Miriam Aziz was born in England and grew up in Brussels, Belgium to a father who was born in Tanzania but whose parents came from what later became Pakistan, and a mother who is Austrian. English is her mother-tongue but she also speaks fluent French, German and Italian. She began playing piano at the age of 5 and started writing songs at 11. By the age of 15 she was writing and performing her own material in a band called Foreign Affairs. In 1989, she moved to Manchester, England where she continued to write and perform songs whilst studying for a law degree which she completed in 1992. She went on to qualify as a lawyer in London and then moved to Edinburgh, Scotland to do a Phd in 1994, all the while playing and experimenting with all styles of music. She began to take her singing more seriously, performing jazz standards and eventually her own songs with a band made up of a jazz guitarist, a tabla player and a bass player. She moved to Berlin in 1997 and spent three years living there before she moved to Florence, Italy in 2000 where she started to work on songs for a debut album, We’re Inside Out which she released on her own label, Rock Pixie Records in 2007 which was produced by Malika Makouf Rasmussen (Exit Cairo and On Club) together with Women’s Voice Productions based in Oslo, Norway.She performed songs from the album in Ithaca, upstate New York in November 2007 as part of the radio show Crossing Borders for WVBR FM at Pancho Villa. She also co-hosted radio shows on world music for WVBR FM and WICB FM during the fall of 2007. She has also performed in Oslo as part of the Global Oslo Music initiative and in July 2008 performed with a 5 set band of musicians and 2 dancers in Prato, Italy as part of the nationwide Womajazz Festival and performed at the renowned MELA world music festival in Oslo in August 2009.Miriam Aziz often collaborates with dancers and her music has been used in dance classes and productions. In 2008, she wrote a piece of music for Tancredo Tavárez, a former Martha Graham dancer who teaches Modern dance at the Béjart school (Ecole-Atelier Rudra Béjart) in Lausanne, Switzerland. The music was used to stage a choreographical piece called “Toutlemonde n’entre pas, sauf les foux” and was performed by Tavárez at a Gala in Santo Domingo in February 2008. Her work with dancers inspired her second album Tránsito which was released on October 26, 2009 on Rock Pixie Records in conjunction with New Music and Women’s Voice Productions, distributed by EMI MUSIC Norway AS. The album was also produced by Malika Makouf Rasmussen and moves away from the singer/songwriter format to embrace theatre and dance and what she has referred to as “acoustic cinema” in an interview with Norwegian Public Radio in December 2008. Stylistically, she has started to introduce strands of theatre with musical and vocal arrangements which have been inspired by classical music, jazz and Indian music and cinema.In 2007, she worked with Scottish film director Richard Jobson, former member of the art-punkband the Skids (16 Years of Alcohol, A Woman in Winter, The Purifiers and New Town Killers) on the release of a video for Gypsy one of songs from her album We’re Inside Out, an experience which inspired her to experiment with film-making. Her work with photographers such as Luciano Valentini in Siena, Italy (Studio Gielle), Tei Blow in Brooklyn and Mariliana Arvelo, New York has been instrumental in enabling her to evolve her search to fuse music, dance and theatre with elements of improvisation. In the autumn of 2009, Miriam moved to New York where she recorded an album called Muerte, Bailaremos (Rock Pixie Records) which was released on June 1, 2010 and which archives a pivotal stage in this journey of discovery. http://miriamaziz.com/
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