Marc Miralta was born in Barcelona in 1966 and started on drums at seven. His first formal teacher was the Catalan drummer Pau Bombardo, who took him on when he was eleven or twelve (his own website says twelve, the Conservatori del Liceu faculty page says eleven). He then worked through three Barcelona institutions in overlapping stretches: the Escola de Musica Zeleste from 1980 to 1984, the Conservatori Superior Municipal de Musica de Barcelona from 1982 to 1989, where he studied classical percussion, and the Taller de Musics from 1984 to 1990, where he was already teaching drums himself between 1986 and 1990. Alongside the kit he took up vibraphone, Indian tabla, and the flamenco cajon, and that four-instrument spread is the reason his career looks the way it does.

The prizes came early and they came from the Spanish festival circuit rather than from records. He took Best Group and Best Soloist at the Manresa Jazz Festival in 1985, second prize at the San Sebastian Jazz Festival in 1986, second prize at the European big band competition in Berlin in 1988, and first prize at the Getxo Jazz Festival in 1989 with the Basque pianist Inaki Salvador's trio. His earliest recordings belong to that same Catalan and Basque circuit: Joan Sanmarti's Concept (Justine, 1987), the Ze Eduardo Unit's Unities, cut at Estudis Perpinya in Barcelona on February 5 and 12, 1988, and Inaki Salvador's Orain (Elkar, 1989), a piano trio with Mario Rossy on bass.

In 1990 he left for the Berklee College of Music in Boston, where he stayed until 1993 and was named the school's best percussionist in 1991 and its most active musician in 1992. The important consequence of those years was not the diploma but the address book. On December 17, 1994, at Master Sound in Astoria, New York, Miralta played drums on Guillermo Klein's big-band record Big Van, taped live to two tracks with Aaron Goldberg on piano and Mark Turner and Chris Cheek in the saxophone section. Every one of those relationships turned into a band of his own within five years.

Back in Barcelona he became one of the house drummers of Jordi Pujol's Fresh Sound New Talent, the label that documented the Catalan scene of the late 1990s and the young New Yorkers passing through it. He is on Elisabet Raspall's Triangles (recorded at Estudis Moraleda, Barcelona, July 2 and 3, 1996) and Lila (1998), on Grant Stewart's Buen Rollo (FSNT 053, 1999), on Pep O'Callaghan's Port O'Clock, on two quartet records by the saxophonist Cesc Miralta, and on both of the Barcelona albums George Colligan made for the label, Desire (cut February 1 and 2, 1999) and Como La Vida Puede Ser (2001). He also turned up on Chris Kase's A Song We Once Knew, recorded at Bit a Beat in Barcelona on July 10 and 11, 2000 with Kenny Wheeler as guest.

The band that carried his name furthest was the OAM Trio, whose initials are its members: Omer Avital, Aaron Goldberg, Marc Miralta. It ran for a decade and made four records. Trilingual was cut in Paramus, New Jersey in 1999 for Fresh Sound New Talent, with Miralta moving between drum kit, cajon, and tabla on a program that put Coltrane's "26-2" and Gillespie's "Woody'n You" next to originals. Live In Sevilla, taped at the Teatro Central in Seville on November 17, 2001 and released by Lola Records in 2003, added Mark Turner on tenor. Flow was recorded in Hoboken in 2000 and held back until November 16, 2004. Now & Here, with Turner again, came out on the Spanish label Nuba in 2009. In the same New York orbit he co-led Sun Sol (Fresh Sound New Talent, 2000) with Seamus Blake and the bassist Avishai Cohen, and led Dreams (2008) with Blake, Edward Simon, and Avital.

His own signature project is flamenco jazz, and it starts with New York Flamenco Reunion, produced with the alto saxophonist Perico Sambeat and issued by Nuevos Medios in 2000. Miralta arranged the record, played drums, cajon, and tabla on it, and built the program out of bebop and standards heard through flamenco meter: "Epistrophy," "Evidence," "Segment," "Dexterity," "Bye Bye Blackbird," "Besame Mucho." Cuadernos de Jazz named it the Spanish jazz record of the year. He kept working that seam for the next quarter century: with Gerardo Nunez and Sambeat on the Jazz Viene Del Sur concerts at the Teatro Central in Seville (February 29 and September 25 and 26, 2000), whose recordings became Cruce de Caminos and Pasajes / Passages, the latter a large collective date that also carries Paolo Fresu, Jeanne Lee, and Julian Arguelles; on Chano Dominguez's New Flamenco Sound (Universal, 2006); on his own Flamenco Reunion (Nuba Records / Produccions ContraBaix KAR 7842), recorded at the 44.1 studios in Aiguaviva on December 18 and 19, 2012 with Baptiste Trotignon at the piano and the singer Blas Cordoba; and on Flamenco Vibes (Nuba Records / Karonte KAR 7903, 2025), where he put the vibraphone in the lead voice instead of the drum kit.

The other long-running band is the CMS Trio, named for Colina, Miralta, Sambeat: Javier Colina on bass, Perico Sambeat on alto, flute, and soprano, and Miralta on drums. It has four records over thirteen years, from the self-titled Trio (ContraBaix KAR 7798, 2007) through Andando (2009), Danza Guana (2015), and the live 15 Anos, taped at the Jazz Cava in Terrassa and issued by Nuba and Karonte in 2020. A parallel quartet, TransEuropean, paired Miralta and Sambeat with the Hungarians Kalman Olah and Matyas Szandai; it opened the Budapest Jazz Festival on September 8, 2010 and recorded Sketches of Pangea for Budapest Music Center Records at sessions on September 5 to 7, 2010. In 2019 Fresh Sound issued Where Are You, a co-billed trio with Kevin Hays and Mark Turner recorded on February 14 and 15, 2018. Miralta has taught drums and vibraphone at the Conservatori Superior del Liceu in Barcelona since 2005. He remains active: on June 23, 2026 he brought a twenty-fifth anniversary New York Flamenco Reunion to the Teatro Campoamor in Oviedo, with Shai Maestro at the piano, Sambeat on saxophone, Bandolero on percussion, and Miquel Alvarez on bass.

Miralta's reputation rests on a specific technical problem he solved: how to play flamenco compas on a jazz drum kit without either flattening the flamenco or stiffening the swing. He does it by treating the kit and the cajon as one instrument, moving between them mid-tune, and by carrying the tabla and the vibraphone into contexts where neither is expected. All About Jazz describes him as one of the key figures in the development of jazz and flamenco fusion, and credits his playing with a rhythmic undertow that is precise and rigorous without ever crowding the soloist. The vibraphone is the second half of the story and the more recent one: he has used it as a colour since the 1990s, and on Flamenco Vibes in 2025 he made it the lead voice of a flamenco jazz quartet, which reviewers treated as a first for the idiom. He came up admiring and then working with the Americans who passed through Spain, and his own website and the Liceu list Pat Metheny, Gary Burton, Art Farmer, Steve Lacy, Lee Konitz, Paquito D'Rivera, Joshua Redman, and the Catalan pianist Tete Montoliu among the musicians he has shared a stage with. Only some of those associations produced records, and the profile treats the rest as live work.