Elizabeth & the Catapult
US musical group
Elizabeth & the Catapult is a Brooklyn–based project by the American singer-songwriter Elizabeth Ziman. They have released six studio albums.
History
Ziman, who grew up in Greenwich Village, trained from youth as a classical pianist, writing her first songs on an upright piano at age 6. She attended the Berklee College of Music on a scholarship to study classical composition, and was awarded the 2001 ASCAP Leiber and Stoller scholarship for her song "Like Water is to Sand." Her original plans to pursue film scoring were changed in 2002 when Patti Austin came to Berklee to recruit background vocalists for an Ella Fitzgerald tribute tour. Ziman toured with Austin for 18 months, causing her subsequent compositional style to draw heavily from jazz vocalists such as Fitzgerald, Nina Simone, Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan. She met Esperanza Spalding through the Patti Austin band and Spalding eventually played bass in Ziman's first band while still attending Berklee.
Ziman met Lucius drummer and fellow student Dan Molad and Esperanza Spalding at a party during their final semester at Berklee, and they began performing together shortly afterward. Esperanza Spalding left the band soon after and Guitarist Pete Lalish (Lucius), another Berklee student, later joined the band after Ziman saw him performing at a Boston bar and invited him to collaborate. After Ziman and Molad completed their studies, the band moved to Brooklyn in early 2005. Using Molad's home studio, the band financed, recorded and produced an EP, Elizabeth & The Catapult in 2006.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5362240. VIAF identifies the subject as 168255734. The Library of Congress control number is no2011023715. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2001, 2002, 2005 and 2006.
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This entry incorporates text from “Elizabeth & the Catapult” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.