Alex Maryol Press Kit
          www.alexmaryol.com

 

"Despite his youth, Maryol writes and plays with a rare maturity and confidence."
-Genevieve Williams, Blues Revue

"The most impressive guitarist of the talented young crop of Santa Fe players . . . Alex Maryol is uncommonly advanced on his ax, showing both great technical ability - the guy can wail - and the equally important ability to restrain himself where appropriate . . . one to watch in the coming years."
-Thirsty Ear Magazine

" . . . his music is really gonna twist some heads off."
-Steve Terrell, Terrell's Tune-Up

"For those not familiar with Maryol, this young man and his four-piece band have been barnstorming the Southwest raising quite a few eyebrows with, not only Alex's uncommonly accomplished guitar playing, but with their blues rockin' tightness that all the words in the world couldn't do justice to.  Show up and discover for yourself."
-G. Douglas Seitsinger, Telluride Daily Planet

"Alex's playing is graceful, honest, and powerful, and this is one performance that should be on everyone's 'must see' list."
-Albuquerque Alibi

" . . . a fine young talent, who never fails to electrify the crowd."
-KBAC Radio


Alex Maryol's Accolades
♦ Sonny Boy Blues Society "Battle of the Blues Bands (Helena, AR - 2002) - 1st Place Winner
♦ New Mexico "MIC" Awards (2001) - Best Musical Production Blues
♦ Telluride Blues & Brews Festival Acoustic Blues Competition (Telluride, CO - 2000) - 2nd Place Winner

BIOGRAPHY
  A native of Santa Fe, New Mexico, Alex Maryol is one of the region's most promising musicians and songwriters.  At 18, Maryol released his debut CD - They Call Me Lefty - and at 19, he was playing an average of five nights a week at the area's most popular bars and clubs.  By the age of 20, Alex had played at New Mexico's acclaimed Thirsty Ear Festival along with several of his heroes - Alvin Youngblood Hart, Corey Harris, Kenny Brown, and Cedric Burnside.  After his performance, Maryol garnered the attention of the international media, including Austria's Concerto magazine.
  Maryol, who started playing the guitar when he was seven, got into playing the blues much later.  He'd been hearing the likes of Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, and Johnny Rivers in his father's company growing up, and as a freshman in high school, he discovered the Rolling Stones.  As Maryol points out, "Really all modern music - rock, funk, all of it - can be traced back to the blues."  Exploring these root musicians - Robert Johnson, R.L. Burnside, Stevie Ray Vaughan - inspired Maryol's own sound - high energy electric blues rock, played in the form of Maryol's original compositions.
  Alex Maryol's latest album - Make Everything Alright - was released in June 2003.  It testifies to his continuing originality - taking the roots of blues and twisting them into a sound all his own - southwest rock, acoustic groove, and pure energy.


Alex Maryol
Make Everything Alright
 By Genevieve Williams, "Blues Revue", November 2003
  The second album from Alex Maryol, a bluesy singer/songwriter who's made a splash in his home state of New Mexico, brims with youthful energy and vigor - as one might expect, given that it was recorded by an artist just into his 20s.  Despite his youth, Maryol writes and plays with a rare maturity and confidence.  Having started on guitar at age 7, Maryol's chops are well-honed; the opening track, with its big, crunchy style and wide-open sound, is enough to establish that.

Alex Maryol
Make Everything Alright
By Gary Miller, blueswax.com, November 2003
  Let me tell you, these cats cook! This CD is a real shocker. You may get real purist in your attitude about young players in the Blues, but when you hear Alex Maryol do "God Don't Ever Change," by Blind Willie Johnson, you will lose that uppity stuff immediately. Maryol proves he has the feeling, attitude and sensibility that it takes to sing and play the Blues. You better like your music raucous 'cause that's what you're gonna get here. I can't think of a comparison except Walter Trout and the North Mississippi All Stars fighting it out. Maryol is the winner on this one. This is a striking bunch of music. 
 www.blueswax.com


Alex Maryol
 By Max Friedenberg, New Mexico CultureNet Artist Showcase  www.nmculturenet.org
  Alex Maryol is gifted musician and prolific songwriter from Santa Fe who manages his own career and is currently working on a second album. He’s played the “Thirsty Ear Festival” and shared stages with blues heavy hitters Corey Harris, Joe Ely and Otis Taylor. He plays his own sizzling electric and smoldering acoustic blues tunes an average of twenty nights a month at Northern New Mexico’s busiest night spots. The release of Alex’s debut recording, They Call Me Lefty, has received critical attention and has insured a strong following at both the solo and band performances.

