(it's how we leave marks on each other)

Mattea discovered jazz through her dad who raised her on his own, after her mom left for a job in the US, she was young when he started playing his rather enormous collection of CDs in the evenings while preparing for work the next day, he was a school teacher, taught music and math, she was maybe seven or eight, he would tell her that he liked to play the blues to chase away his own, those that played out the fact that her mom had left, Mattea felt awfully relieved that the music would comfort him, so she didn't have to. She had her own worries, her own blues to listen to.

As she grew up with his music and took to it kindly, he enrolled her in a music school where her talent for singing was soon discovered and nurtured from early on. Mattea was no wonder kid, her talents were not unseen or unheard of, but she had a nice resonance and a good range, most importantly she embodied soul and brought life to her lyrics. Though she didn't have the frail, light voice of her idol, Lisa Ahlberg, her musical goddess, her first crush, she had a depth of her own that she eventually learned how to master with the help of teachers and jazz-loving friends whom she could jam with, perform, practice.

At the age of sixteen, she came out to her dad (and to her mom, long-distance) as a lesbian, something that changed virtually nothing in their relation, but had built up for years finally to find its relief in his acceptance, in the acceptance of her mother and in her own. Throughout college she educated herself in a more practical direction, so that she'd be able to cover an office position after graduation, but kept music on the side, meeting one by one the three women who would eventually form her band, her trio of piano, drums and double bass. All three of these women, Lizette, Sacha and Rosalie, belonged on the LGBT spectre and frequented the same bar that Mattea, too, began to visit, once she was legal. Lipstick.

Now, ten years later, she's not only an established regular in the lesbian milieu playing out around Lipstick, but she has been performing with her trio at the bar every weekend for the past couple of years, her life only starting Friday afternoon when work ends and the weekend begins with its love games and jazz standards.