NEW VIDEO!
Maud Hixson on Baby Blue Arts Television
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NEW INTERVIEW!
Maud Hixson backstage at Sample Night Live, April 1st, 2009
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"One of Minnesota's best jazz singers"--Mississippi Rag

“I never thought it could happen, but it did: the catalogue of popular music now commonly referred to as “The Great American Songbook” - the music written and popularized between the 20th century's two World Wars - has become "cool" again. Music rejected by the rockers and hippies of the '60s and '70s has been embraced by audiences born too late to have experienced the music (or its later generational rejection) firsthand. The evidence is everywhere, as Rod Stewart, Barry Manilow and Joni Mitchell jump on the Tin Pan Alley bandwagon, releasing their “standards” CDs (with varying degrees of success), and the youngsters who populate the American Idol competitions can’t pass muster unless they spend at least one heavily publicized week under the video-scrutinized tutelage of a time-tested warrior such as Tony Bennett.

It all seems so pat, so formatted: the formula for instant "Golden Age" trivialization by well-meaning but mindless overkill. Even a lifelong lover and student of this music begins to develop a cynical attitude regarding the Johnny-come-lately musical onslaught.

Then, along comes Maud Hixson...and everything makes sense.

Maud Hixson is a Minnesota gal who started singing professionally in 2002, but began storing up a lifetime's worth of musical understanding and sensitivity from her earliest days. Here was a child quietly searching airwaves so full of everything that sounded wrong, for music that was "right". What she eventually found were the voices of Mabel Mercer and Judy Garland...Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald...Fred Astaire and Doris Day. Through the voices, she discovered those wonderful MGM movies (“All-Singing! All-Dancing!”). She heard and fell in love with the works of Gershwin, Porter, Mercer, Ellington, Berlin, Warren, Carmichael, Cahn, Van Heusen, Kern, Arlen, and the others. Because she loved the music, she studied and learned. Because she is a rare talent, we are lucky she did.

By 2001, after suffering years of self-doubt and a crippling case of stage-fright, a shy and inexperienced Maud Hixson had finally developed enough courage to approach various singers and musicians she admired, asking for the opportunity to “sit in”. This is a common practice for beginners, whose sitting-in sessions usually lead these fledglings nowhere, but Maud’s forays won over many of the experienced pros, who immediately came to the conclusion that this young woman was uncommonly gifted. Why? Because the evidence of a lifetime spent absorbing and listening was immediately apparent in her sound...simple as that. Warmth, sincerity, time, understanding...the attributes of the Mercers (Mabel AND Johnny), the Crosbys, the Garlands, the Peggy Lees that she'd been studying all those years were reflected in her singing, blossoming forth from within her attractively articulate, straightforward style.

Since then, in a professional rise that one recent writer has described as “meteoric”, Hixson has become a mainstay with collaborators such as the Wolverines Big Band and their small groups, the JazzMN Big Band, the Twin Cities Hot Club, the Mouldy Figs, and with many of the other top musicians within the Twin Cities club and concert scene: Catch her at the Times, the Dakota, Cue at the Guthrie, The Artist’s Quarter, and local jazz festivals, arts centers and society parties. She has appeared in special concerts, including the Twin Cities Jazz Society's "Tribute to Cahn & Van Heusen", “BingSongs!”, and “Beyond Category: the Ellington & Strayhorn Songbook” and on several live radio and TV appearances. She has become a regular attraction at the lovingly restored Heights Theatre in Minneapolis, where she is frequently called upon to create and present uniquely individual concerts to introduce and accompany the classic movie musicals she so loves.

Maud Hixson’s first commercially-released CD, “Let’s Not Be Sensible!” (a collection of vocal duets co-starring this writer, released in 2005), continues to enjoy a favored status on the playlists of various national cable-TV and internet radio stations, from which the disc’s selections are presented almost daily. Towards the end of 2007 Maud released her solo CD “Love’s Refrain”, a masterful collection of standards and rarities, all informed by Ms. Hixson’s unique and special genius, and solely accompanied by the wonderfully sympathetic glow of Rick Carlson's piano artistry. The critical success of “Love’s Refrain” was immediate and unanimous, as reviewers struggled to find the proper superlatives to describe for their readers the intimately beautiful listening experience that awaited them. One Minneapolis writer summed it up best when he declared “Love’s Refrain” to be, quite simply, “the best homegrown vocal jazz CD of 2007”.

There’s an essence of a lovely sort of “fairytale” quality attached to the Hixson story: The shy kid, who waited years before she was able to muster up the courage to knock on a few doors, has become one of the leading attractions on the Twin Cities’ jazz vocal circuit, and has attracted the admiring attention of influential listeners from as far away as England and New York, where she successfully premiered her first one-woman cabaret show (at the Village’s Duplex) in 2008. Yet, she remains one of the most unpretentious of performers, letting her gorgeous tone and oh-so-satisfying, laid-back sense of diction front for a performer who is otherwise fascinatingly devoid of ego and show-offmanship.

Watch her - listen to her - as she quietly takes over the room. A real "stealth singer". Maud seems to have taken the Cole Porter line in the song "Now You Has Jazz" to heart, as she has found "...a spot, cool and hot..." from which to present her musical persona: the cool, even phrasing and temperament of the post-modern movement meets the subtle yet insistent swing of the original stylists of the '20s, '30s, & '40s. "Cool and hot" indeed.

What Maud Hixson shows the Wanna-Swingers is that this music has a history, a tradition, and a set of standards by which its truest practitioners - both yesterday and today - must be measured. Hers is a quiet voice, but don't let that fool you: in a world of pop diva gate crashers at the "Golden Age's" big bandwagon, Maud's the real thing, adding immeasurably, in her subtle, sweetheart way, to the real rebirth of The Great American Songbook.”

--Arne Fogel, vocalist, radio personality, historian