15.12.2025 | Artist
Danish percussionist Marilyn Mazur, a strikingly original figure in and beyond contemporary jazz, has died, aged 70, after a period of illness.
Born in New York in 1955, Mazur came with her family to Denmark when she was 6. Obsessed with music from an early age, she took lessons in classical piano, as well as dance, followed by studies in classical percussion at the Danish Royal Conservatory. Her transition into jazz and improvisation, however, was largely unstudied, intuitive.
Guitarist Pierre Dørge gave Mazur important early exposure in his large ensemble the New Jungle Orchestra alongside John Tchicai, Johnny Dyani and other free spirits. But it was the realization of Aura, the suite Palle Mikkelborg had written for Miles Davis, that brought her to wider public attention and led to her joining Davis’s band and, subsequently, to work with Wayne Shorter and Gil Evans in the US.
Marilyn Mazur also spent fourteen years as a member of the Jan Garbarek Group, bringing to the music her sense for colour and atmospherics, as well as the kinetic energy that Garbarek famously likened to the movement of the wind through trees, a persuasive, insistent and naturally dramatic force as she moved around her organic assembly of multi-ethnic wood, metal and clay instruments. She first recorded with Garbarek in 1992 on Twelve Moons and was on hand for Visible World and Rites as well as hundreds of Garbarek Group concerts around the globe.
The album Elixir, featuring Mazur solo and in duets with Garbarek, is among her most notable recordings, the open setting bringing out her feeling for evocative texture and sonic poetry. As a bandleader, Mazur often assembled striking constellations of musical characters. At ECM these included the band Future Song, with singer Aina Kemanis, trumpeter Nil Petter Molvær, guitarist Eivind Aarset and pianist Elvira Plenar. The quartet Celestial Circle, meanwhile, brought together pianist John Taylor, bassist Anders Jormin, and vocalist Josefine Cronholm.
Mazur can also be heard on recordings with Jon Balke and Magnetic North (Further), Ketil Bjørnstad (La Notte) and Eberhard Weber (Stages of a Long Journey). Her final appearance on ECM was in trio with Palle Mikkelborg and Jakob Bro on the album Strands, recorded live at the Danish Radio Concert Hall, and released in 2024. To the end, a spirit of exploration is to the fore as Marilyn Mazur‘s percussion language of blossoming gongs, bowed metals and rumbling drums blends with Bro‘s drifting and rippling washes of sound…
