About Marlena

Marlena Boedigheimer was born and raised in Duluth, Minnesota where she began playing the tenor saxophone at age 14, inspired from hearing the instrument sampled on Pete Rock & CL Smooth’s “T.R.O.Y”. She eventually began taking private lessons with local woodwind doubler Kim Stellmaker, who saw Marlena’s inclinations toward improvisation and encouraged her to audition for her high school’s jazz band. From that point forward, Marlena’s interest in jazz grew exponentially, and she became obsessed with the concept of improvised music as a whole.

After graduating from high school, Marlena elected to stay home and pursue a Bachelor of Music in Jazz Studies at the University of Minnesota-Duluth where she studied under Dr. Theodore Schoen and Ryan Frane. As she progressed through her undergraduate years, several challenging personal experiences led her to seek a redevelopment of her relationship to music. On this path, she began to seek higher meaning, and also sought to find and establish her own place within the world of jazz. After discovering the music of Alice Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, and Yusef Lateef, Marlena was more inspired than ever, and dedicated herself heavily to the avant-garde. While this shift was met with mixed reactions from her peers, mentors, and instructors, Marlena rapidly developed her personal concept of sound, and in turn, began playing in a much wider range of musical settings. She began performing, composing, and arranging for the Duluth-based band AfroGeode and the Gemstones, appearing on the album released under the same name. She also appears on prog rock records like Reflectivore’s Weather Enough, as well as alternative records like Peat Boggs’ Good Enough. It was around this time that she also was selected as one of the members of the Women in Jazz Organization’s 2021-2022 class of mentees, and was mentored by New York saxophonist Gabrielle Murphy.

Upon receiving her bachelor’s degree in 2022, Marlena began focusing more on performing and recording as a bandleader. Under the name “pink marlena”, she has released a variety of studio and live albums, primarily consisting of freely improvised pieces. Her development as a free improviser led her to pursue a Master of Music in Improvisation at the University of Michigan, where she currently studies with Andrew Bishop, Ed Sarath, and Marcus Elliot. She performs and composes in the Ann Arbor/Detroit area frequently with a variety of avant garde ensembles, including the University of Michigan Creative Arts Orchestra, the Astro Mystic Sama Ensemble, LuFuki and the Divine Providence, The 11th Hour, the NeuroArts Productions Collective, and her own pink marlena group. 

In everything she does, Marlena aims to help cultivate a more open and welcoming environment for women in jazz through collaboration and musical experimentation. She also aims to increase the visibility of Indigenous people within the improvised music world, being a member of the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa herself. Lately, she has dedicated herself to a variety of projects centered around her heritage, learning and using the Nishnaabemwin language that her great grandmothers were forced to stop speaking in the Indian Boarding Schools of the early 1900s. Her debut EP Primaries was recorded on ceded territory near the Red Cliff Reservation in Wisconsin, and she’s currently working on subsequent projects that will be recorded on the same land.