Trombonist Jeff Albert joins me for a two-part conversation. The beginning of this episode explores the unique Guthman Musical Instrument Competition at Georgia Tech which celebrates musical inventors from around the world. You’ll be hearing some of these instruments from this year’s competition and you’ll find that information linked in the show notes. The second half of this episode is about Jeff’s life as a trombonist, improvisor, music technologist and professor. You’ll hear about his many years playing and recording in New Orleans across many styles and how digital media pairs with his interest in experimental music. All the music excerpts you’ll hear are linked in the show notes for you, from several of Jeff’s albums. Whether you play in a laptop orchestra or have only the vaguest idea what that means, you’ll enjoy Jeff’s great stories and insights. 

I’ve been following the Guthman competition for a couple of years and I’ve also linked several previous episodes for you with musical instrument inventors in the show notes, as well as some of the other trombone players I’ve featured. 

You can watch the video  on my YouTube  or listen to the podcast, and I’ve also linked the transcript.It’s

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.