Jaggery (band)

Did You Know?

• Jaggery's music style has been described as avant-rock with elements of chamber pop, jazz, classical music, and dark wave.
• Sastri has cited Cyndi Lauper, Björk, Tori Amos, and Jeff Buckley as early influences on her musical style.

History

Jaggery came together in 2004, founded by singer and songwriter Mali Sastri, who performs as Singer Mali, alongside her brother Raky Sastri on drums. The siblings had been active in New York since 2001, playing under various monikers such as The Throes. Their debut EP, In Lethe, arrived in October 2004, with guitarist and bassist Ziggy Drozdowski joining the lineup. Following that release, percussionist Daniel Schubmehl, bassist Tony Leva, and harpist-guitarist Jesse Sparhawk each came on board. Around this period, Raky Sastri departed to join the Boston band You Won't, though he kept contributing to Jaggery on occasion, including on their first full-length album, Polyhymnia, which came out in December 2006.

In 2008, Mali Sastri moved back to her hometown of Boston, settling into Cloud Club, a communal artist housing project in South Boston that briefly housed singer Amanda Palmer. The relocation was partly driven by Sastry's ties to Palmer and The Dresden Dolls, as well as stronger audience reception in Boston. The rest of the band remained in New York and New Jersey, commuting to Cloud Club for multi-day rehearsal sessions. Jaggery's second album, Upon a Penumbra, was released on July 28, 2010, with Sastri recording most of it at Cloud Club.

For the RPM Challenge in February 2011, the band created their third album in a single month, titling it Sp(l)ice and putting it out on March 7 of that year. Shortly after, they began work on the EP Private Violence, which finally dropped in November 2012; the band called it a concept album inspired by Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. In June 2014, Jaggery played a show at Harvard University's American Repertory Theater, which was captured and released as the live album For the Record. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston then commissioned them to craft a song cycle based on Leonardo da Vinci, dubbed The Beautiful and the Grotesque, performed at the museum's Remis Auditorium on May 1, 2015. By 2016, most band members had relocated to Boston. Their fourth studio album, Crux, came out on April 29 of that year, earning positive reviews that called it genre-defying and refreshingly unique.