Mark Deutsch Bazantar Inventor: Interview

This is the transcript of my interview with Mark Deutsch, who 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. The video and podcast versions are linked here as well. 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.