Mark Deutsch Bazantar Inventor: Interview

Above is the button to take you to the video, podcast, and show notes for this episode. Mark Deutsch is a brilliant and unique musician who has devoted the last 3 decades of his life to his instrument the Bazantar, which is unique to him. There is only one Bazantar, which is a double bass hybrid with elements of the sitar:  it has 6 main strings, 4 drone strings, and 29 sympathetic strings. Mark grew up as a multi-instrumentalist, but primarily a classical, jazz and rock bass player, and gave up a successful career as a performer to devote himself to the Bazantar. While studying sitar with Ustad Imrat Khan, Mark begin delving into the universal fundamentals of music and its underlying frequency structures. The nonlinear mathematical patterns that exist in sound are found universally in the natural world, includeng seashells, and Mark goes into some of the math of the overtone series in some detail, as well as fascinating specifics of how the Bazantar and his playing of it have evolved.  You’ll hear Mark talk about how he developed his patented engineering solution to construct a separate housing for the sympathetic strings. In this episode, Mark demonstrated live, and also is sharing not only excerpts from previously released recordings, but a preview from an upcoming album. 

The full transcript of my interview with the Bazantar inventor Mark Deutsch is below:

Mark Deutsch (00:00:10):

(music) I am the kind of person that once I get something that I want to do, if it doesn't work, I'm just, I really just keep working at it, keep working at it. A lot of people were like, you're crazy. And so that helped because I was like, I will do this. And I was sitting and I was just looking at the instrument. It was the Bazantar, and it was one of those cool things where you had got a bunch of information in your subconscious or you think about it for a long time. You had a bunch of things and all of a sudden, and I called it a thought ball because the whole idea came down or came to me pretty much all at once.

Leah Roseman (00:00:56):

Hi, you're listening to Conversations with Musicians, with Leah Roseman. This podcast strives to inspire you through the personal stories of a diversity of musicians with in-depth conversations and great music that revealed the depth and breadth to a life in music. Mark Deutsch is a brilliant and unique musician who's devoted the last three decades of his life to his instrument, the Bazantar. There's only one Bazantar, which is a double bass hybrid with elements of the sitar. It has six main strings, four drone strings, and 29 sympathetic strings. Mark grew up as a multi-instrumentalist, but primarily a bass player playing classical jazz and rock, and gave up a successful career as a performer to devote himself to the Bazantar. While studying sitar with Ustad Imrat Khan, Mark began delving into the universal fundamentals of music and its underlying frequency structures. The nonlinear mathematical patterns that exist in sound are found universally in the natural world, including seashells, and Mark goes into some of the math of the overtone series in some detail, as well as fascinating specifics of how the Bazantar and his playing of it have evolved. You'll hear Mark talk about how he developed his patented engineering solution to construct a separate housing for the sympathetic strings. In this episode, Mark demonstrated live and also is sharing not only excerpts from previously released recordings, but a preview from an upcoming album. 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 from composer Nick Kold, and you can use the timestamps to navigate the episode. Before we jump into our conversation, I wanted to remind you that you can support this independent podcast through both my Ko-fi page and also my collection of merchandise, which features a very cool, unique and expressive design from artist Steffi Kelly. This weekly podcast is in Season Four 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. Now to Mark Deutsch and his Bazantar.

(00:03:16):

Hey Mark, thanks so much for joining me here today. This episode today is really going to focus on your beautiful instrument, the Bazantar. And I know because we already recorded the big part of the episode, just full disclosure here. So we're going back. I just really wanted you to speak to the audience about what led you to completely change your life and devote yourself to this instrument.

Mark Deutsch (00:03:38):

Cool. That sounds great. Well, I started out as a musician playing gigs when I was 12 years old with my father and my uncle, and that was really interesting, because we played the entire history of the 20th century pop music, western pop music, and that was a weird education. Wasn't one of those kind of kids that had private lessons and was a classical musician, and my parents really liked, supported. It was more like I was a working kid. So I did that and then I rebelled and I went and studied classical music when I was 18. I was like a jazz musician, and I went to the conservatory. I got into conservatory. I studied classical music, but I didn't study classical music with the intention of becoming a classical bassist. I studied classical music. I wanted to learn the acoustic bass. I was a really good electric bass player, and I wanted to be a jazz bassist, but I thought studying classical music would help me with my technique, and I wanted to learn to read notes.

(00:04:55):

I was excellent, really proficient at reading for changes and improvising. So then I did that and that I did on and off for 10 years before I graduated. And I started, made my living as a jazz musician, and I also played the symphony part-time, played the Illinois Symphony and played all kinds of music. But there was a night where I was at a party at the conservatory party and everybody was whatever, and I was feeling antisocial and weird and uptight, which is not that uncommon for me. And I went into this room, it was like a sunroom, it was a little bit off, and I just wanted to take a break from the people or something. And I was sitting in this chair in this lounge chair, and there was some music on, and it happened to be my teacher Ustad Imrat Khan, playing surbahar, which I thought was a sitar because I didn't know anything. And surbahar is the bass version of a sitar.

(00:06:05):

This was my first exposure to this kind of music. And I've always been really interested in different kinds of music, unusual things. When I was a kid, I heard Stravinsky when I was like 14 maybe, and just got really into the weirdest classical music like Yusuchevsky and Cowell and Charles Ives, anything that was really unusual. But then this musics of art music was, I think it was like a pentatonic scale. It was super simple. There weren't that many notes in this scale, which was very different from what I was doing. I was playing avantgarde, bebop and avangarde classical music and really intellectually heavy music with chromatic atonal and chromatic and modulation and all this stuff. And this was the antithesis of that. This was extremely slow and majestic and profound and peaceful, and my nervous system sort of just super relaxed. It was kind of exactly what I wanted though. I didn't know that's what I wanted. I was a little bit of uptight and socially weirded out or whatever, and this was just this sonic wonderful massage.

(00:07:38):

But I didn't actually hear it at first. I just experienced it. And then I noticed, I'm like, wow, what is this music? It's so odd and wonderful. And that kind scared me too because I was like, I can't do this. I could never see myself playing this slowly. I was like playing bass and all that stuff. And this was like, then the no would just empty space, and then I couldn't see myself doing it. And that sort of terrified me. I'm like, I don't have what it takes to do this. So I was very impressed by that. So I went out and I bought a sitar at this store called Coyote Spa in St. Louis where I lived. And it was funny because the guy, he thought I was, I looked like a, I didn't look like a classical musician. I looked like a rock musician, long hair and looked like a hippie.

(00:08:48):

And he was very, very condescending when I went to buy the sitar and I had money with me, and I was like, well, just sit down, show me how to sit with it and show me how to play with it. Show me how to hold it and whatever. And I could play it. I could play most any string instrument with no problem so I could play it. And I remember him being kind of shocked. And so then I bought a sitar, and I got this little weird book by Ravi Shankar, which I don't know, it was kind of pointless, but I got it and I bought it with the sitar, and I taught myself how to play the sitar, and I taught myself how to tune it, which was more of a thing, not tune it, but stringing, stringing it, sitar is challenging. And that was the biggest challenge.

(00:09:40):

And when I did meet my teacher, he wouldn't constantly wouldn't accept that I taught myself how to string it. He's like, no, no, somebody taught you how to do this. I'm like, no, I taught myself just like that. Anyhow, so I played sitar on my own just by listening to records for, I dunno, quite a few years, five or six years. I actually had little gigs and stuff. I had all kinds of gigs. I had blues gigs and rock gigs and little jazz gigs, and I had a classical gig. I was like, whatever you wanted. I was making my money doing all kinds of different stuff, which it is kind of how I grew up as a musician, playing with my dad and uncle, just like, whatever you mean, very much a working musician vibe. But I was really into, personally into the esoteric aspects of music, the deeper profound, what does music do to consciousness kind of thing.

Leah Roseman (00:10:41):

You're about to hear an excerpt from Lahja from the Picasso Tunings. Please check out the link to Mark Deutsch's recordings in the show notes of this episode. (music)

Mark Deutsch (00:12:13):

Very unusually, the guy who I was listening to, Ustad Imrat Khan is a great surbahar player whose brother, he's the younger brother of Vilayat Khan. He's very one of the three trinity of sitar players in the 20th century. Nikhil Banerji, Ravi Shankar, and Vilayat Kahn, so anyhow this is his younger brother. And he came to St. Louis to Washington University, which school is right where I lived. And I had been making all my friends listening to this music. They were like, come on, man. I was like, come on, listen to this great music. I was really into him, and I was really into Sultan Khan, who was sarangi. I was really into the sarangi. Anyhow, when he came, they're all like, you're a witch man. You brought this guy to town because you boys met us listening to him. Here he is now you're going to study with him. So I started studying with him and studying the sitar.

