The world isn't short of drummers who make you want to put your hands over your ears, but it's usually to reduce pain rather than enhance pleasure. However, Marilyn Mazur, the American-born and Danish-raised percussionist - with her bird-like impulsiveness of movement, childlike wonderment of expression and mercurial relationship with her kit - is as absorbing to watch as to listen to.
Over the years, Mazur's talents have endeared themselves to Miles Davis, Wayne Shorter and Jan Garbarek. This year she also won the Jazzpar prize, one of the most prestigious of all international jazz accolades, for her leadership, virtuosity and compositional vision. She was on a short UK tour with her septet, Future Song, performing a repertoire of originals.
The Union Chapel's celebrated echo was more than usually encouraged by the vistas of empty pews. As one of the original forces of European contemporary jazz, Mazur deserved more than the underselling she had in London, but the family-sized audience didn't appear to blunt her animation a bit.
Though she can swing her moccasins off, she prefers to work as a textural player, and featured a conventional drummer, plus keys, guitars, sax and vocals in her band. The music veered from headlong funk to a Wayne Shorterish whimsicality of theme and suspended-motion ambient journeys of pinging bells, gongs, leafy rustlings and gurgling gourds. If this doesn't sound like a jazz/contemporary-music mix of startling strangeness, it isn't. And if Mazur herself were missing from this ensemble, its impact would be slight enough. However, the ghostly purity and poise of vocalist Aina Kemanis frequently exerted a trance-like compulsion, which the chapel echo magnified.
But Mazur was constantly absorbing in every idiom her many-faced music explored. Her sudden explosive flurries of tom-tom playing jolted a driving funk episode out of an early reverie that imperceptibly turned Latin. She also furnished the fizzing accents and spark-showers of cymbal sound under an exhilarating flat-out groove that sprang unexpectedly out of a delectable synth episode for vocals and panpipe effects. It was all very inventive post-Miles/Weather Report fusion, except that exploratory improvising from someone other than Mazur herself was under-represented.
