BIO- The Story
The musical beginnings of the usually pig-tailed clad Winnipeg born and raised Mischievia, better known to her family and friends as Brenda Fitz, began emerging around the age of three, when she started charismatically mimicking her older brother Brent (current drummer/keyboardist for former Motley Crue vocalist Vince Neil) whenever he would sit down and play the piano. Shortly there after, her journey into 13 years of piano lessons began, and set the stage for her future love and devotion to the world of music.
By age seven she started developing the ability to write and create her own songs, and could usually be heard singing or humming along to one of her latest concoctions, down off in the corner of the basement. A few years of saxophone study, a guitar lesson or two, then the jump to a professional career in music at age 17, when she joined her first funk/dance bar band (Sons & Daughters), playing keys and alto sax to intermittently sequenced material, and started teaching piano from her home. A year later she graduated from high school with two music awards under her belt, and was invited as keyboardist/ backing vocalist to join a thriving, well-established bar band by the name of Rumours shortly after her eighteenth birthday.
Spending the next seven years with Rumours, the band used the cover band scene to fund their real focus on creative original material. An article in the Free Press led to interest from Warner Canada and various UK film & music industry representatives, including a director from Ridley Scott, and facilitated a trip across the pond to pursue and promote the project.
When terms with both Canada and the UK were not solidified, Brenda and the band's lead vocalist decided to throw a tent in the back of her car and head south. Pointed in the direction of Los Angeles (where brother Brent resided), they began following leads previously created during a week-end North Hollywood recording session (besides Rumours, she also had a piano/vocal side- project), as well as contacts made by the duo’s recent trip to the L.A. N.A.M.M. show. Armed with only a two song demo cassette, they managed to stimulate the interest of an engineer to Michael Jackson after only a brief listen to the cassette during a recording session Brenda had landed, playing piano for a film soundtrack he was engineering. This led to an immediate response, and a personal referral to a record label he thought would have serious interest in the material.
Before any working relationship could be established with the label, Brenda lost the use of both her arms, and was unwillingly forced to make the decision, now at age twenty-five, to break from the band and industry. A musician’s worst nightmare had become her reality… tendonitis... to a severity so extreme, she no longer had the ability to hold a hairbrush in her hands, shift the gears in her 5-speed, and most unfortunately ... play keyboards. Think the story ends here for Brenda? Think again.
Adamant not to let injury sway her course, she turned the next couple years into a flurry of research and study, focused on exactly one thing . . . recuperation. Turning to her teaching (now in its’ eighth year) to keep her connected to music, she further reached out for alternate creative outlets and enrolled in various photography, tai chi, and pilates classes, voice workshops, and business seminars (leading to the opening of her partnership/ ownership of Transcona Music Centre in 2000), plus an African dance work-out class, that, two years later, would change her life, and compel her to travel to West Africa. There, she would find herself fortunate enough to experience African dance in its truest form, studying briefly with The National Dance Company of Ghana, while at the same time, gathering the strength, conviction, and motivation necessary for her inevitable return to music.
Back on Canadian soil and armed with the heat of Africa still boiling in her blood, Brenda jumped back out on stage again as keyboardist/backing vocalist for African high-life/reggae artist Coffieman, appeared on “A” Channel’s Big breakfast (again) African dancing for the Coffieman, replaced her beat-up old dilapidated cassette four-track with a digital 8-track, and dove head first back down into the basement - her latest potion of sound creation landing right here, for your personal consumption . . .
