Ian Maksin Interview
Below is the transcript of my interview with Ian Maksin; you’ll also find the link back to the podcast and video versions, with the show notes and additional links.
Ian Maksin holds a special place in the hearts of his fans worldwide, with his unique concerts of cello and songs in over 30 languages. It was really interesting to learn about how he has forged a unique path as a solo touring performer, and he shared his insights on finding commonalities between cultures, mindfulness practice and how he stays healthy with such an intense touring schedule. You’ll hear about his childhood, his need to break out of a strict classical music career, how his love of languages started and some suprises, including how he became a pilot as a teenager.
Ian Maksin (00:00:00):
Fans who are going to become your loyal and relevant audience, most importantly, relevant audience. I do believe that every artist is capable of having their own audience. When I quit mainstream classical music, I went back to clubs, bars, and house concerts. Today I have, depending on the market, depending on the country, I play for audiences anywhere between a hundred and a thousand people. And it's very rewarding and I've done it all by myself. I kind of waited as any artist, you, especially back in the day, you sort of wait to be discovered. You think, well, okay, where is the magical day when some producer comes to see you play or reaches out to you? And I've reached out to hundreds of people myself back in the day with zero response rate. And that's when I realized life's too short. You got to take it in your own hands. If I don't do it for myself, nobody else will.
Leah Roseman (00:01:02):
Hi, you're listening to Conversations with Musicians with Leah Roseman, which I hope inspires you through the personal stories of a diversity of fascinating guests. Ian Maksin holds a special place in the hearts of his fans worldwide with his unique concerts of cello and songs in over 30 languages. It was really interesting to learn about how he's forged a unique path as a solo touring performer, and he shared his insights on finding commonalities between cultures, mindfulness practice, and how he stays healthy with such an intense touring schedule. You'll hear about his childhood, his need to break out of a strict classical music career, how his love of languages started, and some surprises including how he became a pilot as a teenager. Like all my episodes, you can watch this on my YouTube channel or listen to the podcast on all the podcast platforms. And I've also linked the transcript to my website, Leahroseman.com. The podcast theme music was commissioned from composer Nick Kold, and you can use the timestamps to navigate the episode. It's a joy to bring these inspiring episodes to you every week, and I do all the many jobs of research, production and publicity. This weekly podcast is in season five, and I send out an email newsletter where you can get access to exclusive information about upcoming guests. Have a look at the description of this episode where you'll find all the links.
(00:02:23):
Hey Ian, thanks so much for joining me here today.
Ian Maksin (00:02:26):
Hi Leah. Thank you so much for having me.
Leah Roseman (00:02:29):
I know you tour very often, and last night you had a harrowing night of driving.
Ian Maksin (00:02:35):
I tour pretty much all the time. I would say that would be a true thing to say. Last night was okay, actually, I was ferrying my car back to Chicago. I don't take it on tour very often, but it so happened that it'd been sitting in the garage for a long time and my mechanic, because I never drive it, and my mechanic said, you really need to take it out for a spin because it's more harm for it sitting and not being driven. So I said, okay, I'm going to take it up for a drive. So I did a run of about 20 cities in the Midwest, Canada all the way to Quebec and finished in Philadelphia. Then I went, left the car in Philadelphia, went overseas for a month, came back and did more northeast USA for two more weeks. And then last night, me and my son, who was in college in New York, we drove it back, ferried it back, so to speak, back to Chicago. It was pretty uneventful. We hit some weather around Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania, but it all turned out good. Nothing too scary.
Leah Roseman (00:03:49):
So if you're not normally driving your own car and you're doing a lot of travel, I know you travel abroad as well, but what do you normally do?
Ian Maksin (00:03:56):
I normally rent a car. I fly. I sort of play in the itinerary in such a way that I have a hub that, for example, Seattle is one of the hubs that I go to rent a car and then play Portland, Vancouver, all of the entire Pacific Northwest. And sometimes I've actually gone as far as Calgary and Edmonton by car that I rented in Seattle, same thing. I would maybe rent a car in Phoenix and then play the entire Arizona play as far as Colorado, possibly as far as California, maybe rent a car in California and go play as far as Arizona, different combinations, logistics are pretty intricate, but I already have a good gist of it. In Europe, for me, it was the first time I decided to rent a car and I sort of regret it. It is pretty stressful for a number of reasons why them is speed cameras everywhere and you have to pay a lot of attention.
(00:04:59):
Plus the lanes are much more narrow and you're literally driving on highway, you're driving mirror to mirror and yeah, so some challenges of driving in Europe, I would probably try to do it by train and other transportation next time because trains are really great for me. What I love about renting a car after you fly into one place, or if you start from home, you literally live out of that car. You have all of your, I could have my shirts hanging, I don't have to iron them every single time because I have to pack them into a suitcase. So I could have a bunch of clean shirts hanging in the back of the car and be playing for two or three weeks without having to worry about that and other things. So it's nice to be able to not have to load, unload, load, load, load, unload every single time.
Leah Roseman (00:05:55):
Yeah, it's interesting talking about these details. So when you were a small child, your dad taught you guitar and different styles.
Ian Maksin (00:06:02):
I wouldn't say different styles. He is an amateur musician, was at the time, he never had formal musical training except a few years maybe of classes. So he taught me what he could. He taught me some chords and he taught me some strums in the right hand, and that was about it. And then I was on my own pretty much after that. So pretty much I never had formal training on guitar. I consider myself self-taught and I pretty much just listened to a lot of rock and roll and acoustic blues and blues. That's what fascinated me the most as far as guitar playing was concerned.
Leah Roseman (00:06:46):
And your mom, I was interested researching your background in terms of your childhood. I believe you have a cool story about when you auditioned for the music school in the former USSR and you had to sing a song.
