The Cedar Presents
MARIA MAZZOTTA
Sunday, January 18, 2026 / Doors: 7:00 PM / Show: 7:30 PM
All Ages
Seated
$25 Advance, $30 Day of Show
*For Cedar Presented shows, a $4 facility fee is included in the ticket price (Ticket fee info here).
This is a seated show with general admission, first-come-first-served seating. The Cedar is happy to reserve seats for patrons who require special seating accommodations. To request access accommodations, please go to our Access page.
For Cedar presented shows, online ticket sales typically end one hour before the door time, and then, based on availability, tickets will be available at the door. Tickets purchased at the door will include a $1 Eventbrite fee.
ABOUT THIS SHOW
Maria Mazzotta spent 15 years with the Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino, performing the Pizzica music of Southern Italy at global music festivals and theaters around the globe. Maria is one of the most acclaimed voices on the Mediterranean music scene today. Her voice is memorable and her performances intensely passionate. This show will be a highlight of our 2026 concert calendar.
Listen
“La Furtuna” video courtesy of MARIA MAZZOTTA’s official YouTube channel.
MARIA MAZZOTTA
Photo by Annamaria Lucchetti
Maria Mazzotta's visceral interpretation meets the electric sounds of Post-Rock, creating an original and profound blend. The title of the new album is Onde (Waves), an album in which Maria Mazzotta has chosen for the first time in her twenty-year career to express the outspoken and vital force of peasant tradition through contemporary instruments with a rural flavor to its essence.
Since 2020, the year her solo debut album Amoreamaro was published, she has covered thousands of kilometers nonstop performing in over 200 concerts in more than 25 countries across Europe, Latin America, and Asia. Through this traveling, she has gained an awareness of how she is able to push towards the true expression of her own experience of folk music with courage and freedom. It is a woman’s journey of traveling from one great European capital to another such as from Paris to Barcelona, all the way to some major world metropolises like Jakarta and Bogota, all the while presenting herself on stage accompanied by all her fragilities and strength in equal measure.
Onde is the result of encounters and influences and of emotions and reflections on modern society. The song “La Fortuna” (“Luck”) opens the album and is the one in which Maria Mazzotta's trio affirms its sound and message. An arrangement steeped in Psychedelic Rock was created for this folk song from the Salento tradition, evoking the sensation of waves rolling in and gaining force until an all-out storm at sea forms. The verses tell the story of encountering “luck”, a luminous and desperate figure who cries in the open sea for the wrongs and injustices suffered by those who cross it, and he faces the waves in search of a better destiny and instead finds his tomb. The sea has become a cemetery of sinking boats and ships not permitted to dock in ports. Accustomed as we have become by now to these macabre news stories, to the point that we are almost used to them, this song, however, shouts out a message of humanity, acceptance, and sharing.
The invitation to share is still protagonist in “Sula nu puei stare” (“You cannot be Alone”), with the participation of the first of two international guests: Bombino, an exceptional guitarist and singer-songwriter from Niger and one of the major exponents of the global success of “Desert Blues”. Tracing a route from Salento, with the classic expression of song and dialect, to Andalusia, with the rhythm strongly inspired by the Flamenco Bulería style, the trio arrives in North Africa where the rhythm remains as always in triplets which is at the same time quite close to how Salento pizzica pizzica is. With Bombino the result is a propitiatory ‘good luck’ rite made of intertwining guitar strings, a Macedonian tapan drum groove, and percussion that encourages dance and dialogue without prejudice; an invitation to show solidarity towards others by putting aside individuality.
To learn more about Maria Mazzotta: