While their are many fine jazz divas out there, with fine and wonderful voices and a respectable enough piano technique or style, genuine female piano virtuosos with a mature and highly individual improvisatory style are a rarity. Apart from the Labeque sisters no serious contenders come to mind. But Aziza is a formidable improvising and composing jazz pianist of the first rank, who could hold her own against all but the most stellar male players (I'm thinking just Herbie Hancock really). She is the real deal, reminiscent of Michel Camillo or Jason Rebello with respect to the power and implacable drive of her left hand, contrasting with a steely delicacy in the right, with its implications of a thorough classical training. Her compositions are often intensely fiery combining her exotic Azerbaijani roots with a central European high classicism. She too has a voice with extraordinary range and control with delivery styles spanning from a quirky scat, through her native mugam tradition, to the near operatic, at special moments taking on an almost inhuman beauty somewhere between Natasha Atlas and the Archangel Gabriel.