Ian Maksin (00:06:59):
Oh, yeah. So there was a famous film called Mimino, it came from Georgia. It was a comedy that everybody knew, and the main actor was a famous Georgian singer and actor. So I was really fascinated with his music, with his songs and the way of singing. It was very soulful and very, this ethnic flair of Georgian accent and very charismatic. So for me, I loved singing his songs just for myself, for my own pleasure. But in order to enter the music school, my parents had prepared me with some proper songs to sing at the entry exam and to their horror, I decided myself, I took that executive decision at the very last moment to sing that song by Vakhtang Kikabidze as was his name, the Georgian singer, and actor, and I did it with so much passion, so much soul with body language that I never practiced with any other songs, but I remember doing things with my hands and my arms. So I guess it turned out so good that they were pretty impressed, and that's what got me into that music school, which other songs, proper songs probably may not have, may not have, because that was the special school for Gifted Children at the Leningrad Conservatory, which was a very prestigious and competitive place. They probably had a few dozen kids per one spot auditioning. So yeah, it was a pretty big deal.
Leah Roseman (00:08:50):
So you were five when you did this song?
Ian Maksin (00:08:51):
Yeah,
Leah Roseman (00:08:52):
Yeah, yeah. It's such a cool story in so many ways, and I believe you had some introduction to Georgian culture a little bit because your mom had lived there as a child.
Ian Maksin (00:09:01):
Well, thank you so much for being so prepared for this interview. It really means a lot to me. Indeed, my mother's family, they were originally from Ukraine, but since my grandfather was in the military, he finished World War II in Berlin. They went all the way from Stalingrad to Berlin as a soldier. Actually, he had a commander role by the time he finished. But anyway, so he went through World War II and then they lived in Germany for a number of years. So my uncle grew up in Germany for a number of years, then they moved to Yerevan Armenia. That's where he was stationed next, and that's where my mother was born. But they were only there for a couple of years. So their next place was Georgia, and they lived in to Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia for a number of years. So that's pretty much where my mom remembers most of her childhood.
(00:10:08):
She lived there from age three till maybe 13 or 14, and that's sort of, we had a very strong connection in the family. Obviously my mom was telling me lots of stories about how she was growing up there, lots of photographs. Also my family, my mother's family had adopted many of the Georgian customs. It's such a rich place culturally that it's almost impossible not to adopt it. Even if you spend a week there, you get so inspired and affected by that culture that you want to be part of it. But they lived there for many years. So obviously all of the cooking, majority of the cooking that grandma and my mom did with Georgian food, which is incredible, very unique, some unique recipes, unique ways to cook, to cook meat, vegetables and other things. No other nearby countries have similar recipes, whether it's Turkey or other Mediterranean countries, not at all, very unique.
(00:11:13):
So that film, they had their own very strong film culture, and those films were obviously translated into Russian, but a lot of times we were translated by Georgian actors dubbing them, and it created this very, very special flair with this unique sense of humor, which is almost, this humor came from another culture, from another language, from a very completely different language. But it was still funny, even in Russian, it was really funny. And of course the music, Georgian music is also absolutely unique. You could find some similarities with, it obviously stems back to Byzantine roots, Greek Byzantine through the church, through all of that stuff. But at the same time, it's extremely, it's absolutely unique Georgian music. You could spot it right away that it's Georgian, that it's not Turkish, it's not Balkan, it's Georgian. That with the most unique feature of Georgian music is the tradition of male choir, male polyphonic choir where several men, and it's so amazing that literally, I think every single Georgian man knows majority of those songs and they just, any group of random men who don't know each other can meet up at a table with wine and food and start singing with no cue.
(00:12:50):
They just start. One person starts and 10 seconds later, the entire table is singing in Polyphonic Harmony in four or five, six part harmony. They sing these incredible ancient sounding songs that probably have not evolved in hundreds of years. They've been passed on from generation to generation, and it sounds just exactly the same way as it did a thousand years ago. So it literally gives me goosebumps every time I hear that sort of music. So back to my mom and my family, obviously I was exposed to all of that since I was a little kid. So yes, Georgian, Caucasus culture and specifically Georgian culture is very, very close to me
Leah Roseman (00:13:45):
Now. I listened to some of your albums, which feature your cello music, and of course we'll be getting into that, but you do sing in 37 languages, and I found a beautiful video on your YouTube channel of you singing in Georgian from a concert in Chicago.
Ian Maksin (00:14:01):
My favorite song of all times, not only my favorite, but I sing it in almost every concert all over the world, and there's not a concert where somebody would not come up to me and say, this song is incredibly beautiful and really gets very deep.
Leah Roseman (00:14:18):
What are the lyrics about?
Ian Maksin (00:14:21):
It's a wedding song. It's an old, old, old traditional wedding song, also probably passed on from generation to generation. Some source say it's Turkish in origin, which is quite possible because that region Adjara, but by the Black Sea on the border with Turkey. It's quite possible that there's definitely some cross-cultural connection there throughout the centuries, but it's a wedding song and a young man is singing to his fiance. I've had to climb nine, not three, not seven, nine mountains in order to find you been looking for you everywhere and I found you, and I'm here to stay. We're going to be happy together forever, that kind of thing.
Leah Roseman (00:15:03):
So would it be possible for us to use a clip of that song in this podcast?
Ian Maksin (00:15:07):
Absolutely. You are welcome to use the clip. I can send you the 4K source file if you like, and you're welcome to. It would be my pleasure if it plays on the air.
Leah Roseman (00:15:20):
Thanks. And of course, everything will be linked in the podcast notes to your channel and your website and all that. You're about to hear performance ofGelino from a live concert in Chicago, and I've linked the YouTube video on Ian's channel in the show notes along with his website.(music)
(00:15:36):
Actually, before we leave Georgia, I'm curious about the food because said you love this food. Is there a particular recipe that you enjoy, like a dish?
