Behind the Music Scene – July 2026

TO SEE John and Jean Mazzei play music is to experience pure joy—wrapped in a whirlwind of jazzy numbers, torch songs, pop tunes, witty banter, boas, faux fur, soul patches, and blazing red sport coats. It’s the embodiment of a good time, Jean out front commanding the room and John hunched, brooding genius-style, over the keyboards. It seems effortless, but is naturally anything but, the celebration of a long partnership and the culmination of the journey that’s brought them to this point. It hasn’t always been easy, but it’s always been interesting.

“We tried to collaborate early in our relationship. It just didn’t work out,” says Jean, some 40 years after a hotshot local musician met a free-spirited dance and improv teacher at a College of the Siskyous event. “I’m more confident now, enough to say ‘this is who I am.’”

“I’m evolved, too,” John adds. “I’m not trying to prove something. It’s made me more relaxed.”

This is hard-won wisdom, earned over four decades together and two-plus decades in San Francisco, where Jean tried to break into the local indie rock scene (with her band Flying Venus) while John, saddled with a 12-hour-a-day job in biotech, just tried to hang on. “I was in survival mode (then),” he recalls. “Fight or flight; mostly flight.”

Exhausted and lacking any real bandwidth, John began composing for stock media, “The music they play on TV when they go to commercial, when guests come out, stuff like that.” Eventually his work made it to the Oprah Winfrey show, but his drive to perform and play continued to wane. His wife noticed. “Honestly, he wasn’t as into it as I wanted him to be,” Jean says.

So, she stayed busy pursuing her own goals. She had her band and steady gigs doing weddings and events with John—plus all the hustling required to keep the machine running. “I was the music business,” she says dryly. In addition, she was trying to get acting work and building a following as a yoga teacher, something that, she says, ultimately won out over other pursuits. “I followed the money,” she explains. “Yoga was more consistent.”

Then, in 2018, the couple retired from their jobs and moved to Jacksonville, where John immediately found himself in demand as a sideman while Jean, having left her yoga and music communities behind, tried to find her place in the Rogue Valley. Eventually, she says, “We had a talk.”

“I’m not going to be a band widow,” she told John. They began playing as a duo, creating a live show both agree is one-of-a-kind.

Theirs is surely a love match. Do they occasionally have disagreements? “Sure,” Jean says. “We butt heads. I mean, we’re married. I guess I could play with other people,” she adds, “but I don’t want to. I want to play with him.”

They have a show upcoming at the Gold Room in Jacksonville on September 19. Would they be open to playing more shows, more often? “I’d like to see it,” offers John. “I think we do something unique.”

Jean nods in agreement but adds a caveat: the days of hustling for gigs are over. “We’ve already done the unfun stuff,” she says. “40 years of self-promotion is enough! This is the part where we have fun.”