(00:13:11):

And early on he always was like, oh, it'll take you 20 years to learn how to play the shrutis, which is the fine tuning mathematically ratio based, exact tune of the difference between a D Sharp and E flat. They're 22 cents apart. It's this ratio of 81 over 80. But he didn't know any of that stuff. He just knew that a piano would be tempered, and it's based on the 12 root two, and it's technically out of tune. And so he knew that, but he was saying for me, it would take me a really long time to be able to hit those because I was a western cat and I didn't grow up in that system. And that pissed me off kind of. I was like, I don't want it to take 20 years.

(00:14:10):

And I was reading this book at the time. This is a weird copy of it, but this guy, I don't know how you pronounce his name, it's Alain Danielou. This guy's amazing, amazing author. He's written a bunch books and not all of them are on music. And he breaks down all these different tuning systems.

(00:14:36):

Oh, it's Music and the Power of Sound. And this is kind of a cheesy copy. I have given this book to maybe 30 people in my life. I've bought it from my students, I've given it to people. It's the one thing that I give to that want to know what I'm doing. I'm decoding this book right now, which is a cooler thing. This is North and Indian classical music by the same guy. And what I did, which is the most interesting thing I did, it's not that big of a deal, but it's the most interesting thing is I have translated all of the information in these books about tuning into cents. So when you think of what a fifth is, 700 cents, seven half steps or what an octave is, it's 1200 cents. And what I did is I translated that into the shruti, and you could see how it's different.

(00:15:42):

The difference between a real fifth, the perfect fifth, that's really three vibrations to two or 3, 2 5, that's 702 cents. I mean 701.97, but seven two is very close. And so I made this chart, which I don't have in front of me right now. And anyhow, I made this chart at that time when my teacher was like, it's going to take you forever to learn this. And I made this chart and I had this programmable tuner, which I still use from the eighties. It's a Korg MT 1200, and there are way better tuners I'm sure now. But this is the one that I use and it's like 40 years old, and I use it, and I just have it tattooed into my mind how this thing works. And so I made this big chart. I've posted this chart online a bunch, and people are always really into it. It breaks down the 66 harmonically, resonant vibrations and how they work. And I teach this and I'm really into it. And I had gotten really, really deeply into this.

(00:16:59):

At the same time I was studying with my teacher. I was getting super into the math. He didn't teach me the math, the math, I'd never been into math. I mean, I was always good in math, but I never studied it. And I kind of had this late and ability in math and also this sort of ability in engineering. I didn't know I had, when I made the Bazantar, I was just really, really good, with my father, I had, my father was an artist and a musician, but he also was incredibly good at making things. He had me make a gazebo when I was 13 years old and just came home and was like, okay, these are the directions you do it. He was a super perfectionist, and I had to make a gazebo, but I made all kinds of stuff grumpily and kind of hating it as a kid.

(00:17:59):

But all that draftsmanship technical thing, working with tools, all that stuff, I totally stayed away from my whole life. I know how to work on cars, but you would never know that I know how to work on cars. I don't like it.

(00:18:14):

But when I started with the Bazantar, all of this wealth of latent information came into use, and I was able to build itar and super fortunate to have some friends who had a music shop with all kinds of tools and stuff. I taught there. They liked me and whatever. They let me come in and just work at a deck with all these tools and grinders and everything.

Leah Roseman (00:18:49):

One thing you didn't address is why so many sympathetic strings?

Mark Deutsch (00:18:56):

Because more is better.

Leah Roseman (00:18:57):

Okay,

Mark Deutsch (00:18:59):

Well, the prototype, I showed you the prototype last time, right? Yeah. The prototype had less strings, and I really wanted low strings. I really wanted strings that were a combination of a tanpura and whatever sympathetics, the sitar. My imagination was not like I want an Indian instrument. My imagination was like, I love classical music. I'm a jazz musician and I like jazz. I like improvising, but jazz is always doing this stuff where you're going in 16 bar cycles or 32 bar cycles or whatever. And I feel like I'm one of those rats on a cycle going round and around. I love jazz, but I don't like that aspect of jazz. And Indian music's great. I love Indian music also, but it's very parlor. It's very, it's, it's not panoramic in the sense where classical music has these epic vistas. You listen to Smetena or I don't know, Bartok or Mahler or whatever.

(00:20:14):

I mean, I know that's kind of a ridiculous thing to say. I want this instrument to have this sort of vast thing. But the Bazantar does for a solo instrument have a really vast sort of territory and the amount of sympathetic strings, because they get in multiple octaves, four or five, you don't get the kind of sympathetic thing that you get going on with a sitar where it's like you get this multiple level of oscillations between octaves where it's like, and it's much faster and it's acoustical illusion than it makes. And I honestly, I didn't think that, I didn't really know how well it was going to work. The prototype didn't work. Prototype proved that it would work, but it didn't work in some big epic way and it wouldn't stay in tune. So I really overbuilt the one that I have now. I made it so it does not go out of tune. I mean, unless the whole instrument changes. I mean, if I just sit here with this humidity in this temperature, the instrument stays in tune. I haven't seen it since the last time we've talked, so I really overbuilt it, but it turned out better than my best hopes,

(00:22:03):

Which was amazing to me. So I did that sort of classical panoramic thing that I was looking for.

Leah Roseman (00:22:12):

Here's an excerpt from Avodah from the album, Fool.(music)

(00:23:37):

So Mark, I found out about you and your Bazantar probably the same way some of my podcast listeners did. It was when I interviewed Anže Rozman and Kara Talve about Prehistoric Planet. Yeah, so we talked about the Bazantar and your work, and there was a little clip featured. So that was very cool, and it's been on my mind since then.

Mark Deutsch (00:23:59):

That was a really, really cool project. It was interestingly challenging the Bazantar. It's kind of set up like a sitar or an oud or - It's in a key, got a drone, and I went down to LA and I explained it all to them, and I showed them, you want it to sound like the Bazantar. And at the time it was in the key of G, and they were like, okay, cool. And then they sent me stuff in every other key, and I was like, okay, this had reconfigured my mind. But it was, like a lot of projects. It was like I thought, oh, this is impossible. I can't do this, but this is the instrument's not tuned like that. It doesn't work like that. So I had to figure out how to play the Bazantar in a bunch of different keys, but which it doesn't do, and it was cool. Super challenging, super challenging, but it turned out great. They liked it.

Leah Roseman (00:25:04):

Interesting. And actually for people who don't have that kind of budget, you have sampled it, right? People can buy a sample pack.

Mark Deutsch (00:25:14):

Yeah, there was, I think on a 8Dio did a long time ago, 15 years maybe now, and they wanted me to do another one, and I might, and that would be cool. It's used a lot. I hear that it's used, the Bazantar box is what I call it. It's on all kinds of recordings. My partner, she's a dancer, Martha, she was listening to something and she freaked out. She was like, they stole your Bazantar. You didn't work on this project. She was like, and it's the virtual Bazantar.

Leah Roseman (00:26:00):

Yeah,

Mark Deutsch (00:26:04):

I actually don't have much idea what it sounds like. I have not really heard. I have a Bazantar, so I don't really use, but I've heard great things about it and people really like it. I have an idea of making a sound library that's more extensive than that and more of some of my unusual techniques instead of just more in depth and shows off some different aspects of the Bazantar.

Leah Roseman (00:26:40):

Okay. Well, in a few minutes, you're going to be playing a bit. Maybe you could show those techniques that would be really interesting.

Mark Deutsch (00:26:45):

Yeah, I have tuned in Bazantar differently in the last couple months. I was tuned kind of like the sitar, so it's tuned like a sitar, an open fifth or the fourth on top is one of the ways I've played it and tuned it six strings. So it was a gd, GD gc,

(00:27:12):

Which does a lot of really cool things with harmonics and accompanying yourself, particularly with bowing, you can get this rolling bow thing happening. You get this big stuff with a melody on top. It's nice, but I'm always changing the techniques, different techniques. So I was messing around it, and I came to my friend that I played with this guy Jeremy, he's got one of the largest collections of played instruments in the world. And he's this very famous scientist, but he's got just amazing instruments. And I was like, oh, I really love the oud, and well, here, here's an oud. So he gave me an oud, and I started wasting too much of my time playing the oud and not playing the Bazantar, so I stopped. But I got in my mind, the tuning and the tuning. It's so bizarre. I came back, the tuning is a fifth and then fourth all the way.