Ian Maksin (00:20:51):
Okay, there's one that's called Shkmeruli, the language is so unique, it's the only surviving one of the very few, or the only major surviving language in the Kartvelian group of languages, native to that specific area. And it sounds like nothing else. There's a lot of weird consonants. There's a lot of agglutinations of consonants together, four or five consonants together. So Shkmeruli is the name of this dish. It's roasted chicken with lots and lots and lots of garlic, and then it's finished in a heavy cream sauce. It's probably not the most healthy dish, but it's just something to die for if you just do it once a year or so. That's one. Then Phkali is a vegetarian dish. It's literally ground nuts with a whole array of vegetables. It could be spinach where it are mixed in ground nuts are mixed in with ground spinach, or it could be with beets, it could be with eggplant.
(00:22:13):
It could be a whole number of things, but it's definitely one of my favorite vegetable appetizers or even could be as a side dish of all times, has a very unique taste. Then stuffed eggplant, stuffed grape leaves. Well, grape leaves is more similar to other cultures around the area, but stuffed eggplant is very, very unique. Also, they have cheeses that are made in a very unique way that I can recognize it from a thousand other cheeses that it's the Georgian Sulguni to speak, and they use the cheese for past. Unfortunately, I don't eat pastries anymore for a long time, but they have this famous pastry with that sulguni cheese that it makes it stand out from any other cheese pastry anywhere in the world. It's absolutely recognizable and unique.
Leah Roseman (00:23:17):
Okay, great. And you were able to go on tour there a few months ago?
Ian Maksin (00:23:23):
I have been. Georgia has become sort of a permanent staple for me. I go there at least once a year. I've been going since 2018, since , with the exception of the Covid year or two. And every time it's an extremely inspirational place to visit and to be able to share my music. My last concert there in the previous years, I played at the Philharmonic Hall and at the Conservatory for a very large number of people. But the very last concert that I just did in the fall was at the more intimate venue in the basement of a medieval castle right in the middle of Tbilisi. And just being there was something incredibly special, let alone making music in that space. It just really, I can't think of a place or a way to get closer to magically being transported to a different time period or timeless of being in a timeless space as being there and making music there, creating live music.
Leah Roseman (00:24:41):
Now, you speak a few languages, but you sing in so many, so I was curious how that kind of got started.
Ian Maksin (00:24:48):
So as a kid with my dad, he was an amateur musician. He was a physician by day and a musician by night. He played weddings in Leningrad probably five nights a week. So he married probably thousands and thousands of couples. Probably the majority of couples got married in those whatever, 20 years that he was active with his band. Got married to my dad's music and they played everything. They played and sang everything that was out there, all the top music from the former Soviet Union, Russian, Ukrainian, Malian, Georgian, Armenian, all of the countries that from Soviet, all the countries, certainly all the Eastern block Polish, Czech, East German, Yugoslavian, all of that music and Western pop music as well. Italian was very big at that time. Italian pop music, French pop music, some English pop music like the Beatles, Rolling Stones and a few other, Simon Garfunkel of course.
(00:25:58):
And then I discovered already on my own, I discovered Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan and Led Zeppelin and all of that kind of stuff. So he sang all of that, even though he didn't speak a word of those languages, but he had it written out in translation. He had these books that were this thick with many of them handwritten, others with stapled type writing, and all of those were transliterated in cyrillic letters, songs in all those languages. So I started by copying what my dad was doing, but I was really curious what those songs were about. I wanted to know. So I started looking for dictionaries to translate all those things and all those songs, and my favorite at the time was Italian. So I really was in love with one of the Italian female singers at the time, and I really wanted to know what she was singing about.
(00:27:03):
So I found a dictionary, but I could not find in Leningrad at the time, I could not find somehow Italian into Russian dictionary. I found Italian to German, so I had to first translate Italian to German and then German into Russian. So I was pretty obsessed with the linguistics at the time, and it was fascinating to me. I wanted to get it right. I wanted to get to sound like the singers did. I wanted to make sure that my pronunciation was correct. I started paying attention how phonetics were different in different languages. So for me, although I never became a professional linguist, so to speak, it always on the back burner somehow was a hobby for me. Throughout the years. I learned English, I learned French, and then eventually I learned Spanish. And even now I still, I'm trying to challenge myself to learn more languages. I'm currently learning Turkish first because I am very fascinated with the entire Turkish and turkic culture, which is much larger than Turkey. There's a huge part of the world from Mongolia to a huge area that speaks languages that are
Leah Roseman (00:28:22):
Like Kyrgyzstan.
Ian Maksin (00:28:23):
Similar to Turkish in the same language. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So for me, by learning Turkish, I pretty much opened myself doors to understand a lot of these languages, learn songs very quickly, and even communicate with people in other turkic countries by knowing Turkish. So for me, it's a pretty important thing right now. So yeah, as far as other languages, obviously knowing Russian and Ukrainian, it's a lot easier for me to think in any other Slavic language. By knowing Spanish and French, it's very easy for me to learn and understand, even understand Portuguese, Romanian and other romanic languages, whereas some other language groups like Arabic for example, is very challenging for me. And even today I do sing in Arabic. I enjoy singing in Arabic very much, but phonetics are quite challenging, and the native Arab speakers say, well, you still need to work. Keep working on your Arabic, keep working. So yeah, it's definitely quite different as far as the phonetics, I can figure out majority of the language phonetics based on the knowledge I have, but some languages Arabic are quite challenging.
Leah Roseman (00:29:49):
Okay, well, there's so much to talk about, but I want to make sure that the listeners have a chance to hear some of your cello playing early enough in the episode. So maybe we should talk about your most recent album, Amor Renatus. All the titles are in Latin, so I thought maybe we could include a clip of the title track.
