Guerino Bruno Mazzola (born 1947) is a Swiss mathematician, musicologist, and jazz pianist, as well as a writer.

Education and career

Mazzola obtained his PhD in mathematics at University of Zürich in 1971 under the supervision of Herbert Groß and Bartel Leendert van der Waerden. In 1980, he habilitated in Algebraic Geometry and Representation Theory. In 2000, he was awarded the medal of the Mexican Mathematical Society. In 2003, he habilitated in Computational Science at the University of Zürich. Mazzola was an associate professor at Laval University in 1996 and at Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris in 2005. Since 2007, he is professor at the School of Music at the University of Minnesota. From 2007 to 2021 he was the president of the Society for Mathematics and Computation in Music. Mazzola is well known for his music theory book The Topos of Music. The result has drawn dissent from Dmitri Tymoczko, who said of Mazzola: "If you can't learn algebraic geometry, he sometimes seems to be saying, then you have no business trying to understand Mozart."

Records

Mazzola has recorded several free jazz CDs with musicians like Mat Maneri, Heinz Geisser, Sirone, Jeff Kaiser, Scott Fields, Matt Turner and Rob Brown. His 2010 album Dancing the Body of Time was recorded in concert at the Pit Inn in Tokyo.

Playing style

A reviewer of Dancing the Body of Time mentioned similarities between Mazzola's playing style and that of Cecil Taylor. This was also mentioned by the AllMusic reviewer of Mazzola's earlier Toni's Delight: Live in Seoul, who also stated that Mazzola "infuses his incredible technique with a blues aesthetic and a sometimes-romantic stamp, overwhelming everything in his path".

Discography