Cellist Mia Pixley Flourishes in Darkness

As cold weather and lack of sunlight cause the leaves’ dominant shades of green to fade, other pigments, like the orange and yellow carotenoids and red and purple anthocyanins, become more visible. The beautiful colors lie dormant in the leaves year-round, only to be revealed by darkness.

This is a perfect metaphor for Mia Pixley’s new album, Love. Dark. Bloom. The soulful jazz singer and cellist pulls from the unknown, the absence of light and even the underworld in her latest body of work.

“I naturally gravitate towards what’s unseen,” says Pixley during a phone call, explaining that her attraction to “what’s underneath” or what some people might deem as “taboo” is pushed by her understanding that darkness is a huge part of who we are as people.

“And so when I’m approaching my art, I’m interested in looking at these areas,” she says in reference to darkness, adding that she’s mindful of finding ways to them “zing.”

That alchemy is shown from the start of the nine-track album, which she’ll be performing across the state, in Occidental on Dec. 20 and at The Freight in Berkeley on Dec. 21, the evening of the Winter Solstice.

The album kicks off with the song “Like Water, Like Love,” providing theme music for an adventure into the depths. The rhythmic thud of Pixley’s cello is paired with drums, creating a sound that’s tailor-made for a lovely jaunt into the unknown.

By the end of the song, the drums are stripped from the track and the jaunting is over; the only thing left is Pixley’s haunting hymns and the umph of the string instrument. The journey toward darkness begins.

The album proceeds to a jazzy, uptempo, smoky-room-sounding song in “Gimmie The Juice,” before leading us to “Dirty” (inspired by the James Baldwin’s Previous Condition) and “Marigold” (inspired by Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye).

Pixley, the co-organizer of the Bushwick Book Club Oakland, periodically meets with other local musicians, reads the same book and then writes music inspired by the literature. If so moved, the artists perform their song for an audience. (Pixley, Nikbo and Claire Calderón also co-wrote the song “Mother Told Me,” which appears later in the album; it was inspired by the book Women Who Run with the Wolves.)

Just past the halfway point of the project, the fifth song brings us into peak darkness. And it’s beautiful. The track, “A Woman, A Wind,” opens with a foot-tapping rhythm as Pixley plays the cello and sings in a gritty tone, “She was walking along the road…”

The song literally came to Pixley during a walk, when she had this idea about a person wearing a top hat. A people pleaser like herself, the top-hatter had to learn how to not “dance and jive for people,” she tells me. Instead, both she and the fictional character had to learn to “let it go.”

The driving rhythm — an urgent strumming of the cello strings that sounds like change is coming — came to her thereafter. She paired it with a benevolently delightful melody for juxtaposition. “It’s, like, free,” Pixley says in reference to the lighter side of the song’s counterbalance.

She laid it all down on a five-channel looper and then mapped out where the supporting artists would fit in.

“I do all the harmonies,” says Pixley, bringing me into the magic behind the scenes. “And then,” she says, “in the recording session is when I invite people that I think whose artistic sensibilities can take those ideas to the next level.” On this track those “artistic sensibilities” were provided by Kevin Goldberg, Isaac Schwartz, Ian McArdle and Bryan C. Simmons.

The song is a journey and, arguably, the epitome of the album. It takes the listener from the darkness of confusion through the driving sound of change before ending on a profound note.

“And it don’t matter where that wind blows,” Pixley sings in an ominous tone over slow strums of the cello at the very end of the song. “Just know, it gets harder when you won’t let go.”

A psychologist as well as an artist, Pixley says her dealings in darkness in both practices “cross-pollinate.” At the heart of it all is the idea of “transforming hard things into new energy.”

Through listening, feeling and intuiting — trusting her intuition — Pixley gathers the information she needs for her work. “I like being in the things,” she says of her ability to use more than her eyes to explore.

Artistically inclined from a young age, Pixley asserts that her time in New York studying at Columbia University nurtured her natural proclivities.

Born in Texas during the winter months, Pixley used to not like the cold season. But through the process of making this album, she’s shifted her relationship with winter and simultaneously broken free of repeating patterns in her life by simply “feeling” her way through it, she says.

“Darkness requires a different kind of sensing,” states Pixley, explaining that this season is all about hearing, tasting, feeling and “listening to ancestral guidance.” And because it requires a different set of senses, some people can find it “totally unnerving.”

For Pixley, navigating darkness, be it from lack of light or clarity, is like the child’s game of “Lights Out,” or Hide-And-Go-Seek in the dark. To play the game, she says, you have to move slower.

As the album concludes, it goes from the cold, somber depths of the songs “Dark” and “Line” to remerge with light in the final track, “Bloom.”

The track was originally written as a commissioned piece for famed violinist Anne Akiko Meyers, who was moved by Pixley’s performance of “Everything is Slow Motion” at the de Young Museum with Mercury Soul.

“She reached out to me and said, ‘Could you write me a song?'” recalls Pixley, who then wrote “Bloom,” but Meyers never used it. “So,” explains Pixley, “I asked her permission if I could put it on this project because it felt like the right track to close the album.” Meyers agreed, under one condition: that Pixley note that it was originally penned for her.

“Whenever I need good external validation,” Pixley reflects, with a lightness in her tone, “I’m like, ‘But Anne believes in me.'” More seriously, she notes that reassurance is a necessity when you’re on a path through darkness.

“If I do this journey with openness and with surrender and with love,” says Pixley, “It’s gonna bloom.”

Mia Pixley’s album Love. Dark. Bloom. was released on Dec. 4. She’ll be performing on Dec. 21, as a part of Barbara Higbie and Friends Winter Solstice Celebration (with Vicki Randle, Kofy Brown, Michaelle Goerlitz and Jasper Manning). Doors open at 6 p.m., and the event starts at 7 p.m. at The Freight in Berkeley (2020 Addison St.). Check here for more information.