Ian Maksin (00:30:08):
Absolutely. Let's do it.
Leah Roseman (00:30:10):
So do you want to speak to the album a little bit?
Ian Maksin (00:30:13):
Sure. So this album is somewhat different from my previous releases of original music. My first release of fully original music was in 2019 album titled Sempre, and it was deeply inspired by European film music composers by composers like Ludovic Einaudi and Yann Thiersen, who you all, everybody knows from soundtrack to Amélie. So it was mainly Neoclassical music. Then in 2021, my next release was titled The Alchemist, inspired by the book by Paulo Coelho, and it was, I would call it kind of like ethno new age. It is really hard to place it genre wise, but it was deeply affected by traditional music from the Middle East, from Mongolia and Central Asia and with lots of frame drum and tambourine, that kind of thing. Sort of a shamanic element to it and a very sort of pan world music feel to it. And going back to Amor Renatus, it's sort of coming back to the roots. The deepest influences I would say are Baroque music, namely music of Johann Sebastian Bach, and music of early French Baroque composers like Marin Marais for example.
(00:31:51):
So it does have a baroque field kind of, I would call it neo baroque. It's like baroque harmonic basis and some other elements of bar Baroque music with maybe a little bit of a twist the way I felt it. And also the center part of the album, several tracks constitutes sort of a mini requiem with traditional, some of the traditional Requiem parts. And you could probably pick out some quotations from Johann Sebastian Bach, some of the riffs that these requiem movements are recognizable to say, okay, this kind of sounds like Johann Sebastian Bach. But then it sort of travels into a completely different dimension and sounds like kind of like a crazy Balkan, Balkan dance right in the middle of it. Then other parts sound maybe like Vivaldi slash Piazzolla with also kind of a jazz jazzy feel to them. So it's very eclectic based on what my favorite music was, anywhere between Marin Marais and Piazzolla, sort of, kind of eclectic, but going back to all those genres, and I would say it's much more profound as far as the emotional base is concerned. When I was writing this album, it was right as the war in Ukraine broke out, and that whole thing completely broke my heart and I was in a pretty dark place for a number of months. And writing this music really helped me process a lot of those emotions, including anger, guilt, indignation, all of those things, and help me find light and love on the other end because it's really easy to plummet into a whole array of dark emotions that start destroying you inside out. And this writing, this music and playing it really helped me tremendously. Ironically enough, this album came out in the same week as another horrific war broke uut in the Middle East that also put a lot of people on completely different parts of, created another huge division in the world, and these sort of divisions keep happening again and again, and most recently related to in light of the election events in the United States, there's a lot of anger, a lot of hatred among people, and I do feel that music purpose of this music, I didn't probably know when I was writing it, but then I realized after it came out that it does have a purpose to help people subconsciously process these emotions and find light and love on the other end of it.
(00:35:23):
For me, that's really the main purpose of this music, and I do believe music is very powerful and can help us achieve those things maybe easier than any other medium.
Leah Roseman (00:35:39):
You're about to hear an excerpt from Amor Renatus, the title track from Ian's album. His website is linked in the show notes (Music)
(00:35:46):
And for those people watching the video, they can see the Ukrainian flag behind you. And I know you're raising quite a bit of money for the Leonid Foundation with your,
Ian Maksin (00:38:46):
There's also a Georgian flag there too, one of my favorite countries. But I do also, there could be a huge discussion about who's right and who's wrong and who should be helping out who. I get a lot of that, but the bottom line is, and we all have to agree here, that there are people, there are children, families who are deeply affected by this war and other wars that do not deserve to be in that situation. That's the bottom line for me, and those are the people that I want to help as much as possible. And for me, Ukraine obviously hits the closest to home, and that's the reason why I do it for Ukraine and not for other countries. Some people asking, why don't you raise money for so and so or for this cause or for that cause because this is the cause that I feel the strongest about and it could be different for somebody else.
(00:39:54):
And I think the most important part is that you give and that you share and it is already secondary to what your cause is because that's something I discovered actually, the more I was giving, the more I was getting back in many, many ways. So for me, it was a huge life lesson on giving and how it works and made me realize that it's probably one of the most powerful laws of the universe that really should be taught in schools. And I do when I play for kids, and I do quite a bit and I hope to do it more and more, I bring it up to them and I think it should be taught on regular basis the law of giving and sharing.
Leah Roseman (00:40:46):
Yeah, so you do these live streams of many of your concerts for people that don't know, and then on social media, you have a link to the Leonid Foundation who helps Ukrainian refugees in New Jersey. Is that it?
Ian Maksin (00:40:59):
In the northeast United States? It just so happens that a lot of them come through New York or New Jersey, and it's a large sort of concentration of Ukrainian refugees, and they've helped several thousand, many hundreds families and several thousand individuals who have come to New York, New Jersey area, and specifically they operate out of Central Jersey. They started off as just a volunteer family, two husband, wife, and three little kids. They started off as volunteers. I remember helping even before they became a foundation, their entire home was just like this one giant warehouse. They had humanitarian aids sitting all over the house. They had at least two families living in their basement and in free rooms of their very modest house, and then it grew bigger and bigger to the point where they became, became a foundation and the magnitude of their impact has multiplied.
Leah Roseman (00:43:07):
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(00:43:08):
So let's return to your childhood. I know you probably had a very strict education in Leningrad, which is now St. Petersburg, right?