I caught up with him at my studio as he had just returned from the renowned South by Southwest Music Festival in Austin, Texas. “I didn’t go to play,” he explained as he walked in, “I went to check out some of the acts and go to the panels. There are all these great workshops about the industry, contacts to make and what-not.”

He plunked his satchel on the floor, phone on the table, and himself onto a short stool. He pulled out a notebook and quickly looked over some “song doodles” that “came to [him] on the way over” to my house.

“I would love to play SXSW sometime,” he continued as he closed his notebook, “but you’ve got to apply for that and I didn’t feel I had all the right representative material; that’s why I’m headed back into the studio.” His impressive self-produced debut release They Call Me Lefty, was recorded winter 1998 and into 1999 at Santa Fe’s Stepbridge Studios.

Smiling, he admitted he “essentially stole” his friend and seasoned blues player Jono Manson’s band to back him up on the album because he didn’t have regular players. “[They Call Me Lefty] is good for a debut and I like it, but it doesn’t really represent what I’m doing now.”

I asked Alex exactly how he got to “now” and he began to offer up a few stories. He detailed how his dad used to play a lot of Chuck Berry in the car and that his mom bought him a classical guitar at seven, but I suspected the roots went deeper. I asked him if I could perhaps do a little of my own research into his past. I asked him if I could call his parents.

Alex’s folks, Jim and Ann Maryol, own and operate Tia Sophia’s, a popular restaurant among locals and tourists in the heart of Santa Fe. It’s been a fixture since 1975, and ever since Alex’s career took off, something of a shrine as well; the walls are decorated with photos of, and press about Alex.

I called the Maryols at home, Ann answered, and I introduced myself. “Alex was probably three or four months old when he would try to pick himself up in his crib to listen to music,” she volunteered. “When he was three-and-a-half I sent him to Miss Gillian’s Yamaha Music School for piano...he was very shy. Um, he’s over that now.”

Obviously, Alex didn’t stick with piano so I pressed for an explanation. Ann related that she and Jim did indeed buy him a buy him a guitar when he was seven but that his first guitar teacher, Robert Gonzales, reported that Alex didn’t practice much. Nonetheless, Alex played “for the family at Christmas and he never stopped after that.”

Alex flirted with Rock and Roll in his early teens and remains a serious fan, but fell in love with the blues early on as he realized that, “Rock and Roll at the core - in its heart - is the blues. Look at Led Zeppelin or the Stones.”

In 1997 Alex met Thomas “Blues” Uhde, known locally as Tommy Blues, a harmonica player whose acrobatic melodies are featured on They Call Me Lefty, “and began to jam and gig with him.” Alex has collaborated with diverse players since, but the current line-up includes drummer Mike Chavez and Jose Romero on bass; Tommy, ever an inspiration to Alex, plays with the trio when he’s available.

The Alex Maryol Trio performed at The Paramount in Santa Fe March 2nd and won me over with their solid, commanding sound. “The trio is really a live band and so I’d like to go back to the studio in record live instead of tracking parts separately so we can get the vibe of the performance on tape,” he told me as if he’d just decided. “I’d also like to lay down some more solo acoustic numbers on this one too,” he added and promised the new release, likely an EP, by July this year.

According to Alex, there’s no right or wrong way to write a song. He said he comes up with tunes, or rather; the tunes come to him before he writes the lyrics. “Ideas come all the time…they’re just like sketches or doodles at first but then I go back and develop them…some of them die, some of them live.”

When asked if this is what he wanted to do the rest of his life, Alex confided, “I think this is what I was meant to do. I feel every person has a calling, a place in life no matter who they are... I believe music is what I'm here to do.”


