music as a child while traveling on musical tours with her mother, the Dominican performer and recording artist Carmen Severino. After failed attempts at convincing her parents to buy her a drum set, she chose to focus on the guitar. She immediately felt connected to the instrument, and taught herself to play.

Michelle initially found inspiration from rock guitarists Jimmy Page, Eddie Van Halen, and Randy Rhoads. However, while riding her bike on a brisk fall evening as a 15-year-old, she discovered where her musical path was leading. Flipping through radio stations on her Walkman, she came across Pat Metheny’s “Are You Going With Me.” Stunned, she had to learn more. She searched for a month, without knowing the name of the song or the artist, until she finally found the recording by humming the theme to a salesman at a record store. Her dedication to the study of jazz had begun.

Her pursuit started by studying privately with legendary pianist Roland Hanna, who held a teaching position at Queens College in Flushing, New York. Prior to Hanna’s mentorship, Michelle taught herself to play guitar, and relying mostly on her ear and intuition instead of formal training. She was troubled by her inability to read music, but Hanna recognized her talent and ambition. Spurred by Hanna’s assertive yet sage teaching style, Michelle excelled at her studies, and it was then that she began to understand her own music in terms of traditional music theory. She realized that the harmonies and rhythms resonating in her mind were unconventional and alluring. Putting her new analytic skills to use, she learned to translate her inner music into a personal composition style. Despite not having set out to earn a degree, she earned a B.A. with majors in both music and media communications, and a minor in journalism. She went on to earn her M.F.A. in jazz performance. Since then, she has performed her sonorous brand of introspective jazz all over the world. In recent years, she has established herself as one of a few female jazz guitarists, performing at Blues Alley in Washington, D.C, at the 2007 Heinekin Jazz Festival in the Dominican Republic, at Italy’s Lucca Jazz Festival, and at such renowned New York City venues as Carnegie Hall, Birdland, and Blue Note.

Beyond her success as a performer, Michelle created Michelle Marie Productions in 2000. The company, which is dedicated to the promotion and support of live jazz and world music, recently founded a small jazz festival in Manhattan’s Upper West Side. The 2008 Michelle Marie Jazz festival presented an evening of music featuring Michelle’s trio, percussion virtuoso Felle Vega, and jazz star Antonio Sanchez’ trio. Also in 2008, Michelle founded MM Records, producing her own albums, as well as those by other artists.