By the time she was in kindergarten, Baltimore native Odelia Mazal had already decided that music was her life’s calling.
“We were coming home from the zoo one day and I heard this Jimi Hendrix song, ‘Foxy Lady,’” recalls the singer-songwriter, thinking to herself, “That’s the thing I need to do.”
Nowadays, Mazal is 19 and recently completed her first semester at the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts in the hometown of The Beatles.
She and her band, the aptly named Odelia, performed a homecoming concert tonight, Jan. 3, at Ottobar, 2549 Howard Street, and released a new single titled “Run” on Jan. 4, at midnight.
Mazal says the band consists of old friends from the Baltimore School for the Arts. Before the Ottobar show, Mazal said audiences would hear a combination of old and new music. The single released is part of a larger recording project she’s working on with a Baltimore-based producer.
“I’m really excited about this project because it’s awesome,” Mazal says. “I think it sounds really great and I’m excited to get new things out there. I feel like every day, I just get closer to where I want to be.”
Currently, Mazal is busy writing and playing indie/alternative rock music. She’s also in the process of creating a band in Liverpool but when back in Baltimore, she performs with Odelia.
“I play guitar and sing, and there’s a drummer, another guitarist, bassist, sometimes backup vocalists and a violist,” she says
Soon after discovering the wonders of Hendrix in her youth, Mazal got her first guitar and took lessons at an afterschool program. At 11, the Krieger Schechter Day School student started studying at School of Rock Baltimore. Eventually, she became a member of the School of Rock’s house band, which performed bi-monthly.
“That was a formative experience,” says Mazal. “I was going through a really hard time after my dad passed away and School of Rock saved me.”
After middle school, Mazal was accepted at the Baltimore School for the Arts, and her experience there “shaped and defined” her. At BSA, Mazal studied jazz and classical guitar, learned to read music and developed skills to pursue a career as a professional musician.
“I think the way I play guitar is heavily informed by the classical technique [learned at BSA],” says Mazal. “Harmonically, [studying] jazz blew up my whole world. I became more open to different sounds. The more I learned, the more I wrote music. It felt like my toolbox was expanding, but it also gave me a lot of room to get weirder and think outside of the box.
“BSA is such a great place for young creative people,” she says. “I think one of the things that’s so great about it is that everyone wants to be there. The teachers want to be there, and the students want to be there. The academic education was really good and fulfilling, and it went hand in hand with the arts.”
After graduation, Mazal headed to college in Liverpool. She chose LIPA, which was founded in 1996 by Paul McCartney and British educator/entrepreneur Mark Featherstone-Witty, for its highly regarded program and because she “really likes an adventure.”
Judaism, meanwhile, plays an enormous part in Mazal’s life. “I literally think about it all the time,” she says.
She credits her Jewish camping experience at New York’s Eden Village Camp, where music was everywhere, for inspiring her to find “her voice as a songwriter” and helping her build a strong Jewish identity.
Jewish family life was also a critical component of Mazal’s upbringing.
“My dad and I would go to Chabad sometimes as a kid and I liked going to the rabbi’s house on Saturday because he was Orthodox and they’d always be banging on the tables, singing their hearts out,” she says.
She and her mother, Rachel Elliott, attend Northwest Baltimore’s Chevrei Tzedek Congregation, where the latter has chanted Kol Nidre for the past couple of years.
“Love and gratitude are such big things in Judaism,” says Mazal. “I’m doing the best that I can, spreading the love, feeling the love as it comes, letting it go through me and back into the world, through my music and everyday interactions.”
For information, visit odeliamazalmusic.com/.
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