Concert with Mark Deutsch

A professional musician since the age of twelve, Mark Deutsch is a visionary artist with a background in non-linear mathematics, sacred systems, and cosmology. As both a classically trained bassist and sitarist, as well as gigging musician he gained extensive experience in orchestral and world music ensembles, jazz/blues combos, and solo sitar performances.

While studying sitar and Indian music theory with the legendary Ustad Imrat Khan, Mark began to explore the deeper underlying universal laws of music and its fundamental frequency structures. This would ignite a process that culminated in the creation of the Bazantar. A new acoustic instrument for which he would be awarded a patent. "...A singular orchestra, the Bazantar is a Pansonicon that resonates from within the very nexus of sound...evoking all the power of Western classical music with the depth and nuance of Eastern traditions."

Since the creation of the Bazantar, Mark has been composing, recording, and developing the techniques that have defined the instrument’s historic place in the wider world. Deutsch's understanding of hidden mathematics, combined with the depth of his cultural influences, weave an unexpected landscape of resonance and beauty. The interplay of melodic, sympathetic, and drone strings in his work is remarkably rich in its texture and like nothing ever heard before. At present his main focus is recording and performing with the Bazantar, giving workshops on improvisation, and lecturing on sound and music’s effects on physiology and consciousness. His latest solo work is The Picasso Tunings, an epic four-hour tone poem of unaccompanied Bazantar music.

The Bazantar is a six-string acoustic bass, fitted with an additional twenty-nine sympathetic strings and four drone strings. The instrument possesses a melodic range of over six octaves, while its sympathetic range spans five octaves. This results in an interplay between melodic, sympathetic, and drone strings which weaves an unexpected landscape of resonance that is remarkably rich in texture.

Mark’s ambient explorations invoke the ancient traditions of trance-ritual and embody a sacred musicality rarely heard in Western cultures.

BILL LASWELL-BASSIST, PRODUCER, AUDIO ALCHEMIST.

You are listening to the future.

JARON LANIER-WORLD RENOWNED SCIENTIST AND MUSICIAN

…a visceral reaction akin to my stunned and delighted response to first hearing a symphony orchestra away back some 75 years ago.

DAVID WALTER-PRINCIPAL BASSIST NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC, FACULTY JULLIARD

Mark Deutsch has created exploration into the depths of sound where the roots of tonality beneath Eastern and Western systems are one...A must for all sonic adventurers.

DON CAMPBELL-AUTHOR OF THE MOZART EFFECT®

Mark Deutsch is a mesmerizing virtuoso on his Bazantar that sounds like many instruments woven into one surprise.

YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA-PULITZER-PRIZE-WINNING POET

Every once in a while, someone comes along and blows doors off what is being done and that is what Mark has done with the Bazantar.

ERIC HARRIS-PRINCIPAL BASSIST, ST. LOUIS SYMPHONY

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

San Francisco Zen Center Conference Center, 308 Page St., San Francisco, United States