David Wax Museum

“...a young Boston act of great invention and verve, delivered retro-folk with great élan. When they jumped in aisles and on chairs to deliver their rowdy, frisky folk, it was unplugged, but it electrified the crowd.” - Boston Herald
Why do we need museums? They show us something familiar and traditional, while at the same time documenting our innovation, showing us possible directions for the future. This is the same reason we need David Wax Museum – to give us music that is somehow familiar, as if it has always existed somewhere in our cultural ether, but is at the same time irresistibly fresh.
Recently anointed as Boston’s Americana Artist of the Year (2010 Boston Music Awards), the David Wax Museum has been called “one of Boston’s hottest new bands” (Boston Globe) and “a revelation” (Providence Journal). It is no surprise that their acclaimed performance at the 2010 Newport Folk Festival was hailed as one of NPR’s All Songs Considered Highlights of the entire weekend. The Museum’s ability to fuse traditional Mexican folk with country, folk and rock, creating an utterly unique Mexo-Americana aesthetic, is what generates its contemporary sound and its broad appeal. Combining Latin rhythms, call-and-response hollering, accordion pumping and donkey jawbone rattling, they have electrified audiences across the country. And they’ve just gotten started.
David Wax's circuitous journey from mid-Missouri to the back roads of Mexico inspires the Museum’s blend of traditional Mexican and American folk music. While attending Deep Springs College, an unconventional school that doubles as a cattle ranch, David spent his summers working in rural Mexico with the American Friends Service Committee. He finished his degree at Harvard University before heading back to the Mexican countryside to study its rich folk music tradition on a year-long fellowship. It was there that he first began blending Midwestern folk with the instruments, rhythms, lyrical themes and song structures of son mexicano.
Homeschooled by her father on a small farm in rural Virginia, Suz Slezak was reared on music -- traditional Irish, classical, old-time folk. She graduated from Wellesley College, traveled around the world on a Watson Fellowship to study textiles, and then found herself back in Boston where she met David Wax, recently returned from his Mexican travels. He convinced her to track down a donkey jawbone, a traditional percussion instrument from Veracruz, and join his band. Suz is the Museum’s anchor to American roots music and helps fashion its distinctive sound with her fiddling and harmony vocals. Since 2007, David and Suz have formed the core of the Museum.
David Wax Museum’s ascent has been a steady one. The band now consistently sells out historic venues such as Boston's Club Passim, often performing two shows in a single night due to heightened demand. The Museum is closely associated with many of the most innovative Americana bands active today, having toured nationally with The Avett Brothers and the Old 97’s and having shared bills with such acts as Carolina Chocolate Drops, Langhorne Slim, Ben Kweller, The Low Anthem, and Nathaniel Rateliff. In addition to packing clubs and theatres across the country and touring with national acts, David Wax Museum has been causing a ruckus in living rooms and backyards throughout the country. In these unique settings, the band's fiery and heart-wrenching shows have created an undeniable buzz and a devoted following.
The David Wax Museum’s exposure is not limited to its performances. The Museum receives consistent play on XM Sirius Radio's Acoustic Coffeehouse and on numerous radio stations in the Northeast. The Boston Globe selected the band’s second album, Carpenter Bird, for its top 10 local albums of 2009. The band is featured semi-regularly on NPR, having been spotlighted on a segment about Mexico-centric indie rock and, more recently, as a favorite act of the 2010 Newport Folk Festival. A new album, Everything Is Saved, is produced by Sam Kassirer (Josh Ritter, Langhorne Slim, Erin McKeown) and will be released February 3, 2011.
Along the way, the David Wax Museum has had the good fortune to ally itself with a uniquely talented corps of musicians for recording and touring: David’s cousin Jordan Wax (People's Republic of Klezmerica) on accordion and piano, Mike Roberts (Wooden Dinosaur) on upright bass and electric guitar, Greg Glassman (The Sacred Shakers) on drum kit and requinto, Jiro Kokubu on mandolin and dobro, Alec Spiegleman (Cuddle Magic) on baritone sax and clarinet, Brian O'Neill on percussion and Sam D’Agostino on upright bass and tenor sax.