Mark Deutsch Blended Math, Music, and Mysticism. The Result Was the Bazantar

A classically trained bassist with a mind for cosmology and non-linear math, he set out to build an instrument that could express both intuition and structure. The result was a five-string acoustic bass augmented with dozens of sympathetic and drone strings.

Earlier this month, the San Francisco-based jazz and classical bassist Mark Deutsch passed after a brief illness, leaving behind no evident movement, major vigils, or grand New York Times obituary. Just a single, hand-built instrument he started working on in the early 1990s. He named his instrument the bazantar. It was as complex as it was beautiful — a massive acoustic hybrid that fused ideas generated through jazz, Indian classical music, and physics to create a sound that felt like a hallucination.

I used to see Deutsch lugging his bass into a coffee shop in University City, Missouri and struck up a friendship. I was working at a record store and freelancing at the time, and we bonded over weird records, performance, esoterica, and the outer edges of sound. Eventually, I started writing about him for the St. Louis alt-weekly. Back then, he’d yet to get his patent, but the bazantar was almost fully developed — a physical presence with a philosophy behind it.

The bazantar looks like a stand-up bass but sounds like an orchestra arguing with itself. Plucked, it grounds the music like any jazz bass, except with a hint of harmonics. Bowed, it turns monstrous — unstable, symphonic. Each note activates 29 hidden strings that shimmer and swell beneath the surface. It’s a sound that once prompted Bill Laswell to describe Deutsch’s ambient explorations as invoking “the ancient traditions of trance-ritual and embody[ing] a sacred musicality rarely heard in Western cultures.”

Deutsch built the instrument as the answer to a question he first encountered in a dream. “I was studying Indian music with (sitar master) Imrat Khan, who had given me the impression that it would take me 20 years to learn the subtle difference in the pitches in Indian music,” he told me. Khan, he added, “thought a Western guy couldn’t learn that stuff, because a Western mind had been polluted by these synthetic vibrations. So I started to do the math of finding out where the vibrations actually were.” (For reference, Imrat Khan’s father was Enayat Khan (1895–1938), considered one of the great sitar and surbahar players of his time; his grandfather, Imdad Khan (1848–1920), was equally revered.)

He also tried another approach, to “start playing Indian music — and particularly sarangi music — in my sleep at night on replay. I was trying to collapse the pattern from both angles. One was from my intuitive dream time, so I could just hear the internal sense. The other was collapsing it from the intellectual, which is understanding the math also.”

Looking back, he added 20 years later to writer Thomas Crone, the reflex upended his creative life. “Before that, I was a jazz or classical musician,” he said in 2019. “But I felt that with this instrument I lost my prior life, and it put me in this weird direction of solo bass guy.

“It was a pretty unusual thing to do,” he added. “I liked it.”

Three prototypes later, Deutsch finished the bazantar. “In comparison to anybody else who plays it, I’m the best in the world,” he laughed, before adding, “The thing I’m getting now is, once they hear it, they don’t believe it. People will listen to the recording and they’ll say, ‘You’re lying. This is more than one instrument.’ It’s really frustrating. You spend all this time, you get what you want, and you’re like, ‘Wow. I got it. I can show it; I can prove my point.’ And then people don’t believe me.”

It wasn’t just the skepticism that threw him. It was the anger. “I never thought about the hostility that people would express about somebody trying to make an instrument. I was shocked. I thought, ‘What a cool idea.’ But then I’d get these sort of patronizing, skeptical reactions. So after a little bit of that, I stopped, and I really didn’t say anything.”

The history of musical invention is filled with visionaries who created what they couldn’t find. Harry Partch built an entire orchestra of microtonal instruments to express a tuning system no standard symphony could touch: Cloud-Chamber Bowls, the Quadrangularis Reversum, a Marimba Eroica the size of a car. Robert Grawi’s Gravikord, an ergonomic, stainless-steel harp inspired by the West African kora, found a niche among world fusion artists.

