Mtali Banda

The son of a Malawian refugee father and an African-American mother, all the sounds Mtali Banda was exposed to growing up can now be heard in his music. Music was always there. Mtali Banda's first tour was at age ten, singing in a gospel choir (his mom was the director) traveling from Washington, D.C. to Maine. More than the singing itself, the musicians accompanying the choir captured his burgeoning imagination. He knew right then what he wanted to be. Born in Amherst, Massachusetts, Mtali spent the bulk of his early years in Madison, Wisconsin, before moving to Atlanta, Georgia as an adolescent. In Atlanta, he switched from his first instrument, clarinet to saxophone and began cutting his teeth in the city's cutthroat school marching band environment. 'If you're good enough in middle school they'll let you play in the high school band," he says. And that's exactly what happened. "It's a sport down there. You gotta have swagger." When Mtali was 15, he and his mother moved to Brockto