Ian Maksin (00:43:17):
Yes, strict would be the right word. It was quite strict and maybe at that time that kind of approach to education, and it was pretty common in all areas, all competitive areas, music, sports, very much so in the Soviet Union at that time, it was very stringent and rigid as far as the approach was concerning. It was kind of almost like you had to be strong and feel like you had to prove something to someone. For me, it was not maybe for my personality at that time, it was not exactly the best approach, so I wasn't doing very well, but anyhow, I still kept going. Somehow I still kept going because I could not picture my life without music. I kept going and going and going, and I would say I was fully able to open and develop into a professional musician already when I came to the United States, even though I was given very obviously highest level of education, musical background in Leningrad, but it was not until I came to America and I had some very special people in my life who made me feel like I was capable of becoming a professional musician and have my own personal voice and do something, do meaningful with it.
(00:44:52):
One person was Suren Bagratuni, the amazing Armenian cellist and an educator who I was fortunate to study to be his TA teaching assistant in grad school at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign. And second person was Michael Tilson Thomas, the music director of San Francisco Symphony and of the New World Symphony where I was accepted as a Fellow at the time. In 2000. He really made me feel and encouraged me to pursue my personal voice as an artist, as a musician, which made me go, in fact, beyond the orchestra career, that that's what New World Symphony was geared at the time, and everybody was like this orchestra audition frenzy. Everybody was practicing five, six hours a day and with one sole goal of getting yourself secured a job with a major symphony orchestra with this in spite all the odds, it was really like lottery and people are putting a lot on a stake, spending thousands of dollars on these orchestra auditions going and playing like 300 people auditioning for one spot. It was absolutely crazy, and at the same time, I began to feel like I was capable of something different. It took me probably several years between then and when I actually started pursuing it, but it was definitely a refractory period for me to the realization that I could pursue my own personal voice. So what I did, I pretty much quit on what I was doing related to classical music career and started from scratch exploring my own personal musical journey.
Leah Roseman (00:47:05):
Were you improvising at that time?
Ian Maksin (00:47:07):
I was mainly on the guitar because that's what I knew as a kid. I was trained very strictly on the cello, and for me, cello was classical. I didn't regard it as anything other than classical instrument. And at the same time, I was playing a guitar, which I played else in that I played rock, pop, blues, all of those things. I was obviously improvising as I was playing blues and some jazz. I was never formally trained, and I really regret not getting into jazz improvisation, which I did, but not anywhere near the degree that I could call myself a jazz musician. That's something hopefully my next reincarnation. I'm praying to become a jazz musician because that's something, it's such a rich existence being able to have that brain and ability to improvise at that level. So I never got to that point, but obviously I have background in improvisation.
(00:48:15):
So it was around 2013, 2014 when I started experimenting with the cello outside the envelope playing, tried playing some rock and roll, tried playing some covers, tried incorporating elements that I learned on guitar and on other instruments into cello. It was not very easy because the fact that cello is tuned in fifths instead of fourths, which is much tighter, everything is under your fingers in guitar, you have more strings, and the strings are more narrowly tuned among each other, which allows you to have these chordal and chords and scales under your finger, which is a lot easier to improvise. And on the cello, everything is so scattered that you almost have to pretend that you are playing the guitar in your mind and then try to do it on the cello. So it is definitely a lot more challenging in many ways, to improvise, to play jazz.
(00:49:28):
Let's put it this way, with folk music, it's a little bit easier. If you take, for example, different traditions of say, Mongolia or Turkic music, which is much larger than Mongolian, all the way, you could even include Japan and China and Turkey and all the Siberian nations into that same umbrella with very similar improvisation. Some of it is on pentatonic, others more has more complex scales, but has a lot of similarities. Then if you take Middle Eastern music, which also has some similarities, like if you take Turkish music, if you take Arabic music, there's some common elements, but also there's some differences, but also you can sort of figure out a way to improvise pretty easily on those and other African music, which is directly connected to the blues. For me, it was a major discovery when I discovered my first discovery in African music was Ali Farka Touré, a prominent guitarist from Mali, and his music was like, wow, this is where everything comes from.
(00:50:51):
This is where the blues comes from. This is where rock and roll comes from. This is where jazz comes from. And then I started exploring more of West African music music from Senegal, Burkino Faso, and it was extremely fascinating for me. And right now my music is very deeply connected to West African music and also, but interestingly enough, you could put all of those people in the same room, and I guarantee you I could get them. Well, it's been done. I don't have to do it. It's been done and proven that it can be done. You can put people from Mali, you can put people from Mongolia and several other completely random places around the world and have them improvise together on a four court progression, and that's very powerful. That's very, very powerful. It made me also realize that if we probably take that music several thousand years back, that it has a lot more common denominators and common elements than we even think, and that we have a much more profound connection through musical DNA that connects a lot of people on this super deep, profound level that we could hear some bits of music, maybe combinations of three or four nodes that we have in genetic memory that sends us back to 20, 30 generations back, maybe even further back in our genetic memory.
Leah Roseman (00:52:27):
And I think with trade music, humans have always traded. Music would've been the one thing they could trade across. Language barriers would be singing
Ian Maksin (00:52:35):
Absolutely.
Leah Roseman (00:52:37):
Now, I'm curious about tuning. Do you tune your cello in different tunings?
Ian Maksin (00:52:41):
I do not simply because it's just a pain in the butt, retuning the cello every single time. It's no fun even just tuning it to fifths. It's not fun. It's a little bit better with the carbon cello because it doesn't go out of tune as much as the wooden cello, but still, it is just not a lot of doing it on daily basis, let alone in the middle of the concert trying to do a different tuning. It is definitely not in the cards, but there's some shortcuts. There's some things like some of the electronics that I use that help me I use, among other things, I use an octave pedal, the octaver that gives me an extra octave on the bottom, which is very, very helpful if I want to add at the bass. It can also help me create different colors by adding an octave above that I can make the chill sound like some cool ethnic instruments. And yeah, there are some shortcuts, but I have not experimented with different tunings on the cello. No.
