MARILYN MAZUR

Ever since Miles Davis called one night in the 1980' and asked Marilyn Mazur to be first and only woman ever to join his band, she has not stopped creating moments of intense magic on stage.

And just as Marilyn is a multi-instrumentalist - in her hands and ears, anything transforms into a percussive instrument -  she is also a multi-band player.
She loves the challenge of playing with new musicians and mixing members of her large and diverse musical family in new and surprising ways.

Percussionist Mazur Mazur is recognised world-wide as a uniquely innovative percussionist, her international reputation sealed by her association with Miles Davis, with whom she played for almost five years. She appears on his albums “Aura” and “Live Around The World”.
Later, Marilyn Mazur spent fourteen years as a member of the Jan Garbarek Group bringing to the music her sense for coloration and atmospherics, as well as the kinetic energy that Garbarek once likened to the movement of the wind through trees - a persuasive, insistent and naturally dramatic force.
She also spent a year on the road with the group of Wayne Shorter, and played and recorded with Gil Evans. The long list of musicians with whom she has worked includes Bobo Stenson, John Tchicai, Nils Henning Ørsted Pedersen, Jon Balke (ECM album, “Further”), Palle Mikkelborg, Dino Saluzzi, Irene Schweizer, Peter Kowald, Arild Andersen, Charlie Mariano, Maria João, Marilyn Crispell, Eliane Elias, Marc Johnson and many others.

Marilyn Mazur was born in New York in 1955, moving with her American parents to Denmark at the age of 6. She played piano before moving to the drums in her late teens, active initially in genres from rock to theatre music as well as jazz. An innovator in the arena of “world music”, she has travelled the world and collected percussion instruments from everywhere which she plays in both ways “traditional” and personal.

The winner of numerous awards including the Jazzpar Prize, the Edition Wilhelm Hansen Composers Prize, the Ben Webster Award and a lifetime grant from the Danish National Art Foundation, Marilyn Mazur has focused the last years on performing regularly with bands of her own, Marilyn Mazur Group, Celestial Circle featuring John Taylor and her Mystic Family with Nils Petter Molvær, Eivind Aarset and Dhafer Youssef.

More details of Mazur’s activities can be found on her Myspace site http://www.myspace.com/marilynmazur
and her web site: www.marilynmazur.com