Her collaboration with Miles Davis, Gil Evans and Wayne Shorter established her worldwide reputation in the mid-to late ‘80s,as did her career with Jan Garbarek later on. But even before that, percussionist and composer Marilyn Mazur had already realized significant projects of her own. Her Primi Band, an experimental music theatre group that existed from 1978 to 1986, left such a lasting impression that the Copenhagen Jazz Festival wanted to reboot the groupfour decades later. This was unfortunately not possible, but the evocative spirit of that band has been letout of the bottle througha new project.

Shamania is the name of the band that Marilyn founded in 2015. Its shamanic spirit is based on the idea of a modern tribal gathering of female musical forces that focuses entirely on rhythm, body and voice in an experimental context and the challenge of finding a common ground.

The ten women of Shamania are among the most independent musicians on the Scandinavian scene, and live in Denmark, Norway and Sweden. When they meet, they bring through their formidable energies - a primal power and fascinating rhythms to the stage and enchant the listener with at mospheric moods and moments of pure amazement. The very same qualities have now been captured on their second album: REROOTING combines 16 songs, a combination of both Marilyn's brand new and older compositions, which have all been, with one exception, previously unreleased.

Each of these songs hasits own story, such as anoriginal song composed for Marilyn’s son when he was a baby, the sunset canon, the world situation, Nordic nights, April 1 – as well asthe title track that was created atthe first gathering of the Shamania musicians after pandemic-related self-isolation and many concert cancellations. From the waterphone, which combines the principles of the Tibetan water drum, the African lamellophone, and the nail violin from the 18th century, to udu clay pot drums, various bongos, congas, the kalimba, drums and tuned gongs from all over the world, to the Norwegian goat horn: the extraordinary wealth of timbres, together with the other instruments, primes the songs, shining out of them, glowing and radiating, results in the unmistakable Shamania sound and, with the brilliant rhythms, form Marilyn Mazur's trademark: an of-ten ritual-type music with an unmistakable instinct for outstanding dialogues, solos and improvisations – as well as an energetic primal force,and the very personal musical language of the great musician that extends into a world that lies far beyond jazz.

Steff Rohrbach