Marilyn Mazur

Percussionist Marilyn Mazur (born 1955) was born in New York City to a Polish mother and African American father. The family emigrated to Denmark when Mazur was six years old. She studied classical piano from the age of 9, and also studied ballet. Her first professional work, in 1971, was as a dancer with Creative Dance Theatre, and she began composing and playing piano with her band Zirenes a couple of years later. It was only when she enrolled to study classical percussion at the Royal Danish Conservatory of Music that she began to play drums. While still at college, she became interested in jazz after hearing Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew, and was soon playing gigs around Copenhagen in free jazz groups.

In 1978, Mazur founded an all female music and theatre ensemble, Primi Band and she also began working in drummer Alex Riel‘s group Six Winds. In 1981, she played shows with the John Tchicai Trio alongside bassist Hugo Rasmussen, and followed both into Pierre Dørge’s New Jungle Orchestra, a band which also featured Harry Beckett and Johnny Dyani. In 1984, Miles Davis was in Copenhagen to receive the prestigious Sonning Award, for which Palle Mikkelborg composed a suite of music inspired by Davis, which the trumpeter then performed with the Danish Radio Big Band including Mazur, by whose playing Davis was impressed. He liked the music and organised for it to be recorded in January 1985 for his last album with Colombia Records, Aura. Impressed again by her playing, Davis then invited Mazur to join his touring band and she performed with him regularly in the late 1980s, until she decided to return to Copenhagen and found her own band, Future Song with the trumpeter Nils Petter Molvaer and her husband, bassist Klavs Hovman. Mazur can also be heard on two albums (in 1988 and 1989) by Gil Evans with the Laurent Cugny Big Band. In 1989, she won the first of six Downbeat polls in which she was named a leading percussionist.

In 1991, Mazur recorded with Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen for his album Uncharted Land, where she met Jan Garbarek, who then invited her to join his group for his ECM album Twelve Moons, and stayed with him for his next two non-Hilliard Ensemble releases in 1996 and 1998. She also recorded her own album for the label, Small Labyrinths, again with Molvaer and Hovman in the lineup. Mazur became the only Danish artist to ever win the country’s most prestigious jazz award, the Jazzpar, in 2001. She has continued to record regularly as both a band leader (mostly on Stunt Records) as well as guesting with others, including Frans Bak, Ketil Bjornstad, Carsten Dahl, Nikolai Hess, Caecilie Norby, Dhafer Youssef and Eberhard Weber. Since 2006, she and Hovman have been members of the Makiko Hirabayashi Trio.

Key Recordings:
With New Jungle Orchestra, Jan Garbarek, Makiko Hirabayashi
Circular Chant (Storyville 1995)
Small Labyrinths (ECM 1997)