Leah Roseman (00:53:56):
And in terms of using a looping pedal, how long have you been doing that?
Ian Maksin (00:53:59):
I started, I think I bought my first loop pedal around 2015, and I was, my first biggest inspiration was Zoë Keating. There's a colleague from San Francisco, California who's been playing electronic music on the cello since probably early two thousands became, I remember we became friends on MySpace. It was before all of those modern platforms, and I was extremely fascinated with her music and what she was doing. And I would say she was probably the main inspiration for me to pick up the loop pedal, even though I feel that what I do is something completely different from what she does. Nevertheless, she was the first person that sort of put me in that direction of using loop pedal, and it took me a while to really get it up to the point where I could safely do it in a concert setting without screwing up or without screwing up too much. But still, it's kind of a hit or miss, maybe one out of 10 concerts. I do have something go wrong and I have to maybe start from scratch and just, but those instances are sort of, I've been able to get them down to the minimum when that kind of thing happens. But that's really from probably investing tens of thousands of hours into doing
Leah Roseman (00:55:34):
I, I've spoken to a few artists who use Loop pedals on this series, and one of them, Linsey Pollak in Australia was using it so early at that time, the loops possible were so short, it was ridiculous that you could create anything. I think it was, I don't want to misquote him. It was maybe 30 seconds or less that it was the only thing. I'm probably misquoting the exact amount, but it was very, very short. And it's interesting. Now, you mentioned MySpace, Ian, I did want to ask you how you think the internet has influenced your career. I think it's really helped you.
Ian Maksin (00:56:05):
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. In fact, for self so-called self-produced artists like myself, internet has given opportunities that otherwise would not have been available. And honestly, I do not see myself having been able to reach out to such a large audience. I've been using social media since MySpace, and I did have probably a significant audience at that time. But really with the rise of Facebook, I was able to reach out to a very, very large number of people. I think I opened my fan page back in 2009 concurrent with the first release that I had, the album called Solo Flight, which is mainly musical of Johann Sebastian Bach. When it was my first year of really my independent work, when I made a tour, I booked a tour myself through Borders stores throughout the country, and it was not done through their headquarters, but it was done through reaching out to all individual Borders stores around the country to every store separately.
(00:57:29):
And I was able to get my CDs into at least a hundred stores around the country. And then I did akin to into book signing tours. I had CD signing tours, and I made some money. I wasn't charging for, the concerts were free, but I was making money on merchandise, and it was my first sort of commercial experience outside mainstream classical music. And classical music, as we all know, does not pay for itself. It's something that exists mainly through donation, I would say. I remember being involved in New World Symphony's development, and from what I remember, 80% of the money came from donations. And it kind of bothered me at the time, and it was one of the reasons why I really wanted to prove something to myself at the time and to other people that you could play the cello and really break even and make a few bucks on the back end of it as opposed to going around begging pretty much for money to exist.
(00:58:41):
I did not like that concept, and that's probably one of the reasons why I left mainstream classical music. So for me, it was the first experience and Facebook played a huge role. That's when I started using Facebook advertisement. Obviously I didn't have huge budgets at the time. I remember advertising $1 a day or $2 a day, but it was the beginning. And that was something I was able to do as an entrepreneur, as a musical entrepreneur. And I learned a great deal. I started learning about music marketing, about digital marketing, and it was something that I spent a lot of time doing, and I still spend a lot of time. I do not have, as of today, I do have digital marketing help. I have a couple of people working for me on other tasks as far as booking and logistics and publicity, but not digital marketing, just simply because I feel like I've learned the intricacies.
(00:59:43):
I know exactly what works and what doesn't work in my specific case. And as far as doing creatives, doing creating ads, finding target audience and things like that, that is very, I've made a couple of attempts to delegate it, to outsource it, and I have not succeeded until today. So in any given week, I probably spent 30 to 40 hours doing digital marketing instead of writing music. But to a certain degree, it, it's a very engaging task for me. And probably if it wasn't that engaging, I would've found ways to outsource it, but I'm still doing it because I actually enjoy it. So yes, Facebook, I was able to grow an international audience. I started putting out advertisement, putting videos, putting ads on videos, and reaching out to worldwide audience and realizing there's thousands of people listening to my music in Argentina, Turkey, in Mexico, in Romania, and completely different parts of the world where otherwise at that time, I would never in the world would've been able to reach out to those people otherwise.
(01:01:04):
And that also made me believe that my music had some meaning to those people and made me believe that I should keep going and trying to reach out to more and more people. And until today, for me, that's the biggest goal, is to get my music out there to as many people as possible at whatever it takes at whatever cost. And in fact, I pay probably a lot more to get my music out there to be heard than I get through royalties on Apple or Spotify or any other platforms. I make a living mainly through live concerts. And for me, that's a privilege to be able to play live concerts for people and actually make some money on the backend. But as far as just getting my music out there, which is my primary goal, whether I get to play for those people live or whether I do not, I still make an effort and I invest significant amounts of my savings, reinvesting it back into it with really no expectations of any kind of return for it, just being able for other people to hear my music.
Leah Roseman (01:02:29):
I was looking at your tour schedule in different places you've played, and you had played at the Airplane Home outside Portland, and you met Bruce Campbell. Could you share that experience and meeting him?
Ian Maksin (01:02:41):
That's definitely one of my favorites. I have several of those venues throughout North America. Another one is the pirate ship that I've been doing performances on in Vancouver, BC in the English Bay, but the Airplane Home obviously tops it off. I discovered Bruce and the Airplane Home through other fellow musicians who had done events there. He's extremely generous as far as allowing people to conduct concerts on his property. An incredible person, very, very generous, very kind with this kind of global connection, global love vision. And he's done a tremendous deal for the local community in Portland, bringing people together with his airplane and internationally as well, because he's living part of the year in Japan, and he's doing something similar in Japan as well. But yes, the Airplane Home, he purchased an old airliner and put it on his property outside Portland, Oregon. It's like place he gets, I would say hundreds of visitors every single day going to visit his home.
