195: Michael Mayo

Michael Mayo is cautious when it comes to labels and categories. He prefers for the language he uses to be “descriptive rather than prescriptive.” It’s easy to understand why: because he defies category in many ways. 

A singer and composer who draws equally from the deep well of jazz vocal language and from neo soul, he’s a modern classic. 

Growing up in a musical family in LA (both of his parents are successful musicians) he was exposed to a life in music from the very start and had two supportive role models. He says that one of the things he most admired about watching his parents at work was the diversity of the projects they did - from gospel to country and everything in between. 

Michael was drawn to jazz - he studied at the New England Conservatory and then the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz (now called the The Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz) - but always had a wide range of influences as well including everything from J Dilla to The Beach Boys. 

But beyond that, he is also a gamer - he loves video games, posts regularly on Twitch and has a band called Shrek Is Love dedicated to the movie Shrek. So he’s open. 

When it came to the more subtle and tender questions of sexual identity, especially in the black community, there were no role models who looked like him. In fact, it would be a long time before he felt that it would be possible to be out as a bisexual black singer and live safely. He tells me, “Traumatized people traumatize people.”

One gets the sense that through musical liberation, Michael found some personal peace as well. He says, “Just because something hasn’t been done before doesn’t mean that it can’t be done.” And he says, “I love living in multiple worlds.” After years of coming to terms with questions of identity both personally and musically, he made his stunning debut solo record Bones.

Here he talks about managing his relationship with social media, which he describes as finding the “balance between staying sane and being seen”, the subtle space between process and performance online, live looping, bi erasure, shedding “Giant Steps”, generational trauma, the “syllables discussion” in jazz singing, tokenism, discernment, and living a life authentically without labels.

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