(00:28:12):

So now it's AEA, and then it's A just tuned like a bass, E, A DGC. I have a high C. And so that's really new and that's opened up a whole different thing. And I've mostly just for, it's been like six months now, I've almost just been plucking the instrument, but I'm trying to work on these plucking techniques where use my thumb. And I have a completely different approach to plucking than a bass player. And I've been expanding my left hand. My bass is, Bazantar is really large. It's the last instrument you would ever want to play solo. And that's pretty much all I do. And to run the kind of lines that I'm hearing in my head, I used to play them as anto with kind of a sitar technique where it's like two fingers and you use one finger kind of as a stylus and the other finger drops, and it sounds really difficult, but it's amazing if you practice it. And I used to play sitar, and so I developed that technique on the Bazantar, which is what my first recording is my Fool recording. So I'm using that technique. And then the Picasso tunings is something completely bizarre where I retune instrument for every piece so that the harmonics make these really super in tune rags. And so it's easy to play the harmonics, sort of easy to play the harmonics, but then I had to relearn how to play the instrument tune in these really bizarre rigs for every piece. So that was pretty insane. But it turned out it really made the Bazantar like an orchestra, the bass tunes like that. But now I'm working with this oud tuning and I'm much more trying to work out sort of a lyric solo sort of oud approach and stuff. And to do that, it's like instead of playing what bass player plays, it's like this is a half step. You're a violinist, right?

Leah Roseman (00:30:29):

I am.

Mark Deutsch (00:30:30):

Yeah. So it's like these are half steps of my instrument, and it's really hard to run a scale when this is like C sharp and D right there. So what I've done is this. These are whole steps now, and so I can run across and run.

Leah Roseman (00:30:49):

So for

Mark Deutsch (00:30:50):

Run

Leah Roseman (00:30:50):

People who can't see, you're using your thumb like a cellist would in thumb position?

Mark Deutsch (00:30:56):

Yeah, except I'm using it everywhere.

Leah Roseman (00:30:57):

Yeah. Okay.

Mark Deutsch (00:30:59):

And because I never did use my thumb much before because it didn't sound good. It sounded like capo, it didn't have, vibrato was not very good. It was just like, oh, the last resort, I'm going to use my thumb. So I never used it because I just couldn't get the kind of sound I wanted out of it. And then during the pandemic, I kept playing these arpeggiations and scales and my thumb was in the right position, but I wasn't using it. And I basic say, oh, well just put your thumb there. Oh, but that sounds like that doesn't sound good. And so for almost a year, I just played with my thumb

Leah Roseman (00:31:48):

Mark. I'm trying to understand physically. I mean, you need a little counter pressure from your thumb in the back of the neck

Mark Deutsch (00:31:55):

Would think, wouldn't you?

(00:31:57):

Yeah, that's all in here. It's weird though. It works on a different muscle than when I'm holding an instrument like this because I'm holding it like this because it is bizarre in a way. It sort of gives my muscles some relief from where they have always been working. So it's a different set of muscles at first with everything else, all kinds of cramps and stuff, all kinds of physical issues, which I wasn't sure it is like, is this going to work or not? It might not work. It's a big risk. Like the thing I did with the tuning instrument, it was a big risk and it was a big challenge, but it paid off. And this is paying off. I mean, it takes a lot of strength and it takes just setting your body and then just imagining the energy going into it. It's almost like, I don't know, people that you reiki or something of just getting your nervous system to accept that position and then relax and then build the strength.

(00:33:08):

Also, you couldn't do this. I couldn't do this if my bass was set up like a classical bass, just, I mean, I could, but I wouldn't be lyric, I wouldn't be fluid bass. My bass is set up to do this. It's not set up like a jazz bass. It's not set up like a classical bass. There are two different setups. It's set up so that you can both bow and pluck reasonably well. Sound good. But also doing something like this with all the slides and stuff I do, it actually has to be pretty low. And I carve my own bridges and I do all my, I mean, built up the, I will show you that in a second, but this is an interesting technique with the sympathetics, like plucking. These are called the drone strings. They're called Chiari Strings in Indian Music.

(00:34:14):

An interesting technique I've developed is I'm using this as a capo and I'm putting it on the harmonics,(music)

Speaker 4 (00:34:24):

So I get like (music) that's, they sound like it then.(music)

Speaker 3 (00:34:39):

And this is the (music),

Mark Deutsch (00:35:30):

So I just practiced that kind of stuff for a long time. I started out though with my thumb like this, my fingernails too. I haven't done this for a while.(music)

(00:35:44):

This has a really cool sound too because it's really clear.(music) And with there, I'm right on the fingernail and I haven't been doing that as much. It's a good technique, but now I'm doing this more (music)

(00:36:36):

And then I could drop in.(music)

(00:37:10):

You see, it gives me that.(music)

(00:37:14):

So that's the tonic of this thing. And this is a whole step there, (music)

(00:37:22):

A whole step down. If I was playing like this, which I still do, of course, then it's the proper bass technique would be (music) a half step. So if you want to go, (music) You're going,(music)

(00:37:41):

Which is fine, sounds good, whatever. If you want to go (music) this, that spread even up here,(music)

(00:38:07):

It's got a good sound. I can vibrate (music)

Leah Roseman (00:38:24):

How much lower than a standard double bass is your lowest string

Mark Deutsch (00:38:29):

Right now it's a low A, so it's a low below the low B on a five string bass. So this is the E.(music)This is the A (music)

Leah Roseman (00:39:29):

Beautiful. Yeah.

(00:39:32):

Hi, just a quick break from the episode. If you're interested in unique and unusual instruments, check out my episodes with instrument maker Linsey Pollak and with Bukhu Ganburged, who's a master of both Mongolian overtone singing and the Morin Khuur. I've also featured a lot of instruments with sympathetic strings. Some of them are with Cretan Lyra player, Kelly Thoma, Bulgarian Gadulka player, Hristina Beleva. And my very first episode with Nyckelharpa player Kirsty Money. I've also featured improvisers from many different traditions, including Sitar player, Mohamed Assani, and I interviewed the improviser and author Steven Nachmanovitch, who wrote a Free Play and The Art of Is. It's a joy to be able to bring these meaningful conversations to you, but this project costs me quite a bit of money and lots of time. Please support this series through either my merchandise store or on my Ko-fi page. You'll find the links in the show notes for the merch. It's features a unique design by artist Steffi Kelly, and you can browse clothes, phone cases, notebooks, water bottles and more. You'll also find the links to sign up for my newsletter where you'll get access to exclusive information about upcoming guests. Please check out my back catalog with weekly episodes going back to 2021. Now back to Mark Deutsch and his Bazantar.

Mark Deutsch (00:40:49):

Go ahead.

Leah Roseman (00:40:49):

I've interviewed lots of people who play instruments with sympathetic strings. So for those people who aren't familiar with the whole idea, I mean, the idea is you're not touching them, they're just ringing, creating that.

Mark Deutsch (00:40:59):

Sympathetic strings are tuned in an interesting way. Right now, they're not actually tuned to a scale. Traditionally, they're tuned to just a whole series of fifths, basically a suspended ninth cord and then flat nine, a tritone and a major third. So it sounds like this(music)

(00:41:37):

This is a low one.(music)

(00:41:43):

There's three rows of sympathetics. I don't know if it can see, but there's this low row here and there's a middle row. That's not all of them. It's just the one I can reach. And they all have different personalities, like that one I just hit. It's got a weird personality. It's like, listen to this. When it rings, you can hear it. It's like I have to try to mitigate it the way the wolf of the instrument is. So it jumps out. And then, let's see. And these are the top layer. The way, the reason I have it tuned like this is because doing a performance, and I am not playing in just one scale. I'm going to play with a bunch of scales. It's with another person, and she's not going to stay in whatever in Indian music. She's not going to stay in the key.

(00:42:49):

So I want to have sympathetics all over the place. It's not tuned, but it's tuned basically to accentuate the fourth to fifth, the tritone, and then the seventh and the second. But I'm leaving off the thirds and the sixes for two reasons. The thirds and the sixes are the ones that I have more tendency to shift. And if your listeners know what shrutis are, there's two versions of each major third, there's a bright version, a dark version, and so I'm way more likely to move my thirds and my sixes around. So I don't want to put a sympathetic on those. And also, the thirds and sixes are already pretty warm and lush, but they're more complicated intervals. So I'm just strategically going with seven seconds, fourth and fifths.

Leah Roseman (00:43:56):

That actually makes sense. Yeah.

(00:43:58):

You're about to hear an excerpt from The Crooked Road from The Picasso Tunings.(music)

(00:44:02):

So your 1993 prototype, how different was it than this?

Mark Deutsch (00:45:04):

The 1993 prototype was completely different. I didn't know what I was doing, and it was intuitive. It's like, I'm going to put strings on, I play the sitar and I'm going to put strings on the Zantar, on a bass. And so it was kind of like how those are done. It was the strings were strung onto the instrument because where else are you going to string? I had three prototypes that didn't work. Two of them I actually made, and the one I halfway through, I had the epiphany of the Bazantar with the rigid housing, and it's a thing I ended up getting a patent for, but that was a really, really unusual idea, which was why I was able to get a patent for it.