(01:04:09):
And the property is something, one of a kind, at least in North America. It's definitely a very unique experience as far as doing a performance. For me, it's double special because I believe the two most magical things we have is live music and flying. And I'm a pilot. I've been flying since I was 16 years old, and flying for me is second most or first or second most incredible thing that we can experience in life along with live music. And so connecting aviation, airplanes and live music in one piece, it is really unique and that's why I look forward to those performances. I've done already a number of them, and I'm looking forward to doing it again and again, hopefully for as long as I can. Those things sell out very, very fast, and people also find it extremely fascinating being able to listen to the music under the stars and this beautiful pine tree forest next to this beautiful vintage airplane.
Leah Roseman (01:05:28):
You were a pilot when you were 16?
Ian Maksin (01:05:30):
Right.
Leah Roseman (01:05:32):
So how did that opportunity come about?
Ian Maksin (01:05:35):
So in the former Soviet Union, I've been fascinated with aviation since I was a little kid. I remember my grandparents were living in a suburb of Leningrad next to a small airport that had skydivers and stunt planes flying out of there. And I remember I could spend hours and hours at a time just watching those skydivers and stunt planes, aerobatic planes, doing their maneuvers, and I was absolutely obsessed with it, and I wanted to do it. I wanted to do all that stuff as a kid. So in the Soviet Union, there was an opportunity for young people to do those things. It was one of the things that I'm grateful for young people to go and absolutely free of charge, do skydiving and learning how to fly planes. So I started doing it as a teenager, and then I continued when I came to the United States, as soon as I started saving gig money in my early teens while I was still in college, I started flying again and was spending all of the money I was making on flying lessons and getting my licenses advanced.
(01:06:59):
At some point, I was contemplating an airline career in North America, but it was around the same time. It was around 2000. It was my first year at New World Symphony. It was the same year as 9 11 happened, and a lot of things in the airline industry has changed at the time. It was a really rocky time for the airline industry. So for me, it was sort of like the iceberg that I always thought, okay, music was giving me all these opportunities, but I want to be an airline pilot. It sort of flipped, and I came to a realization partially thanks to MTT, Michael Tilson Thomas, at the time and the opportunity to be in New World Symphony, I realized I'm actually capable of becoming a professional musician. That was the first time I was what, 22, 23, when I realized I can do it. I can do it.
(01:07:57):
I have something to say as a musician and I can do it. And I realized that it could be a much more fulfilling life than flying planes for hire for the rest of my life. So it sort of reaffirmed my commitment to music. And from then on, I pursued my career in music and flying was put on a back burner. I had to put it on hold completely between for the last nearly 20 years as I was raising a family. And as I was fully invested in my musical career, simply there was no room for flying. But now that my son is, as I mentioned earlier, he's in college in New York and is fully independent, and I'm at the point in my life where I can sort of look at other things that I've put on the back burner and bring them back into my life. And I just actually, I got back to Chicago last night and I was going through all of the mail and I found my new reinstated pilot's license came from FAA in Washington DC and I legally can be flying again, and all I have to do is do some flying with an instructor to get back into my currency, and I'm very much looking forward to doing
Leah Roseman (01:09:32):
Fun. Yeah. You had talked quite a bit about your marketing and you have a wonderful engaging social media presence, and I was curious if you had any talk tips for people with all that your experience gained
Ian Maksin (01:09:48):
Tips? I am not very good at giving out tips for musicians trying to establish their social media presence. I would say you cannot rely on organic engagement. That's one thing that I learned. You could have most amazing content, but with the social media geared around memes and kind of stupid videos, it's very difficult, almost impossible to break through among the rest of the silly content that goes into the algorithms. So you do need to use target, target ads, whether you can do it for as low as $1 a day, a budget, and it works for $1 a day, you can acquire maybe three or four fans who are going to become your loyal and relevant audience. Most importantly, relevant audience. I do believe that every artist is capable of having their own audience, whether it's a singer songwriter or an, I do believe that each person can build their own audience to the point that they can play live concerts.
(01:11:21):
So it could be somebody, it could be a singer songwriter in Blaine, Washington who has aspirations to perform as a perform for people, whether you start at a bar, at a club, play a house concert for 10 people, but it's your audience. And you can do that by putting your music out there and finding your, your target audience through using online ads, reaching out to the right people and building your audience. Then obviously once you start performing it's word of mouth and you bring in more and more people. I mean, that's how I did it back in the day when I quit mainstream classical music, I went back to clubs, bars and house concerts, playing for 15, 20 people, then 50 people, then a hundred people. And today I have, depending on the market, depending on the country, I play for audiences anywhere between a hundred and a thousand people.
(01:12:35):
And it's very rewarding and I've done it all by myself without any sort of professional help as far as marketing or any kind of production or having a professional impresario is concerned. So I kind of waited as any artist, you, especially back in the day, you sort of wait to be discovered. You think, well, okay, where is the magical day when some producer comes to see you play or reaches out to you? And I've reached out to hundreds of people myself back in the day with zero response rate. And that's when I realized life's too short. You got to take it in your own hands. If I don't do it for myself, nobody else will do it for me. And yeah, it was quite a long journey. I've put all of my effort into it, put a lot of years into it, and now I'm at a place where I feel incredibly grateful to be able to do what I love and to make a living to the point where I feel abundant. I feel I have enough for everything I need and for what my loved ones need as well, and be able to give it, to share it with them and with other people that I want to share with.
