RockOm

Mark Karan’s long anticipated debut album Walk Through the Fire is out today on Quacktone Records. Four years in the making, Walk Through the Fire is a testament to Mark Karan's dauntless musical spirit which shines through brilliantly on each track of this remarkable album.

Since 1998 Mark has been performing with the extended Grateful Dead family (The Other Ones, Mickey Hart's Planet Drum, and Bob Weir & RatDog). He has anchored the lead guitar slot in RatDog for the last eleven years, touring the US year round. Before crossing over into the land of the Dead, Mark worked his guitar and vocal voodoo for the likes of Dave Mason, Delaney Bramlett, the Rembrandts, Paul Carrack, Huey Lewis, Jesse Colin Young and Sophie B. Hawkins.

Mark is a musician's musician. In recent years, Mark has performed with The Allman Brothers, Trey Anastasio, Joan Baez, Dickey Betts, Delaney Bramlett, Larry Campbell, Clarence Clemons, Michael Franti & Spearhead, Galactic, Gov’t Mule, Jackie Greene, Sammy Hagar, Levon Helm, Bill Kirchen, Chuck Leavell, Little Feat, New Riders of the Purple Sage, Phil Lesh & Friends, John Popper, String Cheese Incident, Derek Trucks, Narada Michael Walden and others. Mark also tours with his band, “Jemimah Puddleduck”, with John Molo on drums, JT Thomas on keys, and Bob Gross on bass. Mark offers his soulful blues-based vocal styling and inspired guitar work with a remarkably tight rhythm section in a passionate delivery of the sounds of Americana.

RockOm caught up with Mark Karan recently to discuss Walk Through the Fire, as well as his time with RatDog and how he healed from throat cancer with the power of optimism and by "walking through the fire."

RockOm: Your new CD Walk Through the Fire is fantastic. You must be proud of it.

Mark Karan: I feel really lucky. I can say that I am.  You get so close to a record when you’re making it- you can hear every bleep, fart and wart. A lot of people that I know who have made records by the time they get to the end of it they’ve put a lot of work in it and they hate it. Everybody else loves it, but they hate their own record. I’m not having that experience at all. I feel really lucky.

RockOm: Tell us how Walk Through the Fire came about.

Mark Karan: This CD came into being at the end of my little stint with cancer. I just kinda had an internal directive to get some work done.  I’ve never made a solo record; I’ve been involved with a lot of record making through the years, but generally speaking it’s either been as a band concept or it was in support of a solo artist.

The song “Annie Don't Lie” is one of my favorite songs to sing it’s just a fun party song, a good chance for the audience to sing along.

“Love in Vain" features Delaney Bramlett. Delaney Bramlett and I go way back. He and I were pretty close friends.  I was selected to do a track on this soundtrack for a movie that's going to be coming out for Sundance next year called Guitar Man. The movie features everyone from Stevie Wonder to Lenny Kravitz to Sting to Neal Shon to Ronnie Montrose. The producer gave me a track and I saw that "Love In Vain" was one of the songs licensed and I said, “I’ll have that one please!” I actually produced the whole track with me singing it all the way through. Michael, the producer, brought Delaney up to interview for the movie, and I got this wild idea and thought why don’t we wipe half of my vocals of this track, and put Delaney on it and have him put some dobro on it and we’ll have it as a duet. It just kinda all fell together naturally.

RockOm: Tell us about your cancer and how did you go about the healing process?

Mark Karan: You got a few hours? It’s kind of a hard story to reign in. I was diagnosed in the summer of 2007. As far as what happened- I don’t know. The doctors don’t know what caused this cancer so I sure as heck don’t. I got diagnosed with throat cancer and had to go through about half a year’s worth of treatment and a bit of recovery time after that. I got the all clear in February of '08 and went back out on tour with RatDog.

I was really, really blessed in the way, for a lack of a better term, the universe sorta presented me the cancer and then allowed me to respond to it. I think it’s very natural for us to go into fear or anger or resentment around a diagnosis like that. I had a sense very immediately that the cancer was here to teach me something.

Walk Through the Fire is available in stores, on iTunes, Amazon.com, and his website, markkaran.com. The entire audio interview with Mark Karan will be featured on Thursday's RockOm.net podcast. You don't want to miss this podcast and the remarkable story of how Walk Through the Fire came into being.

A very special thanks to Dennis McNally for being such a friend to us here at RockOm.

"If you practice for ten years, you may begin to please yourself, after 20 years you may become a performer and please the audience, after 30 years you may please even your guru, but you must practice for many more years before you finally become a true artist - then you may please even God." - Ustad Ali Akbar Khan

It’s difficult to imagine George Harrison never discovering classical Indian music. There would never have been sitar on The Beatles' “Norwegian Wood” or his songs “All Things Must Pass” and “My Sweet Lord” and as well as others. There might never have been A Concert for Bangladesh in 1971 which ushered in the era of the relief concert. All this and so much more might never have been if not for the presence of Ustad Ali Akbar Khan who passed on June 18 at the age of 87. It was Ali Akbar Khan’s many firsts as a Master Musician that paved the way for the introduction of Indian music to the rest of the world.

He was the first to record an LP of Indian classical music in the States in 1955 as well to give a recital on American network TV. The late American violinist Yehudi Menuhin, who became one of his earliest champions in the West, said he considered Mr. Khan "an absolute genius, the greatest musician in the world." Khan was also the first Indian musician to receive the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1991. In 1997 Khan was chosen to receive the prestigious National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. It was presented by Mrs. Hillary Clinton at a ceremony in the White House.

Ustad Khan was a virtuoso of the sarod, a 25-string instrument in the lute family. His chosen musical genre is based in part on the concept of the raga, which consists of improvised music based on a variety of scales. From these scales, or permutations of them, Indian musicians follow traditional forms but add their own inflections and feeling.

The son of a revered musician and teacher, Mr. Khan began intensive training as a child and partnered with sitar player Ravi Shankar - his future brother-in-law - performing duets throughout India. Khan and Shankar were the opening act at A Concert for Bangladesh.

Ali Akbar College of Music is the name of three schools founded by Ustad Khan to teach Indian classical music. The first was founded in 1956 in Calcutta, India. The second was founded in 1967 in Berkeley, California, but moved to its current location in San Rafael, California the next year. The third was founded in 1985 in Basel, Switzerland and is run by Khan's disciple Ken Zuckerman.

Derek Trucks was a student of the Ali Akbar College of Music and Trucks’ playing is heavily influenced by Ali Akbar Khan. Many revered musicians such as Ustad Zakir Hussain were heavily influenced under the direction of Ustad Khan. Khan was nominated for Grammy Awards five times between 1970 to 1998.

Survivors include his wife, Mary, and 11 children from several previous wives.

Ali Akbar Khan webpage