Success Comes Slowly to SF Blues Artist Maryol
By Joseph Ditzler, Albuquerque Journal, June 28, 2003
     Fans of local nightclub blues singer Alex Maryol can ease their worried minds. The 21-year-old songwriter has a second album in the works, and, with the right mojo, it could be released soon. Expect a more mature Maryol and a smooth production overseen by music legend Kenny Passarelli.
    "I have high hopes," said Maryol, who slid recently into a booth at his parents' San Francisco Street restaurant, Tia Sophia's. "I just want to give people who like my stuff something to listen to that's a little more updated."
    He's been shopping the disc, titled "Make Everything Alright," around to interested labels, he said. If no takers emerge, Maryol said he'll release it on his own Flash Tone Music label, on which his "They Call Me Lefty" came out in 1999.
    "That's the nice thing about being independent," he said. "I'm completely in control of everything. The downside to it is I'm not completely efficient and organized."
    The new disc stays true to tradition but also steps away from traditional blues forms into chunky riffs, blow-out guitar solos and arching harmonica accompaniments. It's got a little North Mississippi, a little funk, a little rock 'n' roll.
    "I think it'll do as well, but it's definitely been a worry in my mind. I hope to live up to 'Lefty' a little bit, 'cuz, y'know, it did really well," he said.
    Maryol said he sold about 3,000 copies of "They Call Me Lefty," an album that drew notice to the Santa Fe youngster's guitar virtuosity and also earned some airplay.
    "If I moved 20 of them, I would have been happy," he said.
    The Alex Maryol Band, comprised of Jose Romero on bass, drummer Mike Chavez and Thomas "Blues" Uhde on harmonica, played the compositions on "Make Everything" nearly two years before recording them at Stepbridge Studios in Santa Fe, Romero said.
    "We want people to notice this is a tight band they're hearing, we've played these songs inside and out," he said. "It has a lot of powerful guitar licks and chops that really stand out."
    Romero said fans at the eight to 10 gigs the band plays around town per month are eager for the new disc. With the new tunes already in their repertoire, the buzz is already working.
    "People buy the first album thinking they're getting the whole deal. People who've never heard us are asking 'Do you have a CD?' '' Romero said.
    Producer Passarelli said he expects good things from Maryol's next CD, and big things from Maryol himself. As a bassist, Passarelli has recorded, toured or both with Joe Walsh, Elton John, Hall and Oates, Dan Fogelberg and Crosby Stills & Nash and released his own recordings as well. Another up-and-coming bluesman he has produced, Otis Taylor, won a recent W.C. Handy award for best new artist.
    Passarelli, of Santa Fe, met Maryol through a common acquaintance and took Maryol under his wing, he said.
    "He's somebody I really believe in; I think he's gonna be a big star," Passarelli said. "He has all the makings of somebody who can handle success. I see it all in him, and I don't want to see him make the mistakes a lot of artists make."
    Success has come to Maryol in increments. Every step, he said, has been forward so far. Not giant leaps, but uniformly forward and so far none backward. He's opening for Bo Diddley, played a Telluride blues festival and has a full slate of summer gigs lined up, including the Madrid and Thirsty Ear blues festivals. The band is still at home at the Cowgirl in Santa Fe, as well.
    In May, the band brought home from Helena, Ark., the first place award from the Sonny Boy Blues Society talent show. The society holds the three-day-long King Biscuit Blues Festival there each year. As first-prize winners, the band earned the opening-act honors on the festival main stage Oct. 10.
    "I thought they were very good," said Bubba Sullivan, owner of Bubba's Blues Corner record shop and the contest emcee. "They were the best band and the appropriate band won. You could see they were dedicated."
    An earlier trip to the Mississippi River country, this one to Memphis, Tenn., and Oxford, Miss., spawned material that found its way into some of Maryol's songs on "Make Everything Alright," he said.
    Before heading to Oxford to hear R.L. Burnside and Kenny Brown play, he visited Graceland, where he marveled at shag-carpeted walls, then jammed with street musicians in the Beale Street park.
    "I was walking down the street and I heard this voice, I thought it was like a John Lee Hooker CD being played out of a club and I turned a corner and it was this big, black dude. And I was, like, I really wanted to play with him, so I bought him a beer, and I gave him one of my CDs and I didn't have to ask, he's like, 'Oh, do you want to sit in?' ''  "I was like, sure, yeah, of course!"
    Between bites of huevos, Maryol stopped to sign autographs for three very young girls and hand out a copy of "They Call Me Lefty." Returning to the blues, he said the songs on "Make Everything Alright" come from life, just as those on "Lefty."
    "I opened up a little bit more, so my friends tell me. It's definitely more personal," he said.
    One song, "Penny in My Pocket," starts out with the words, "I've got a penny in my pocket and shotgun to my head." Dark, admittedly, but not hopeless, Maryol explained.
    "It sounds like a suicidal thing, but what it really is is a metaphor for, like, in the middle of all hopelessness, you still have a penny's worth of hope somewhere inside you," he said. "I guess that's the thing I'm trying to realize with my music and in my music. That even when things suck, everything's OK. There's nothing to be worried about, ultimately."

SBG Productions
P.O. Box 2966
Telluride, CO 81435		 Ted Wilson
(970) 728-8037 ext. 105
ted@sbgproductions.com