Leah Roseman (01:14:05):
Beautiful. Beautifully said. I was curious if you had perspectives on being on the road so much, how you stay healthy?
Ian Maksin (01:14:13):
Oh, that's a very, very good point. Obviously for me, from early days as a performer, for me it was huge. It was the biggest challenge to be there available to perform at my highest performance potential to any given time on the concert schedule. I could have a concert here, there, it's at 7:30 PM a week from now in a different time zone. But I might feel inspired at four o'clock in the morning today, and then I could be really sleepy, tired, and not feeling well by the time I have to do that next engagement. So for me, it was a big question. It was something I had to figure out. And I started by yoga was a big breakthrough for me. Meditation, yoga, and meditation are the two things that have helped me to get to that point where I could control and harvest my own energy whenever I wanted.
(01:15:18):
Have it on demand. And nutrition obviously came into play very quickly into it. Once you become in tune with your body and your mind, you sort of start attracting and eliminating things that are good for you, people that are not good for you, bring in people that are good for you, and same bring in nutrition, other nutrition that is good for you and not good for you. So through just personal trial and error, finding, some things fall into your lap. You watch a video, you find a book, and through those things that the universe brings to you at the right time, you learn. So I've learned a great deal about nutrition, about what works for me. I realized there's no one size fits all.
(01:16:10):
There's one thing that works for one person, doesn't work for another. So I have my own sort of list of ingredients that work for me that I try to stick to as much as I can. Even when I'm on the road. When I'm on the road, I try to stay in places that have a kitchen as much as possible when I can stay. It's not the case when I stay for one night, but when I stay for two or three nights and I'm able to at least unpack and use the kitchen, I do it. I buy things and I cook for myself from scratch, from those ingredients that are on top of my list. I try to keep it free of things like MSG and excess sodium, which I think is very important, especially as we grow older, to have our food as clean as possible. And it helps me a great deal to stay healthy and have all the vitals, all my parameters in the healthy range and to feel good most importantly. Because for me, it's also not about today. Now I want to stay in this for as long as I can, and God knows, I feel like, okay, this, I have no control over it. This sort of life could last for another five years, maybe another 10 years, maybe 20 years, if I'm lucky know. I have examples.
(01:17:46):
My friend Dave Mason who travels, who is 76 now and who does yoga meditation and is very healthy and travels with travel and tours around the world, people like Mick Jagger and a lot of other people who have stringent tour schedule being in their late seventies. And I have admiration for those people, and I would absolutely love to be one of them then. So today I have to do everything I can to sort of stay in that state of physical and mental health, even more importantly, in order to be able to keep doing and pursue touring as a career. And in fact, with everything that I've discovered throughout the years, I could say I physically and mentally in a much better place than I was when I was 30 or 25 or 20. And I'm very grateful to be able to do that and hopefully even share it with young people and inspire them to do that, because I think it's very, very important. And that's something just like the law of sharing that we talked about earlier, the nutrition, our mental hygiene are the things that also should be taught in elementary school to kids. We could grow a society of people, a much happier generation of people who would be in a much better place if those things were available to them from an early age.
Leah Roseman (01:19:41):
So you mentioned meditation, but other than that, for mental health, what are good strategies?
Ian Maksin (01:19:47):
I would say meditation is like 80 to 90% of it, and just different ways to reach a new level of consciousness. I would say it's meditation and awareness that you develop awareness of what's in your, what you have, what kind of emotions fill up your inner space, your subconscious mind. Some things that we've inherited since we were born. Some things that we've have acquired from an early childhood that put us into an emotional orbit that is predictable. That we sort of, some of the negative emotions like lack and resentment that we feel on daily basis that only generate more of the same emotions and it's almost seemingly impossible to get out of that orbit, which kind of brings in the same circumstances, the same and people and the same events into our lives that make us experience the same emotions over and over again. But by finding ways to disconnect from our past and live in the present moment, disconnected that emotional baggage opens up a whole great realm of possibilities for our future. And I do believe that music can be a very powerful tool in reaching that state, the state of being able to live in the present moment and disconnecting from those things that are dragging us down and not allowing us to live to the fullest of our potential to live to the fullest of all the possibilities that are open to us.
Leah Roseman (01:21:58):
I was curious about memorization for you, because you are mostly playing from memory.
Ian Maksin (01:22:05):
Everything I play is from memory. Absolutely. To me, it's like acting. If you're an actor on stage, you got to do it from memory. Just doing it from the script is just, doesn't cut it somehow. It's just not convincing enough. So I do believe that the same thing with music, especially when you're the solo artist on the stage, you really have to be convincing and do it from the heart. In fact, the expression do it by heart. That's probably why it exists, because you really, when you have something memorized, then you can do it from the heart, from a different place, from a different part of your brain as well. That is where it's already separated from the conscious mind. That's probably what it is. I want to have everything running from the subconscious mind as much as possible. And that sort of brings it back to the subconscious mind. And that's where you, once you're in that space, that's where the healing begins. People have already discovered that thousands of years ago, especially the cultures that use music for to be for healing, use music to get into that altered state in order to begin to heal.
Leah Roseman (01:23:35):
Okay. Interesting. Well, thanks so much for your time today. Really appreciate it having you on the podcast.
Ian Maksin (01:23:39):
Absolutely. Thank you so much, Leah, for this great opportunity. I'm looking forward to actually posting it and sharing it with my fans. Thank you.
Leah Roseman (01:23:52):
I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please share this with your friends and check out episodes you may have missed at LeahRoseman.com. If you could buy me a coffee to support this series, that would be wonderful. Or you can browse the collection of merch with a very cool, unique and expressive design from artist Steffi Kelly with notebooks, mugs, shirts, phone cases and more. I'm an independent podcaster and I really do need the help of my listeners. All the links are in the show notes. Have a wonderful week.