(00:46:03):

The first prototype, sort of a trap setup with strings going through the bridge, the Bazantar bridge. I could get the strings to vibrate. I couldn't get 'em to make any, have any volume. I also had a really hard time keeping in tune, and it was really expensive to hire people who did not think it was going to work. I mean, I could tell they were like, oh, yeah, alright. And it hired me a lot, cost me a lot of money, which I really didn't have. And so I ended up spending a lot of time messing around with it myself. And in that messing around, I figured out what the problems were and I didn't know how to fix 'em. I was trying to fix them. But basically, if you want a sympathetic string to vibrate, you have to have the ends of the strings where the nut and the bridge would be. You have to have those strings completely stop vibrating anywhere except where that string is going. You really need to tie off the ends a lot. And that wasn't happening. It was like the refusal setup or whatever.

(00:47:33):

I couldn't string the strings tight enough. And when I did, there was so much leakage of energy from the ends. There's too much wobble. And I did all these crazy things like with fishing waves. I remember I put this on the strings. It's a really crazy kind of thing. I've seen a bunch of guys in Europe though, who are putting sympathetic strings on basses, and they're right where I was in 1994. And it's like they're stringing 'em on the instrument, which, what else are you going to do? And I can't hear them when I'm hearing the recording like, oh, it brings up all this resonance and stuff. I'm like, I don't hear it. I mean, I don't hear the sympathetic experience. It might be a little bit of resonance, which is reminds me of how I was with my prototypes. And what happened is I was pretty exhausted, and exhausted with the whole process of trying to get this to work.

(00:48:39):

I'm the kind of person that once I get something that I want to do, if it doesn't work, I really just keep working at it, keep working at it. And a lot of people were like, you're crazy. And so that helped because I was like, I will do this. I was like, and I was sitting and I was just looking at the instrument, the Bazantar, and it was one of those cool things where you had got a bunch of information in your subconscious or you thinking about it for a long time. You had a bunch of things. And all of a sudden, and I called it a thought ball because the whole idea came down or came to me pretty much all at once. I was like, oh, I need a rigid housing.

Leah Roseman (00:49:34):

Many people will watch the video, but a lot of people will be listening to the podcast and they'll be needing to imagine it. Maybe they'll see a photo later or not. So as much as you can describe things, it's great.

Mark Deutsch (00:49:46):

Okay. So this rigid housing is a external thing that you load onto the instrument. And the logic of it is, is that it will cut off the vibrations at either end of the string. So the vibration of the string has nowhere to escape except to the body of the instrument. It also allowed for me to crank the tension up on the strings, get a lot of tension, and then get a lot of energy with a lot of tension. And then because the rigid housing holds all that tension, none of that tension is displaced onto the instrument. So the instrument doesn't, if I put all these strings with all this tension on the instrument, the instrument wouldn't play. It would just, that being said, I popped two bass bars on my instrument in all this experimentation. One of 'em was early on and super humid weather, and the original bass bar on this instrument was pretty pithy.

(00:51:02):

It was pretty small. So I had it replaced and that was cool. And then the other one was by an accident, the instrument got hit and had to be rebuilt. But yeah, this is the rigid housing and it does a lot of great things. I mean, holds the first prototype that works, the real prototype. I said, which would probably be 1995 when I got the real prototype working that was made of wood, and I have it, I'll go get it, I'll show it to you. It was made of wood and it had friction pegs, and it proved the point. It proved that you could get the sound to be loud enough and loud enough so that it was comparable to a sitar or a sarod, that level of sympathetics. But it was impossible to keep in tune. And I learned a whole lot with that.

(00:51:58):

And then I made this and this, I sort of overbuilt. This is like it's made out of carbon graphite, and I made it a carbon graphite when carbon graphite was not common. It was super expensive, but it's super light. And when we finally got the housing together, we put it between two cinder blocks. I had these really, really cool guys that helped me, man, I was so lucky. I could have never done it without having these three maniac guitar, rock guitar engineer dudes. They were like, Hey, man, you can come in. And they basically gave me a deck in their shop for years, and it was amazing. And they never charged me anything. And then it was just a gift. But we put this thing on cinder blocks and I just jumped on it, and I like 250 pounds just because I wanted to make sure that it was so thin and it was so thin and so light. I was like, is this thing really going to hold all this or is it going to snap? And it does a great job. It's totally works, and it allows for the instrument to be really playable. It's huge, but it's not tight.(music)

(00:53:20):

Even with the weird weather right now, it's pretty good. (music)

(00:53:39):

I will go get the prototype, first prototype.

(00:53:42):

This is wood, this is some maple. These are harp tuners, and this is way simpler than that thing, but it shows you how, if you can see in there, it's like three layers of strings packed in. That was a logistical thing. I drew out. I have the designs, I don't know whether they are, but I drew all this whole thing out and was very meticulous with putting 29 strings in an area that's about the size of your fist. And they all have to perfectly run without hitting anything. And clanking and

Leah Roseman (00:54:27):

The housing Mark, how does it attach to the bass then?

Mark Deutsch (00:54:32):

It attaches underneath the fingerboard. And luckily, just fortunately, my bass has a lot of space between the fingerboard and the body. It's like where the neck comes in, locks into there, and then goes between the feet of the bridge and then attaches to the saddle. It's just underneath the saddle. A lot of things were fortunate in that my bass, and I didn't really know this at the time, but my bass has a really large gap between the fingerboard and the body. So there's enough space to put something there, and a lot of basses don't, a lot of basses. The neck is real close. The fingerboard is real close to the body. The Bazantar would've never fit in there. The way that I built it, I probably would've ended up with a different design if that happened like that. And my saddle had been raised up anyhow to relax some of the tension on the instrument and open it up a little bit. So it had already been, those factors were already there, and people have wanted me to build more Bazantars, which I'm cool with, and I'd like to make more Bazantars. But right now, I really want, with the time I have left before my body falls apart, I just want to figure out how to play it.

(00:55:55):

But then I'll probably build by Bazantars for people or be better yet, I'll have somebody who wants me to design them, and then I can just design them. Because like I said, I'm very, very, very, very slow, very meticulate. I have a whole box of bridges that I"ve carved.

Leah Roseman (00:56:11):

Wow, beautiful.

Mark Deutsch (00:56:13):

This is my favorite bridge. This is interesting because the sympathetics are split. There's the strings and then I keep going, but the drone strings, but the low string goes here. It splits the two drone strings. There's two here and two here. Two of them I had a sympathetic bridge on, so they make that buzzy sound. The other two I didn't, so I could bow them. I bow these drone strings, drone strings. It sounds like a sarangi, I'll do that for you too. But this is,

(00:56:55):

That's my favorite. This is my most extreme. This wing broke off with the sympathetics here. This is my Salvador Dali bridge. It's worked great. It sounded fantastic. And this was the first bridge, and this is the bridge that I had before just now, and it's got this weird thing coming out on that. And that was an experiment. I like to experiment. And that was an experiment of the length of the lowest string, the perfect place to bow the lowest string. And I have an extended 52 inch long low string. And then the perfect place to bow these drone strings is in different places. And if I pushed this forward on the Chiari strings, I would get a closer, perfect bow place between this really low string and these really high strings. I didn't find out that it's super mattered in the end. This is just what it looks like as I'm working on

Leah Roseman (00:58:04):

It. Okay.

Mark Deutsch (00:58:05):

Is my next bridge.

Leah Roseman (00:58:06):

But why are you building a new bridge if the one works well?

Mark Deutsch (00:58:10):

Great question. This new bridge is going to be the same as the bridge I just carved, which looks way more normal than any of these, except I'm going to inlay these pickups I have in there. These pickups are great for recording the instrument plucked.

Leah Roseman (00:58:29):

Here's an improvised piece Mark played for us during the recording of this episode. After we'd been talking for almost two hours, I asked him if he wanted to play something else, and this is that improvisation. (music) Thank you so much, mark.

Mark Deutsch (01:04:06):

Thank you.

Leah Roseman (01:04:08):

So in 2019 before the pandemic, I believe you did a bit of a cross country tour with your Bazantar. So if you want to speak maybe to some of the kinds of performances you did and the kinds of audiences and what that experience was like, maybe some highlights.

Mark Deutsch (01:04:26):

I did a thing at Brown University in Providence, which was the most interesting to me because that was the one where they really wanted to know about the math, the tunings, the lecture was music and sounds effect on physiology and consciousness. So I got to talk about the things I really am interested in, which is how vibrations, specific vibrations affect your nervous system and your consciousness. And there's a whole, in Indian music, there's a whole really deep, profound study of that. And there's all kinds of very poetic and very mystical, or they make a lot of claims of the effects of different kinds of tunings on your nervous system and whatnot. And so that was great, and I got to play the Bazantar, and I had a really, really quirky, really interesting, really intelligent group of people to talk to. It was really a lot of fun.

(01:05:40):

I did a gig in St. Louis at the place called the Sheldon, which is where I debuted the Bazantar. And so that was cool. People got to see it after 20 years. It was about the 20 year anniversary. People who had seen me build it. It was great to hear their comments about what I was like when I was building this. And they were like, oh, yeah, we remember you were really crazy, man. You were so focused and so intense, and you looked like you were on a mission from God. So that was nice. It was nice to see those people again. And I did a lot of just university things where I would either, I did a lot of different things. Sometimes I just talk about improvisation, different approaches to improvising, developing melodies and textures and tones and developing your ideas, and also where all my ideas come from and the intersection of different cultures like Persian music, Indian music, the Avant-garde, 20th century music.

