Mimi Patricia Snider

A jazz vocalist who cares about creative and innovative communication through voice, rhythm, and movement.

Mimi Snider — Jazz Vocalist

A jazz vocalist with a deep affinity for rhythm and the expressive language of improvisation, Mimi Snider brings a distinctive sensibility to every performance. As both singer and self accompanying percussionist, she inhabits the music from the inside out—shaping its pulse, colour, and emotional character with an intuitive understanding of groove and ensemble interplay.

For several years, she was featured at the Vancouver International Jazz Festival, performing material from her CD Thank You, Merci—a heartfelt tribute to the extraordinary musicians and enduring musical spirit of New Orleans. Her musical journey has also taken her to intimate jazz clubs and venues throughout Vancouver (eg Frankie’s, Rossini’s) and Toronto (eg Rex Hotel, Emmet Ray, Montreal Jazz Bistro) where she has shared her interpretation of the jazz tradition with audiences drawn to music that is both sophisticated and deeply felt.

Her artistic journey took an unexpected turn following a minor surgical procedure that resulted in persistent laryngeal spasms and profoundly affected her singing voice. What followed was a long and demanding process of vocal retraining, patience and rediscovery. It seemed as though muscle memory had been lost.  She worked to rebuild technique and find that connection again. During this almost 15 year period, she continued expanding her creative skillset, as a creative outlet, studying American plays and scene study work with reputable acting schools, as well as entering more deeply into poetry writing, percussion, jazz theory and piano.

Although her voice would never return to what it had been—in time, she came to understand that it did not need to.

Today, her voice carries a different character and intent:  deeper, more textured, and more reflective. There is a new weight and intimacy in its sound, shaped not only by years of musical experience but by the journey of finding her way back to singing. What once felt like a loss has become another dimension of her creativity—a voice that carries the desire to tell stories through song with vulnerability and resilience.

After almost 15 years, she has returned with a new concert, performing and creating with renewed strength, a deeper appreciation for the voice, and an even more intimate relationship with the music. 

This new concert celebrates musical conversations that crossed oceans, cultures, and generations and traces the rich and often overlooked these exchanges that helped shape American jazz from the late 1880s through the 1950s. Through the waterways and highways connecting Cuba, Mexico, New Orleans, New York City, and to other parts of the Americas such as Brazil, Cuban, Brazilian, Mexican, and American musicians shared rhythms, melodies, sounds, and ideas in an increasingly rich musical way.

The half century or so leading up to the Cuban Revolution of 1959 was particularly fertile. Cuban and American musicians were in close musical dialogue, with artists travelling between Havana, New York, New Orleans, Mexico, and other locations, including Brazil. During this period, Afro-Cuban rhythms increasingly became an integral part of the language of American jazz, while jazz itself—including bebop—found new pathways into Cuban music and other musical communities throughout the Americas. 

The Cuban Revolution of 1959 and the political rupture in U.S.–Cuban relations that followed profoundly changed these patterns of travel and exchange, creating a new chapter in the relationship between the musical cultures of Cuba and the United States. The musical dialogue continued, but the environment in which Cuban and American musicians could exchange ideas had changed for a time.  And during that time, Brazilian bossa nova would create another extraordinary chapter in the conversation between Brazilian music and American jazz.

This concert returns to that earlier era of musical exchange—late 1800s to mid 1900s—not as a fixed historical moment, but as part of an ongoing conversation.  It honours the roots from which American jazz grew:  primarily African-derived rhythms and African American musical traditions both rooted in communities descended from enslaved Africans, while also drawing upon European harmonic and instrumental traditions, as well as musical influences from Indigenous communities. It also honours the cultural and musical exchanges between Cuba, New Orleans, Mexico, and New York City during jazz's formative years, and later Brazil.

This new concert is a reflection of that continuing conversation and a celebration of those who carry the legacy forward.

For Mimi Snider, this is more than a return to the stage. It is a continuation—a reconnection with a musical lineage that has always understood that music can cross borders and that songs carry history. It is also a rediscovery of the voice:  a voice shaped by what came before and, with care and respect, finding new life by listening, remembering and continuing the conversation.

This concert is dedicated to two significant music mentors both gone too soon:  Kate Hammet-Vaughan, Jazz Vocalist, Capilano U, VCC and Patrick Parson, Artistic Director Ballet Creole, York U.

LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

I am grateful to have the opportunity to work on this land and I recognize my presence on the traditional territory of many Indigenous Nations. I acknowledge the current treaty holders, the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation.  For thousands of years the area known as Tkaronto has been the traditional land of the Huron-Wendat, the Seneca, and the Mississaugas of the Credit and has been care taken by the Anishinabek Nation, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, and the Huron-Wendat.  This territory is subject of the Dish with One Spoon Wampum Belt Covenant - an agreement to peaceably share and care for the Great Lakes region.