Marilyn Mazur's Shamania LIVE

Auditorium Teatro Golden Palermo, November 13, 2024

© Hanne Hvattum

Presented in its national premiere in Catania and Palermo by “Catania Jazz 2024”, the Shamania project summarizes the musical encyclopedism of Marilyn Mazur who borrowed, with different coordinates, what was done in jazz and rock by Don Cherry, Miles Davis and Frank Zappa. On stage Mazur generates a polycentric flow made of diversity, contaminations, spirituality and ritual power. It consists of hieratic and hypnotic music, which evoking implicitly dance, suggests a state of trance. Ranging from jazz to funk and Afrobeat, the compositions of the American percussionist, naturalized as Danish, sublimates the best musical contaminations of the third millennium in an organic synthesis.

The multifaceted timbral dimension of Shamania simultaneously allows us to reflect on the foresight and relevance of historical free music, which incorporated a rich instrumental armamentarium belonging to Asian and African traditions. The creativity and imagination of musicians of the caliber of Josefine Cronholm, Lotte Anker, Sissel Vera Pettersen and Makiko Hirabayashi also make it one of the best European orchestras today.

The combination of music, recited texts and improvised interaction revives the musical theater of the Primi Band, formed by Mazur in 1978 in the name of a synesthetic musical microcosm in continuous movement, without expressive or genre barriers. The cultural curiosity of this nonet is also the direct consequence of Scandinavian cosmopolitanism, which already in the Seventies favored transversal meetings and fundamental recordings, which today enter the history of jazz.

© Maurizio Zerbo

© Per Morten Abrahamsen

Musicians:
Marilyn Mazur, drums, percussion, composition
Hildegunn Øiseth, trumpet/goat horn
Sissel Vera Pettersen, sax, vocals
Josefine Cronholm, vocals
Lisbeth Diers, congas/percussion
Ida Gormsen, bass
Lis Wessberg, trombone
Makiko Hirabayashi, piano
Lotte Anker, sax