David Wax Museum

Anointed as Boston’s Americana Artist of the Year for 2010, the David Wax Museum has been called “pure, irresistible joy” (Bob Boilen, NPR) and hailed by TIME.com for its “virtuosic musical skill and virtuous harmonies.” The Museum fuses traditional Mexican folk with American roots and indie rock to create an utterly unique Mexo-Americana aesthetic. Combining Latin rhythms, call-and-response hollering, and donkey jawbone rattling, they have electrified audiences across the country and are “kicking up a cloud of excitement with their high-energy border-crossing sensibility” (The New Yorker). 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 and 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.