Born in 1970 in the United States, Cion drew early notice for her exceptional ability when the Boston Jazz Society presented her with its 1988 award. She finished her formal studies at the New England Conservatory two years later, then in 1991 became one of four pianists selected for the Banff School for the Arts in Canada. During the balance of the decade she performed widely, undertaking tours that took her to Germany, Israel, Japan and Portugal. A 1996 jazz workshop in Switzerland found her working alongside Monty Alexander, while the next year her composition “It’s Christmas Time, Once Again” reached the finals of the John Lennon Songwriting Contest. The recording she made with the Herve Jeanne Trio, It Could Happen To You, earned a Jazz Podium prize. In 1998 she brought her own trio to the Mellon Jazz Festival in Pittsburgh, where it opened for the George Coleman Quartet, and later that year her quartet appeared at the JVC Jazz Festival in New York City. Early in the summer of 1999 the trio headlined the Women In Jazz Festival at the Kennedy Center; that November she won the seventeenth Great American Jazz Piano competition in Jackson, Florida. Cion opened the new decade with a month-long engagement leading her trio in Japan and soon afterward joined Marian McPartland on the National Public Radio program Piano Jazz.
Among the vocalists with whom she has performed are Della Griffin, Allan Harris and Etta Jones. She has also appeared with Lew Anderson’s big band and with the Spirit Of Life Ensemble, both in New York City. A superb technician, Cion delivers powerful swing while conveying a notable depth of feeling on ballads. By the start of the twenty-first century she had secured recognition as an outstanding stylist working in the lineage of Bill Evans, having forged a personal and distinctive voice.