(01:06:53):

I really like Bird right now, but I love atotal music, which is interesting. I play off of the drone, but the kind of music that I like to listen to is I kind of drone music, Indian music or Persian music. And then I sort of the opposite spectrum, but it affects me in a similar way is I love string quartet. I like at home music that's done with instruments that are not fixed and pitched like string. I love listening to string quartet, like a really great string quartet where they're all adjusting the pitches subconsciously or consciously, I'm not sure. And they're just beautiful. And if it's a really great string quartet, listening to the Bartók string quartets, I love it. There was a lot of different kind of performances. I had a residency in New York at a recording studio where I did a bunch of gigs and did a bunch of lectures, and I did some kind of, I don't know, they said they were sound healing kind of things where people would just come in and lay down and I would just play. And I just got a gig today that's like that where I'm playing with the singer and a bunch of people will come in and there's a light show. It's in San Francisco, and it's at Grace Cathedral, which is a big cathedral and lights. And so I'll play the Bazantar. I'll be this sort of immersive meditative thing.

Leah Roseman (01:08:33):

Yeah. I wanted to ask you about your improvisation. So I know you came from a jazz background on classical and all that. It must have evolved over the years, but you definitely have a language having listened to your recordings. There's a Mark Deutschelanguage. How much of it is are you auditing before you play? You know what I mean? How much are you hearing right before you play?

Mark Deutsch (01:08:59):

Interesting. Okay. Yeah. My thing now, which is not when, up until I was about my mid thirties, I was a classical bassist, a jazz bassist, and I played sitar and I was kind of musician for hire, whatever you wanted, blues or funk or whatever. I play electric bass and I play all the string instruments, banjo and guitar, whatever. This is a weird story, but I'll go ahead and tell it. I was at a accelerated learning seminar where you use hypnosis and concentrate, focus your mind and learn all these techniques and whatever. And one of these things where we went in groups, or no, we were in groups, we paired off into two people and you were supposed to model that person's physiology. You're supposed to just model the way they breathe, model the way their eye movements were, whatever. And it was pretty interesting to do that and see what you got just from putting yourself in somebody else's shoes.

(01:10:16):

It was just part of the technique. But then as that thing developed, they had you do it from a distance. So you would watch a person, but the person didn't know you were watching you pick your person. And there was a Mexican lady that didn't speak very much English, and she was modeling me. And to her, I was a big scary guy, and that's why she wanted to model me. She was like, I wanted to model some big scary man and see what that was like. And when she didn't speak very good English, but they asked her, they said, well, what did you see? And she was kind of in shock or I don't know. She was just like, man, it wasn't what I expected. She said, I heard this really beautiful, but super sad. Music was the most beautiful but sad music. And it was like, that's what I heard in my head.

(01:11:18):

I was like, and I was like, I know what you're talking about. I mean, I know what you're talking about. And this was before I started playing sitar in public, but I always played my bass. I practiced my licks and I practiced my jazz stuff, practiced my classical, whatever. But a lot of times I just played, it just played what I felt. I never thought that anybody would want to hear that bass players don't play melodies, blah, blah, blah. But I would just play with the bow and do that. But after this lady said that, I'm like, I want to just play what's in my head.

(01:12:07):

And so I almost kind of neurotically. I got into this thing of practicing where I only played that was in my head, and I found out that I typically sing really slow. I don't sing really fast things in my head that much, and I usually don't modulate. And I was like, oh, if you don't modulate, you're kind of dumb. I was like, damn, modulate. I'm playing jazz, everybody, all those neurotic sort of things. And I was like, just stop that. Just play what you're hearing, whatever it is, just play it. It's like, oh man, that's really slow. Nobody will know how great I am. I'm not playing fast. Oh, I'm not playing anything intellectually, bam. So I got on this thing of really trying to play what I was hearing, and that developed into a whole bunch of things and more on the sitar. At first, I used to play a lot of sitar. I don't play the sitar anymore because a lot of people play sitar, and I figure I should focus on the Bazantar, even though I love to play it. There's a lot of things that I don't do because I get so into things like I don't play chess because I find it so fascinating that it just takes up so much of my time. And I don't play video games. I know if I did, you've never seen, that would be the end of my, I have maybe an addictive personality or a compulsive personality, whatever, but I try to put those energies into something that is unique and interesting, and that's the Bazantar. And I love playing the Bazantar, so it's not really the problem, but I try to stay away from some other things.

Leah Roseman (01:13:56):

I know that you've done a lot of teaching over the years. I'm not sure if you're still teaching.

Mark Deutsch (01:14:00):

Yeah, I'm still teaching lecturing, teaching,

Leah Roseman (01:14:03):

Yeah. And do you teach online or only in person?

Mark Deutsch (01:14:09):

I teach online. I have Zoom.

Leah Roseman (01:14:11):

Okay. I am imagining you help different types of musicians, not just bass players.

Mark Deutsch (01:14:18):

Yeah. I have a violin student right now, and it was interesting how she came to me, but I'm mostly just working on her intonation and tone, and I'm teaching her where the harmonics are, and she's like a baroque violinist, but that's not what she's playing with me. I'm teaching her, I'm teaching her how to play what's in her head and how do you manifest? That's fun. During the pandemic, I taught one of my students who's a bass player, I taught his five and 6-year-old daughters. Oh man, that was fun. It was really fun, but really intense.

Leah Roseman (01:15:07):

What were they playing?

Mark Deutsch (01:15:09):

Guitars. But a lot of times we did rhythms. We would play rhythms, sing, they'd sing,

(01:15:18):

And I'd teach him guitar way back in the day, 30 or 40 years ago, I, I was my first really young child back when I taught all the time in the nineties. I was kind of a well-known musician in a sort of a rock thing, and people were kind of the regional kind of rock star thing. And so I had all these kids that they were like, oh, you're so cool. And they were like 13 and the mid twenties. And I so enjoyed teaching it. I so enjoyed trying to figure out what would make a difference. I've never approached any student exactly the same, and I didn't realize how much I enjoyed that until I wasn't doing it as much.

(01:16:13):

But I had these two, oh, I forgot. I lost my train of thought. I had, my first student was this 5-year-old girl, and I was teaching mostly teenagers, and I was like, oh man, I don't know, five years old. And she was be beautiful and really quiet and really thoughtful. I mean, it was just a little five-year-old, maybe six, just gem of a person, just wonderful. And I remember teaching her a basic blues pattern, and they had her little recital and there's a video of me and her playing, and she forgot and played one thing like five times, and I went with her, played the one chord change, and that was wonderful. I really enjoyed teaching.

Leah Roseman (01:17:01):

When I was researching you, it came up something, a student of yours had said that really something I think about and people about is how do you encourage both the intuitive and the analytical and making that switch?

Mark Deutsch (01:17:17):

One of my students said that, that sounds like me. If somebody is a very intuitive person, the music, I'll go with that strength. But I'll try to have them engage both elements, the analytical and the intuitive, because when you get what I find with myself and with my students, when you get stuck in just the being really intuitive and auditory, you can get stuck. There's limitations and you can get bogged down, and you can break out of that with some theories and technique. Some of the more analytical aspects of music and the opposite's true. And I've had students that are super analytical or super sort of theory-based or whatever, and with them that I would work on their weakness.

(01:18:18):

And I think if you have both engaged your intellect and your intuition, it's going to be a lot more helpful for you as a musician. And I'm very much like that. When I play, when I'm playing for you or when I play at anytime right now, I'm not trying to think. I don't want to be talking to myself. I just want to be playing and I practice enough, or hopefully I have practiced enough. So I always tell myself I want to play on intention and I don't want to play on the act of playing. And what I mean is I want to play the way that I walk. When I walk, I don't think about what I'm doing. I think about where I want to go. So when I make a left turn, I'm not thinking, oh, this one leg has to do this kind of thing and this other thing, because otherwise I'll fall over I'm, I have so much confidence that I can get to the store, but I'm not going, oh God, how do I do this step, that step, this step and kind of thing. I want to play that well and I don't, but that's my goal is to just be able to pick up the instrument and manifest my ideas without too much bogged down in thinking about how to do it or that kind of thing.

(01:19:46):

But to get there, I'm super analytical. When I practice, I'll always try to identify what is the weakest link in this thing, in this phrase or whatever. Right now, right now it's trying to get this finger to work bent this far back, because what I'm doing when I'm doing this new technique with my thumb to line it up, this finger is almost playing on top of itself.

