Festival Big Band, featuring Maiya Sykes at the Mendocino Music Festival

Maiya Sykes completely and utterly wowed the audience at the 2023 Big Band concert. She’s a former back-up singer whose rendition of “Stay with Me” on The Voice in 2014 catapulted her to lead singer fame. Based in Los Angeles, Sykes is a classically trained musician who graduated from Yale and studied with Betty Carter and Nina Simone. Among her recent projects was a reinterpretation of Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze”, with the funk band Scary Pockets.