Marilyn Mazur Shamania

The music maker and percussionist Marilyn Mazur has enchanted the world with her magnificent musical force for five decades. In the 1980s, her collaboration with jazz giants like Miles Davis, Gil Evans, Wayne Shorter, Jan Gabarek, and NHØP significantly put Danish jazz on the world map. But her heart beats for the adventurous jazz she creates in her own boundlessly ingenious projects. In Shamania, she has united with eight like-minded and superior female musicians from the Scandinavian jazz scene, who with great voices, ritual rhythms, electrifying energy, and moving motion, have created a vibrant, bubbling, and hypnotic female jazz collective. Together, they have released two magical albums, where you can clearly sense the sound of Miles Davis in jazz's wild years, but it's also the sound of something entirely different: quiet Tibetan winds, West African jungle, and improvisational music à la Frank Zappa. The eight female musicians in Shamania are the spirit-makers of jazz, who will surely get us all to fall into an intoxicating trance and feel the presence of jazz's ancient gods and magical goddesses.

Line-up:
Marilyn Mazur: percussion, composer Josefine Cronholm (S): vocals, percussion Hildegunn Øiseth (N): trumpet, goat horn Christina Dahl: saxophones Sissel Vera Pettersen (N): alto saxophone, vocals Lis Wessberg: trombone Makiko Hirabayashi: piano, keyboard Ida Gormsen: bass Lisbeth Diers: congas, percussion

About Marilyn Mazur:
Mazur was born in New York City on January 18, 1955, of Polish and African-American descent. She has lived in Denmark since she was six years old. She began studying classical piano and ballet at the age of nine and joined the Creative Dance Theater in 1971 as a teenager. Later, Mazur studied classical percussion at the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen, but she is primarily self-taught on her many instruments and draws inspiration from music from around the world.

Mazur formed her first band, Zirenes, in 1973 as a pianist/composer, and in 1975, she also regularly worked as a percussionist, drummer, and singer for various groups. Her breakthrough on the Danish scene came in 1978 with the popular fusion band Six Winds with drummer Alex Riel and as the leader of the music theater group Primi Band, consisting exclusively of women. In 1983, she received The Ben Webster Award and formed the jazz quartet MM4 with saxophonist Uffe Markussen. Since then, she has continued to develop her unique musical vision with various like-minded collaborators.

A turning point in Mazur's career came in 1985 when she was invited to participate in the recording of Danish trumpeter and composer Palle Mikkelborg's tribute to Miles Davis, "Aura." Davis himself participated in the recordings, and a few months later, he asked Mazur to join his band. She subsequently toured with the Miles Davis Band for extended periods in the late 1980s (her time with Miles was documented on the posthumous Warner Bros. release from 1996, "Live Around The World"). In 1986, Mazur also toured and recorded with the Gil Evans/Laurent Cugny Big Band Lumiere (documented on two EmArcy albums, "Rhythm-a-ning" from 1988 and "Golden Hair" from 1989). In 1987, she went on a world tour with the Wayne Shorter Quintet, and in 1988, she was back with the Miles Davis Band.

Some of the other musicians she has worked with over the years include Bobo Stenson, John Tchicai, Niels Henning Ørsted Pedersen, Jon Balke, Dino Saluzzi, Irene Schweizer, Peter Kowald, Arild Andersen, Andreas Vollenweider, Christy Doran, Marilyn Crispell, Charlie Mariano, Jasper van't Hof, Rita Marcotulli, Eliane Elias, and Marc Johnson, Nils Petter Molvaer, Klavs Hovman, John Taylor, Norma Winstone, and Pierre Dørges New Jungle Orchestra.

In 1991, Mazur became a member of the Jan Garbarek Group, with whom she continued to tour until 2004. Since then, she has primarily focused on her own groups, including Marilyn Mazur Group, Celestial Circle, Mystic Family, Spirit Cave, Future Song, Special 4, Percussion Paradise, and Shamania.

In 2001, Mazur received the prestigious Danish Jazzpar Prize, and in 2004, she received the Danish version of the Wilhelm Hansen Composer's Prize, an award normally given to classical composers. In 2013, she received the Grethe Kolbe Grant, awarded by the Danish Conductors' Association. Mazur is also a recipient of the Danish Arts Foundation's lifetime achievement award for composers. In 2019, the album "Shamania" won the "Jahrespreis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik" (Annual Award of the German Record Critics).