(01:20:16):

And that is bizarre. It is a bizarre feeling. It's like you're on top of it. And so I'm the kind of person to will analyze what the problem is and then just beat it into the ground. Just massive amount of repetition. So a lot of times when I practice, I'll put something on my computer that's visually not too interesting, but enough so that I can practice some of a repetitive thing for two hours and I can kind of just be looking at some where I'm getting that muscle memory or that physiology in. So that's the thing. I used to teach some of my students. I said, if you're going to definitely don't only practice like this, but if you're going to watch a movie yourself, put your guitar in your hand and just stretch your fingers and just sit there and digitally work your fingers. You don't have to be thinking about, it only takes a little bit of concentration to get your fingers to move in a certain way, but just do massive amount of reps to get your nervous system to be able to handle that move unconsciously. How would it make all these tough moves then? The bass and the Bazantar, the bass, whatever? I mean, it's hard to put three notes together that are in tune and don't sound like you're moving furniture. It's a rough instrument to be lyrical on.

Leah Roseman (01:21:46):

So Mark, your first album, Fool, you played both sitar and Bazantar.

Mark Deutsch (01:21:53):

That's true.

Leah Roseman (01:21:54):

So how did that work?

Mark Deutsch (01:21:58):

I was playing a lot of sitar back then, and I had just a huge repertoire of stuff. And the Bazantar is, it's pretty low. It's a bass. And so I was giving myself a higher voice for the whole as a concept. I was giving myself a higher voice, and then this lower voice and the whole album. Have you seen the artwork in the albums? There's a wild graph where I graph out what I'm doing visually and it's on three layers and it shows all these different oscillating patterns from light to dark, from high to low, from fast to slow, and the golden mean is in there, all this stuff. And it also shows and it's very beautiful. I drew it out and then a friend of mine who was a graphic designer manifested on the computer. It was all written out by hand and it's got all these metaphysical ideas, struggle and stuff. I'm not sure if that answered what you were asking me though. How did that work?

Leah Roseman (01:23:09):

That was very interesting, but practically speaking, did you record the sitar first and then,

Mark Deutsch (01:23:15):

Okay. No, I recorded the Bazantar first. Okay. That was in 1998, and I finished the instrument in October of 1997. But to answer that question specifically, no. I recorded all the Bazantar stuff first and then I recorded the sitar stuff after the first piece on the album is interesting. First there, the first piece is a bunch of gongs that are at tuned to a suspended ninth board, and then there's a sitar piece that comes in and it's really, really simple. It's like five notes. And I was on the 49th day of 52 day fast.

Leah Roseman (01:23:59):

Oh my goodness.

Mark Deutsch (01:24:00):

And I don't play like that the way that piece is. It's great. I wish I played like that all the time. It is super simple, but it just works. It works in a really profound way for me. I was sitting there, I was all way thinner than normal and way out there, man. My mind was in a really great place and I just remember I was exhausted, which was kind of great for recording. When you record, you get uptight, you start to play chart perfect and all that kind of stuff. And I was just in this other really awesome headspace and I was super tired and I was just like, I'm just going to play exactly what I feel. It was this really simple thing and it turned out to me really magical, the very first piece and it, it's completely captured my mood, which was a good space when you're fasting. That was the longest fast I've ever done, and you just end up letting go of so much stuff. And that piece really exemplified just a really deep letting go of all kinds of crap.

Leah Roseman (01:25:28):

This is an excerpt from the Painted Bird on Mark's first album, Fool, which is Sitar with Bazantar. (music)

(01:26:51):

Was someone guiding you through this fast?

Mark Deutsch (01:26:55):

Oh, no. I had been fasting for a month every six months starting that goes along with the development of the Bazantar. I had studied with this witch docctor Shaman madman and starting in the late eighties. And when I say to people, my teacher, I'm always talking about this guy who wasn't a musician. It was the hardest thing I've done. It was the most challenging, even more challenging than me getting in the conservatory when I didn't know anything about classical music, which is probably the second most challenging thing I did. But this was years. I mean, I worked with him for quite a few years and I just developed a bunch of knowledge and actually didn't fast with him, but I had learned how I'm not recommending people fast for that long. I mean, I have a certain kind of body type. I wouldn't recommend you do that. I'm a big guy and I can not eat for a long time and I'm fine, and that's pretty abnormal. But I would do, they weren't fast with just water. They were either like carrots, carrot juice fast or some kind of juice fast. So they're pretty hearty, but pretty, they were extreme, but they weren't extreme for me. And I found out that if I did this every six months, I just had an intense sort of clarity in my life.

(01:28:37):

But it was cool. I would shut down for a month. I wouldn't take on very many students. You could really, really, I mean it was hard. I got really cranky sometimes fasting as you body detoxing and all that kind of stuff that's sort of a mystical or whatever you want to call it kind of stuff. It was a big part of my life when I was building the Bazantar

Leah Roseman (01:28:57):

And the Picasso Tunings, there's all these albums in that. So it's the specific tuning of the Bazantar?

Mark Deutsch (01:29:06):

I like Picasso, but I'm really into art.

Leah Roseman (01:29:08):

Yeah,

Mark Deutsch (01:29:09):

Picasso's fine. I'm not a big Picasso fan, but I like Picasso. The Picasso Tunings. I am tuning the top strings of the instrument, the strings that you would play on the violin, I'm tuning them super specifically and very bizarre. One piece is tuned in tritones, okay, but it's a very specific tritone. There's two tritones. One is 45 over 64, and the other one is 64 over 45. Other one's, 32 or 45, whatever these, if you tune into this very specific tritone, the harmonics that come out of it make this gorgeous six note scale,

(01:30:03):

But you have to learn how to play the instrument with the strings not in the place where you thought they were. It's not too fourth anymore. A bass player, violin is not too, the fifth is the piece. Antique Slippers is that half steps. It's F sharp, F, c, f sharp. So if you can imagine playing your instrument with strings a half step apart, that gives you this beautiful raag in harmonics. So you can play the harmonics just where the harmonics don't move. They're in the same place on the instrument no matter what. So you figure out how to play your scales and bowing and it's like all this weird back and forth bowing and stuff, but then if you're going to put your finger down on the instrument, everything was in the wrong place. I mean really in the wrong place. And I was trying to explain this, and I don't know if I've explained this well enough to you because I was explaining this to a bass player and he would not get it. He just could not get that. I was tuning the top strings and as steps and tritones and hole steps and four steps and all kinds of things.

(01:31:15):

And I said, it's like Picasso. It's like Guernica, everything's in the wrong place. It's the Picasso Tunings. And so that phrase, that Picasso Tuning came up as again and again for me to try to explain to people, when you look at a Picasso tune, the nose is in the wrong place and the eyes are in the wrong place. That's what it's like to play the Bazantar.

Leah Roseman (01:31:34):

You're about to hear Antique Slippers, the eighth movement from the Picasso Tunings.(music)

Mark Deutsch (01:35:20):

And that was a really extreme thing to do. I wasn't getting any work at the time. I had moved to San Francisco and nobody knew me and I wanted it. I had this idea that I built a Bazantar and I was getting work, but I was getting work as a bass player and people were like, oh yeah, bring the Bazantar. But what they really wanted was a bass player because bass players are always a need, and I was a good bass player and they'd be like, okay, yeah, bring the sitar and bring the Bazantar. We'll work it in. Really, I couldn't get away from being a bass player, so I just kiboshed my life and moved someplace where nobody knew me and I didn't tell anybody I played bass and I tried to establish myself in this new way as a Bazantar player, which was kind of crazy.

(01:36:14):

I mean, because I went from someplace where everybody knew me and respected me and I could get more work than I ever wanted to a place where nobody knew me. And I was planning on moving to LA or New York, and then I ended up moving to San Francisco. I had an ex-girlfriend that needed a roommate, and I was like, okay, San Francisco sounds cool, but it wasn't like a great place to develop. So I wasn't getting any work and I was upset. I was just broke. I was living in the most expensive place in the world and in the United States, and I was just dying.

(01:37:00):

I had to start a organic produce business, which is, I still do it. It's called Guerilla Organics. But I, I'd never done anything in my life instead be a musician. I've been a musician since I was 12. I didn't know anything else. So I was like, okay, I'm going to buy, produce and drive around delivering, which worked. It was amazing. But in that time I was just so annoyed. I had always been able to get work. My whole life started at 12 and I've always worked as a musician and I got, I'm not proud of this, but I got really angry and really depressed and I was like, screw this man. I'm going to do whatever I want. I'm just going to do the, I mean, I can't really perform like this because a once of in one, two, then you takes a whole stringing it.

(01:37:55):

Like the research I've done in the strings is nuts. Bass strings they come into, there's a lot of variation in bass strings because there's a solo tuning thing where instead of being EADG, it's F sharp B, whatever, it's a whole step higher and there's all these different gauges and stuff. So I was able to mix and match all these different kind of strings to get a tuning on Bazantar that was like FF sharp, C, FF sharp where the tension and everything was balanced. You could play on it. And then because I'm a sitar player and you play on one string on the sitar, I could look at the string no matter where it started and see where all the intervals were. Okay, that's a third, that's a whatever, but looking up one string. And so I approached each string on the Bazantar like that. It was like, okay, F sharp is like the sa, so I know where all those things are.

