Cristina Mazza was born July 20, 1955, in Milan. She took up saxophone in the early 1970s, drawn to the playing of Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane, and in 1983 graduated from the Bologna Conservatory with a diploma in saxophone. She went on to work directly with several of the musicians who shaped her sound in seminar and workshop settings, most notably Giorgio Gaslini — already documented on this site as the architect of Italian "total music" and, from 1972, the founder of Italy's first academic jazz course at Rome's Santa Cecilia Academy — alongside Mal Waldron, Steve Lacy and Markus Stockhausen. It was through a series of Gaslini-led seminars in the 1980s that she first met Waldron, a connection independently confirmed by the Italian jazz outlet Tracce di Jazz, not just by her own biography.

Mazza made her national debut in 1986 at the festival "Il Nuovo Suono del Jazz Italiano," an appearance that drew attention from the specialized Italian press as, in the recurring critical framing used by Italian Wikipedia, Jazzitalia and her own biographical materials alike, "the first female saxophonist, composer and bandleader in Italy and one of the few active in Europe in the field of improvised music." Her recorded debut followed two years later: Kkann (1988, Splasc(h) Records), cut in a single session at Verona's CIM Studios on May 9, 1988. Discogs catalogs the release under her own name alone, but Beppe Castellani's own already-published profile on this site independently documents it as a quintet date — Mazza with pianist Luigi Bonafede, bassist Marco Vaggi and drummer Riccardo Biancoli, with Beppe Castellani himself guesting on tenor saxophone.

By the end of the 1980s Mazza had settled in Verona, and the city's jazz scene became the base for the two connections that most define her discography. In 1991 she recorded the trio album Where Are You? (Il Posto Records) with pianist Mal Waldron and bassist Reggie Workman — a session Discogs credits to all three as co-leaders, with Mazza contributing two originals ("Where Are You?" and "Absence") alongside pieces by Waldron, Ornette Coleman and Steve Lacy. That same year she also turned up in the ad hoc University Jazz Project, documented on the live album Live in Verona (ARTIS Records) alongside English free-improvising drummer Tony Oxley, Dutch cellist Ernst Reijseger, French-horn player Martin Mayes, guitarist Enrico Terragnoli and, on tenor saxophone, Beppe Castellani — the two trade solos together on the opening track, "Apple Juice," and Mazza's own composition "Where Are You" appears again in this looser live setting.

Through the 1990s and 2000s her catalog widened in two directions at once. On one side sat further exploratory work: Lanxsatura (1994, Light & Flow), a collaboration with vocalist Lorena Fontana; and 360° Circular (1999, Dischi Della Quercia), a septet-scale session that introduced a long-running working relationship with baritone saxophonist and organist Bruno Marini, already profiled on this site. On the other sat a groove-driven, organ-and-electronics vein: The Gamble (2001) and E-Waste (2004, both Azzurra Music), both featuring Marini on Hammond organ, and Catch the Beat (2003, Azzurra Music), co-billed with vocalist Daniel Sous, recorded live in Verona in November 2002 and remixed for release — Discogs tags it Soul-Jazz and Acid Jazz, genuinely outside the straight-jazz lane of her other records. Marini, in turn, brought Mazza in as a guest on two of his own leader dates in this period, Be Bop Impossible (2002) and Bop'n Out (2004). She also appeared as a guest on American drummer Jimmy Carl Black's Freedom Jazz Dance (2008) and on No Trespassing (2008), a meeting between Danish-Congolese-American reedman John Tchicai and Marini's group Ice9, and released the hip-hop-inflected mini-album Relations (2011, Vibrarecords) alongside bassist Antonella Mazza and DJ Zeta.

Waldron died in Brussels in December 2002. Five years later, in February 2007, Mazza organized a sextet session in Verona to honor him, gathering South African-Dutch reedman Sean Bergin, clarinetist and tenor saxophonist Daniele D'Agaro, Bruno Marini, French bassist Jean-Jacques Avenel and drummer Sangoma Everett to record his compositions without a piano in the group. The results sat unreleased for fourteen years before Caligola Records issued them as Celebrating the Music of Mal Waldron (2021) in its "Hystorical Tapes" series, with liner notes contributed by Elena Palumbo Mosca, John Tchicai and saxophonist Oliver Lake. The same Verona circle of players reconvened, minus Bergin, D'Agaro and Avenel, for the quartet album Double 3 (2022, Caligola), pairing Mazza and Marini (doubling here on piano and flute) with bassist Roberto Del Piano and drummer Alberto Olivieri.

Since 2013 Mazza has lived with myasthenia gravis, a chronic autoimmune neuromuscular condition that has curtailed her live performance schedule without stopping her recording activity. Mazza's Discogs-documented connection to D'Agaro is not limited to that 2007 session: in 2008 both are separately credited as performer and co-writer on American drummer Jimmy Carl Black's Freedom Jazz Dance (Azzurra Music), alongside baritone saxophonist Bruno Marini. Her own biographical materials and an animal-rights organization's artist page additionally describe a 2018 septet recording, Blow Up (MaxySound), and a 2024 project called The Adventures of Frank Floyd; neither could be independently located in Discogs or any other database checked for this profile; they are reported here as bio-sourced claims rather than independently verified releases. Mazza remains active as a bandleader and is also a longtime animal-rights and environmental advocate, a member of the Verona chapter of the Italian anti-vivisection league LAV.

Mazza's alto saxophone voice sits in the Ornette Coleman-descended, Waldron/Lacy-adjacent lineage she absorbed directly from those musicians in the 1980s — audible in her own choice to cover Coleman's "Beauty Is a Rare Thing" (on both Where Are You? and, three decades later, Double 3) and Lacy's "Blues for Aida." That free-jazz identity, documented on Discogs style tags across Where Are You? (Bop), Celebrating the Music of Mal Waldron and Double 3 (both Free Jazz), sits alongside a second, groove-oriented side of her catalog: Catch the Beat, tagged Soul-Jazz and Acid Jazz, and the Hammond-organ-driven The Gamble and E-Waste, both built around her decades-long partnership with Bruno Marini. Rather than treat these as contradictory, her own catalog holds both a free-improvising reed voice, shaped by direct study with Gaslini, Waldron and Lacy, and a Verona-scene groove-jazz identity built around Marini's organ chair.