Project Description

Singer Mali Website
Similar Artists: Fiona Apple, Kate Bush, Bjork

Singer Mali is a singer/songwriter, performer/composer based in Boston, MA. For over a decade, she has been the primary songwriter, lead vocalist, and frontwoman for the avant-chamber pop/art rock band Jaggery. Jaggery has garnered national and international praise for their “exquisite, lush . . . audacious aesthetic” (Stereogum). With Jaggery, Mali has released six albums and two EPs and toured nationally. Other Jaggery accomplishments include selection for Boston’s Outside the Box Festival (2013, 2016) and a commission to create a Leonardo da Vinci-inspired song cycle by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2015). As a solo artist, Mali has toured internationally and composed works for dance (Luminarium Dance), experimental theater (Liars and Believers), and in collaboration with painter Steven Bogart (Ten Paintings, Ten Songs). In 2018, she was a featured speaker for Princeton composition Ph.D. students and served on a panel for a New England branch of NPR Music’s Tiny Desk Contest.

News

RELEASES

“Lodestone” (Album)
Release Date: September 22, 2023

“exquisite, lush . . . audacious aesthetic” – Stereogum

Jaggery frontwoman, Mali Sastri, releases her first solo album under the name Singer Mali on September 22. The album “Lodestone” explores humanity’s dichotomy, the destructive and restorative, love and conflict, individual, familial and societal, and the introspective and external struggles that comprise the wide-ranging aspects of those experiences. All of this is done with the inventiveness Mali is known for through blending and juxtaposing the familiarity and accessibility of pop music with elements more often associated with jazz, classical, musical theater, world music, and the avant-garde. Read more

Bio

Singer Mali is a singer/songwriter, performer/composer based in Boston, MA. Her work blends and juxtaposes the familiarity and accessibility of pop music with elements more often associated with jazz, classical, musical theater, world music, and the avant-garde. For over a decade, she has been the primary songwriter, lead vocalist, and frontwoman for the avant-chamber pop/art rock band Jaggery. Jaggery has garnered national and international praise for their “exquisite, lush . . . audacious aesthetic” (Stereogum). With Jaggery, Mali has released six albums and two EPs and toured nationally. Other Jaggery accomplishments include selection for Boston’s Outside the Box Festival (2013, 2016) and a commission to create a Leonardo da Vinci-inspired song cycle by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2015).

Mali trained in the expressive arts modality of Voice Movement Therapy, and her uncanny vocal range exhibits this therapeutically expressive approach to sound-making, moving from “new-age songbird to woman scorned to woodland fairy to blood-thirsty werewolf to sultry lounge singer” (Boston Herald). She has been featured as the lead vocalist for works composed specifically for her voice (2020’s song cycle Having It Out with Melancholy by Michael J. Veloso, 2015’s aria You Will Have The Moon by Mary Bichner). 

As a solo artist, Mali has toured internationally and composed works for dance (Luminarium Dance), experimental theater (Liars and Believers), and in collaboration with painter Steven Bogart (Ten Paintings, Ten Songs). In 2018, she was a featured speaker for Princeton composition Ph.D. students and served on a panel for a New England branch of NPR Music’s Tiny Desk Contest. From 2015–2020, she was the music curator for the annual publication event of Boston University’s award-winning literary magazine, AGNI. Mali was composer-in-residence at Marble House Project in Dorset, Vermont in 2017. Currently, she is gigging with Tony Leva (Jaggery) on bass and Dylan Jack (Jaggery) on drums and preparing to release her first solo album in 2023.

“exquisite, lush . . . audacious aesthetic”

Stereogum

TOUR DATES

Fri June 16th - The Newberry Artistan Market, Saugerties, NY

Sat June 17th - Barbes, Brooklyn, NY

Sat June 29th - First Church, Jamaica Plain (Boston), MA

Fri Sep 22nd - Lodestone album release show, Cambridge Multicultural Arts Center, Cambridge, MA