(01:38:53):

F is, and it sounds crazy and really hard, and it is. And if you've never done it, it's like the possible, but once you start thinking like that, it's not as hard as you might. I got really good at it, and I did that for five years.

(01:39:13):

And I will get you this recording where I recorded on that, where I just recorded the sympathetic strings, and it doesn't sound like anything like that is out there. It sounds like an extra terrestrial orchestra, and you would never think that it's one instrument. The recording is one pass, and I recorded the sympathetics in isolation. I have all these pickups on them. And then I took that sound and I bounced it against something really hard and got a good echo. And then that's what you're hearing because the sound of just the sympathetic strings through the pickups, the pizo electric pickups, and they're really, they had this ugly sort of, I don't know, character, they're fine for plucking, but with bowing, whatever. And even with the Sympathetics, it sounded like bowed barb wire. It was brittle. And so I took the whole sound and I just threw it up against something, captured the echo. And then I have this amazing, and I mean it is amazing. I haven't released the album and I had a bunch of different offers and whatnot, but you would never in your wildest imagination think that this was a bass for one thing or that it was just one instrument.

Leah Roseman (01:40:35):

You're about to hear an excerpt from Bardo, which is as yet unreleased. And in this piece, Mark is just using the sympathetic strings and activating with harmonics on the main strings.(music)

Mark Deutsch (01:41:48):

And basically what I'm doing is I'm playing all those harmonics on your violin or bass where there's all these harmonics. So I'm playing all these harmonics and they're all compounding. And because the math is so perfect, the energy from one sympathetic will compound with another sympathetic, and you just get this, oh, worldly beautiful, incredibly evocative sound. It sounds like you got a bunch of Tibetan monks and their ghosts, like singing this really beautiful.

(01:42:24):

I had a really, I don't know, heartbreaking experience during this time where I was totally broke. And I have this friend that he's a very famous scientist, Jaron Lanier. He is the guy that invented in virtual reality is the founding father of virtual reality. And I think I mentioned him, he's like the guy that gave me the, oud, we recorded a lot together. And he's like the only guy before the Bazantar was finished that thought it could work. And he's just a really bizarre, interesting dude. He's a really good musician. We play together here. He lives in San Francisco, we both moved to the Bay Area exactly at the same time. He took my playing mine and his playing the duo and showed it to Quincy Jones, and I was playing these super high harmonics and it doesn't sound like a bass. It sounds like a gigantic violin.

(01:43:27):

You've heard some of the harmonic works on the Picasso Tunings. You hear how high this was even more extreme that this was with a harpsichord. And so Quincy Jones listened to it and Jaron's wife was there, and Quincy Jones was like, no, it's not a bass. Nobody can do that. It's not possible. He didn't understand the tuning and how I could get harmonics super high and get all these really, he was like, no. And he got really angry and Jaron's wife, Lana was there going, I sat right next to him and he recorded this is some guy on a huge bass, and it was Quincy Jones, like the biggest producer. He was like, no, it's not possible. And he stormed out and said "really bullshit".

Leah Roseman (01:44:08):

So I think what would be really great if you want to play some more, is maybe just talk play and just talk a little bit about improvisation to kind of close this out a bit.

Mark Deutsch (01:44:21):

So we were talking about this new fingering that I've been working on, so this is some of what the results are (music) Being able to play chords like that. (music)

(01:45:14):

One of the things that's nice about this fingering is your hand is set up in a way that fourths are hard to play on a bass because they're right next to each other. So it's always a challenge how to get a fourth to sound smooth. You can either go and with this finger and you can either do this, you can get the fourth spread there,(music)

(01:46:02):

So that's cool. But you can also, because of the way your fingers end up lining up, you can get the fourth between these two fingers, which is nice and smooth. It's like, what a blues guitar player. It's like that comes from my guitar playing. It's be able to get that fourth it's doing, and I am using my thumb as a finger in a way that's, it's tricky. It's rigid. This is a technique that I'm not sure how it works, and you as a violinist might. I've had some discussions. So I'm playing (music)

(01:47:06):

Now, I'm bending a harmonic. You are not supposed to be able to bend a harmonic, but there's a technique with my bow of going down and getting this harmonic. It sounds really cool on low strings, and I've used this in a bunch of different film recorded stuff I've done. A lot of it is with the bow, if I'm trying to find the harmonic with the bow and how it feels to me is like a reptile has those scales and it's like if you go past the scale, hook it and then lift it up a little bit. It feels like that's what I'm doing with the Harmonic. So it's like I can find it, hit it, I'll feel it with my hand, my bow hand, and then just kind of pull up on it and I can bring it out. And I tell you, me talking about it makes it super hard. Then I'm thinking about it. And on the Picasso Tunings, I use this a lot. I was playing a lot of harmonics. How I developed this technique, this rolling bow harmonic technique or playing chords is I was recording Fool and I was recording Kundalini Rising, which is a piece that's just harmonics how the album works. You were asking about how the sitar thing sort of worked, is it oscillates between a low voice and a high voice, but for that piece, I'm not using the sitar. I'm using something like this going on.(music) Same.(Music)

(01:49:22):

Anyhow, that wasn't what I was planning to do in the studio because that was impossible. I had no idea that I could do that. It wasn't in - my soundman was fabulous. He recorded me in the recording studio. It takes forever. It is setting up mics and doing all this stuff, and you're just sitting there bored out of your mind. And so I was playing something more like (Music)

(01:50:11):

I was playing single notes, so I was trying not to refine my intonation, but where that note is. So instead of going, (music) I was going(music), so I'd have one, but I was just zombied out just in the studio, just goofing off. And my sound man, Liam Christie recorded it and he knew that I was not going to record that because I was, every time he pushed play, I would go play single notes. He was like, dude, you got to hear this. It sounds like seagull's taking off. And I was like, okay, okay, okay. And he played it for me. I was, oh, whoa. I was like, that's incredible. And it was like right now the sympathetics are not tuned to that, so you're not hearing the sympathetics just explode when they're tuned and the sympathetics have to be tuned really, really perfectly. That's a whole another story about the instrument if you want them to sing I mean. But you to my intonation has gotten ridiculously better playing this instrument because the sympathetics won't ring if you don't play really in tune. And so he played that for me and I was like, hold it. I said, this is going to take me a minute. He said, give me like three days. And I spent three days, 12 hours, just over and over this brand new technique. And then we recorded it, and that's Kundalini Rising on the Fool album. That was me just learning this technique.

Leah Roseman (01:51:48):

This is an excerpt from Kundalini Rising from the album Fool.(music)

Mark Deutsch (01:53:00):

So there's the harmonics, they're always in the same place, but then there's what I call the Shamanic bowing thing, just because it's like I haven't been bowing my Bazantar for many months. And because of that, once you really get into doing that, there is a lot of color and texture and oscillation and that mixing in with the sympathetics can take a voice that's a bass and give it a lot. You're going to do a solo album, and I think the Picasso Tunings is four CDs and seven LPs having a lot of different voices. So you go from rich sound, there's a lot of things you can do with that. It pulls out different harmonics. Very, I like it. But it's a really, really subtle technique. And it's one of those things where I was saying I have to practice enough to where I'm not thinking about what this technique is, I'm just thinking about my intention of what sound I want. A lot of times when my lecture or just demonstrate the math that I'm talking about, I like to show people what the Harmonic series sounds like. That's like the first harmonic,(music) That's the two division, the string divided half, that's the three, that's the fifth, here's the seventh. Then you get a whole scale.

Leah Roseman (01:55:43):

I know you've studied different tuning systems and in terms of the way the natural frequencies occur, how does that line up with Indian music, for example, that you've studied a lot?

Mark Deutsch (01:55:55):

Well, Indian music is where I first started to learn that, and you're basically trying to set up a sonic fractal. It's the opposite of encryption. The person that got this the quickest was not a musician, but a dude who was, is, he's like a expert witness or something, but he deals in encryption. And I was on tour, this was my tour, and I showed up in Hartford, Connecticut. He was the smartest dude I've ever met, man. And I just met him and I was exhausted and I'd been driving and traveling and nobody was home. And he was there. Me and him just talked. He was a super nice guy, kind had a vibe like to you with him. And he just was asking me questions, and the questions he asked were so amazing. And he explained back to me what I do in the opposite and the opposite of what I do is encryption, where you're trying to get the high primes.

(01:57:06):

Encryption has to do with using high prime numbers to make something that is incoherent and uncrackable, but vibrationally will not. The factors are so high mathematically that it's like you're building something that doesn't work at all vibrationally, there's no internal coherence, and that's really hard to break. And he explained what I'm doing is you are building something that's super coherent, and that is everything is as interrelated as it can possibly be in which how that works without, I dunno, I Well, how that works is you use the first two primes that are different and the prime that's the same, which is the octave or this is the string divided into, so that's two is a prime. It's the only prime. And so you use that, which is two for anything that's doubled, you use those as factors. That's basically octave, octave up, octave down, no big deal.

