Album Notes

Mitzi Cowell's music has its feet sunk deep in the warm rich soil of the Delta blues, with its eyes on the stars. Mitzi's debut solo CD 33 is a journey through the territory of her heart, from lush guitar layering to stripped-down slide, with honest lyrics addressing the spiritual to the mundane, always honoring the miracle of American roots music from New Orleans to Hawaii to the Sonoran Desert.

A highly respected player in Tucson's (surprisingly vital) blues scene for many years, Mitzi's emotional, tasteful guitar style was forged in a variety of blues and R&B bands, including Sam Taylor's A Band Called Sam, The Visionary Blues Band, and (during her tenure in New Orleans) the Jay Monque'D Blues Band. Since the mid '90's this Tucson native has been fronting her own musical projects, working to express her unique musical vision through her original songs and sounds.

"There is a sound - a tone - more fundamental than melody, harmony, songwriting, verse-chorus-verse, rhythm-and-lead, that I'm reaching for. I first heard it as an adolescent in the '70's, eloquently expressed by Billy Gibbons in ZZ Top's bizarre spooky rock, and I followed it back to the blues of the Mississippi Delta, and forward to American roots artists like Tucson's own Rainer (if you don't know who he was, check him out right now.) This is the realm of magic, beyond Voodoo, Light making love with the Shadow, accessible through groove, the Sagrado Corazon of the blues (pain conceived in joy / joy birthed in pain), at the precise axis of the crossroads between Spirit and the World. The sound of the experience of being alive. It slithers up into you from between the bricks of New Orleans sidewalks. It rattles your bones and caresses your skin in the Sonoran desert summer night wind. I hack out songs in my spiral-bound notebook and squeeze guitar strings in smoky stinky bars to get back to this elemental place. 33 is my first attempt to calcify some of this experience to share with you. Thanks for listening." - Mitzi

"Cowell was a wonder with her blues guitar, extracting every possible sound out of her strings, riffing and jamming and grimacing with the best of them." - Margaret Regan, Tucson Weekly