In 1999, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issued Patent No. 5,883,319 for Deutsch’s bazantar. “You can’t usually patent an idea, but since this idea is so unique, I got a conceptual patent,” Deutsch boasted not long after. The patent officially recognized his “hybrid acoustic bass fitted with sympathetic and drone strings.” The confirming document reads like part engineering brief, part sonic blueprint — evidence that his dream had entered the material world.

To get to that point, Deutsch had to solve mechanical problems few musicians ever face: implosion. “What I needed to do was to get the right tension on the strings,” he told me, “because that’s going to generate a lot of amplitude. The problem was: Say I strung all these strings up here and down there. The whole body would cave in.”

His solution was to create the sympathetic strings in a separate stress-bearing cartridge about the size of his forearm, then raise the bridge and affix the unit beneath the strings. The result is a machine that’s attached to the bass but not built into it.

He put it a more fanciful, academic way when writing about it: “The integration of North Indian classical music’s highly refined sense of pitch, and its subtle melodic contouring, with Western classical music’s strength of thematic development and its ability to create musical structures panoramic in architecture is one aspect of the style I am working to develop.”

That impulse — intellectual and mystical, dogged and strange — was on full display during a truly memorable collaborative performance. At the turn of the millennium, I traveled to Chicago to cover Deutsch’s set at St. James Cathedral as part of the Chicago Humanities Festival. The building was an ideal, if reverberant, amplifier: parquet floors underfoot, Arts and Crafts-era wallpaper curling up its archways, gold leaf glinting off the ribs of the ceiling.

The host introduced composer Dennis González, Pulitzer-prize-winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa, percussionist Susie Ibarra (who recently earned her own Pulitzer), harmonica player Sugar Blue and Deutsch. Barefoot, long-haired, dressed in flowing cotton and moccasins, he lugged his strange stringed contraption across the stage. He was a sideman on sitar, electric bass and bazantar that night, but my focus was him — and Ibarra’s drumming.

That was especially true during Wild Fruit/Salome/Amazing Grace, when Deutsch moved to the bazantar and bowed a series of low notes that activated the resonant strings. The room seemed to hold its breath as he did so. While initial tones came deep and mournful, behind it, as if pushed by a gust, came a full harmonic bloom: sympathetic strings humming and echoing into chaos.

The bazantar hasn’t caught on, and he never built another. But, then, no one else was going to play it like he did. Deutsch left behind a striking body of work. His discography includes his first, called Fool, and a series of later releases that expanded the instrument’s possibilities. He collaborated with reedist J.D. Parran for Omegathorp: Living City in 2005. Eleven years later he and Parran recorded a stunning series of duets called California Street Sessions for NY jazz label Sympathetic Visions, an exploratory duet that pushed the bazantar into deep, intuitive dialogue. Parran’s a cofounder of the Black Artist Group who has collaborated with artists including Stevie Wonder, Peter Brotzmann, Anthony Braxton and more.

In 2017, Deutsch also self-released a four-CD box set documenting his solo improvisations, mathematical tuning systems and compositional structures. Called The Picasso Tunings, the set compiles his acoustic solo Bazantar music — 20 original compositions delivered in four volumes: Four Sisters, Questions of Prescience, Blood and Holywater, and Gone. The notes describe the work:

This collection of music begins from a Western perspective tonally. It then evolves, in the second volume, to a more exotic Eastern place in both texture and melody. The third volume takes a cosmopolitan turn, more experimental, urban, cinematic and edgy with hints of jazz, blues and the avant-garde. The final album is a long contemplative meditation on acceptance and the cultivation of a sense of peace and relaxation while living in the midst of “Samsara”, the modern world, this veil of tears.

In 2023, he issued a vinyl box set that gathered highlights from his archives into a physical monument worthy of the instrument’s sonic reach. Issued in an edition of 1000, the vinyl set is currently available on Bandcamp; once it’s gone, it likely won’t be back.

There were easier ways to make music. But Deutsch didn’t want easier. He wanted the whole thing. He wanted to be in tune with his universe.