(01:58:13):

It doesn't create any new notes. The first thing that creates new notes is when you divide the string into three. So you get, that's the first new prime, which is threeness, I call it. The note is actually a perfect fifth. And the Chinese system and Pythagorean system of tuning, they just use fifths. They generate all their notes. So I mean when I say you generate notes, it's like you're on C and a fifth of that, or the three factor of that is G, and that three factor of G is D, which is nine. And then you keep going. 27 is the A. And so how these notes occur and how they're interrelated is they're all based on a fifth, and that fifth is 2 cents higher than a tempered fifth, 702 cents instead of 700 cents. And the 10 or fifth is based off the square root of two.

(01:59:31):

And so it's an irrational number. But in the Indian system you have to have a tonic. As long as you have a tonic, you can add in the next prime, which is five. And that sounds like this is the fundamental, that's Gs. You're going to use that to build your notes. Four, four is the same as twoness. It's just knocked it above, and then that's five ness. So you take those first two prime factors and you start compounding them and you get a fractal vibrational matrix where it's the most internally coherent, meaning it's the most in tune with itself as you could possibly get. You don't use seven. There's a whole bunch of reasons and there's a bunch of esoteric stuff. You don't use seven, because it sounds like this though. Seven sounds.

(02:00:42):

Going back to my teacher, he was like, okay, it's going to take you forever to learn how to do this. I'm like, no, it's not. And I programmed the vibrations into this programmable tuner and I just used it. I just played into the tuner figuring out where these notes were at the same time. And that's like attacking it from the intellectual, like say a minor third, there's a minor third that's 300 cents. That's a tempered one. There's another one that's 316 cents, and that's six vibrations to five, and that's like the blue note. And that has a heroic characteristic, but there's another one that's 22 cents lower than the three 16, which is I think 2 94, 290 4 cents minus 6 cents, and that's melancholy. And so I would learn these by the intellectual, it's this much higher, this much lower, but then what is the poetic way of experiencing this?

(02:01:56):

Now, I did that on my own because that's the only way that I could latch onto it. I couldn't latch onto it being 16 cents higher. I had to have a major third. Okay, there's the major third, that's five four. It's the, it's in the overtone series. It's how that overtone divides itself into half, and it divides itself into three and it divides itself into four. Well, when it divides itself into five, you get a major third, that's 14 cents lower than temper. That's temper is 400, it's 286 cents. That's a lot lower, and you'll get it on your violin or whatever, but that is always a lot lower. To me, that sounds like warm, glowing, sundown. It's got a really warm, luscious soothing. So when I want to hit that and I'm not hitting it as a harmonic, that's what I'm listening for. The one that's higher than that is the fifth or the fifth or the fifth or the fifth.

(02:03:06):

It's like if you're on C, it's up a fifth to G, which plus 2 cents up a fifth to D, which is another two, that's four up to a, that's another, that's 6 cents. And then up to the E, and so that's plus 8 cents. There's always a 22 cent difference between these two, and that's what the shrewd is, and that's 81 over 80, and that's the gap where God lives as the Indian musicians would say. But that one is bright shimmering light. How light reflects through running water if you have a waterfall and that water, that's that characteristic. So that's the poetic way of me grasping these vibrations. And then the tempered one, which is based on 12 two, which doesn't have a overtone that it relates to because it's an irrational number. The 12th rooted two is a never ending, never repeating number. So there is no fundamental for them.

(02:04:16):

That sounds like a glare on a windshield if you give them sort of a poetic thing to listen to. How the Bazantar came about was, I was trying to attack this from the intellectual is knowing the math, knowing the math, putting it in a tuner, playing, seeing where it is adjusting, trying to experience it with giving it some poetic literary sort of idea that I could take onto. The other thing I was doing was mostly playing sarangi music, which is a bowed indigenous Indian instrument, which is gorgeous. I don't know how to describe it. Do you know this sarangi?

Leah Roseman (02:05:05):

Yeah, I've heard it.

Mark Deutsch (02:05:06):

Yeah, it's really amazing. It's a haunting, beautiful. There's a guy, Ram Nyaran that I used to listen to, and then Sultan Khan, and I had studied with this and Indian shamanic dude for quite a while before this, and he had me do all this work in my dreams and very intense hard work, and that had a big influence on where my headspace was. It didn't have anything to do with music much, but it had to do with, I dunno, some sort of spiritual psychic, whatever. So I would work in my dreams and I would play this sarangi music because the pitches are so clearly hearable compared to maybe listening to the sitar or the surbahar or whatever, and it was the perfect music to sleep to. It's so peaceful and haunting, whatever.

(02:06:08):

Now, there was no Bazantar at this time. I was still just studying sitar and trying to get to learn how to play these shrutis, vibrations, and I was trying to do it in two months instead of 20 years, which I was able to do it. I never told my teacher what I did. He just was like, wow. I just let him think I was some kind of genius or something. So one night I was dreaming and listening to this music, and I dreamed that I was playing the bass because I was acoustic bass player to, and my acoustic bass had sympathetic and drone strings on it, like the sitar, and so I had this dream. I didn't remember that it was a dream. When I woke up, I didn't remember the dream, but I did think that I had read about a base with sympathetic strings, and this was before the internet and all that.

(02:07:09):

It was like I used to have Omni magazines and Musician, these different magazines about music and futuristic stuff or whatever. And so I was looking through these magazines trying to think where is this bass with sympathetic strings that I heard about and I couldn't find it, and so then about two or maybe three or four nights later, I put the CD again and I had these a CD changer that would play up repeatedly all night, and as soon as I put the same music in, I remembered the dream, which was pretty cool because it was a couple days, and so then I remembered the dream. I was like, oh, that was a dream. Wow, that's cool. Nobody's done this.

Leah Roseman (02:07:57):

Yeah, I mean, I can relate to this as a string player, and when I played baroque violin, that's when I was first exposed to that idea of lower thirds and listening for that, and it's certainly different as a violinist if you play with the piano or if you're in a string group or there's all these things. So to close this out, maybe do you want to just reflect on, I guess you mentioned that you want to just keep working on your playing and do another recording. I assume all your recordings are improvised and all your performances?

Mark Deutsch (02:08:29):

Get hard sometimes, and I can read and you say, I played in an orchestra a for years, and I grew up playing over changes. I mean, I was a machine at playing over changes. I learned so young and I played so many gigs, but my aesthetic is I want give people, I don't want to give people some representation of some other moment in time. Not to say anything wrong with that. I love listening to Beethoven recordings, and there's a lot of that and it's wonderful, but what my aesthetic is is I want to give you this creative moment of July 6th performance. Never going to play anything like this again, is going to, I have things that I do, but no performance is ever locked in stone. It will always evolve with who I am at them and who I'm playing for and what the environment is, what the space is, and that, I mean, that's definitely not the only way to play music or anything.

(02:09:31):

That's just what I've decided to take is my aesthetic. I can play, when I get hired for doing film scores and stuff, a lot of times they'll have really specific wines and stuff, and that's fine, no problem with that, particularly if I get paid, but otherwise, I'm, it's almost like a martial art. I feel like a martial artist works on all these moves and does all these things, and then when it's time to fight or do whatever they find, they just go on automatic and hopefully they've practiced there are moves enough so that they can move on intention instead of on memory.

(02:10:15):

Yeah. I am planning to do another album for sure, and I was planning to do it by now, and I kind of feel bad. I had to go down and I've got a lot of people like, Hey, I want to do your next album and what's happening, but I'm working on this technique with this new tuning and my thumb until I'm able to run these lines. The way I'm able to run 'em on my guitar, that's my goal. That's my metric is I'll figure out lines of the guitar and then I'll say, that's what I want to play on the Bazantar, which is freaking impossible, and then I'll figure out the finger until I can get that kind of fluidity. When you hear a lot of bass push plays, even really great ones, there's a real bumpiness to the playing. It's like, which is fine, but that's not what I want to do.

(02:11:22):

That's not how I want my lines to sound. I want 'em to sound lyric, and so I, I'm close. I mean, last couple of weeks the technique has fallen a little bit more in my subconscious. Even when I was playing for you right now, I went back to my regular way of playing, which I'm very comfortable with because if I'm performing, I'll be performing a couple days. I'm not going to go with the technique that I have to think about. Even if I'm working on it, it's like, no, if it doesn't show up, it doesn't show up, and so until it starts showing up in my playing as the best move I've got for some idea, I don't want to record it quite yet. Does that make sense?

Leah Roseman (02:12:07):

Yeah, makes sense. Yeah. Well, it's been wonderful to meet you today and to have this closeup experience of the Bazantar.

Mark Deutsch (02:12:19):

Thank you.

Leah Roseman (02:12:22):

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.