MarKamusic Biography

MarKamusic means "Music of the people" in Andean Quechua, the most widely spoken native language of the Americas
(about 20 million people). Markamusic is also a high-energy, multi-national musical ensemble that performs Latin music
deeply rooted within the folkloric, popular and traditional genres of Latin America, the Caribbean and South American
Andean regions. These regions comprise distinctively different zones and lands. From the wind barren high plateaus of the
Andes; the mystical Amazon rain forest, the heat of the Caribbean islands and the deserted coasts washed by the Pacific
Ocean, Latin America spans a whole varied and diverse continent. MarKamusic sensibly brings the musical forms and the
soulful art of the cultures and countries from these regions. An ever changing, eclectic weave of ancient, modern, aboriginal
 and pop themes performed on a fascinating array of native, western and African influenced instruments, like its ancestors
before them MarKamusic musicians draw from the well of their unique cultural past: Inca, Taino, Maya, African and
Spanish/European.

MarKamusic has embraced the responsibility that an ethnic artist must have to its own people, history and music but then
takes it all together to a different realm. Fussed with the feelings, experiences and creations of younger generations, during
its performances, MarKamusic will emphasize the musical and cultural contributions of the four major cultural influences
that have shaped modern, folk and traditional South American music and Latin American music at large: the indigenous, the
West African, the Euro-Iberian, and the United States. Traditional rhythms and music forms from these diverse cultures and
lands slowly fused over the centuries, creating that which is today's South American traditional, folk and popular musics.
MarKamusic's careful choice of repertoire and instrumentation reveals this historic evolution to its audiences.

Deeply moving at times or full of fresh and ancient energy, MarKamusic's music and song calls out to rekindle the senses
of our human collective memory, to the doors of our ancient hearts, only to convey and understand the universal feelings
that will be shared and enjoyed by the listeners. MarKamusic performances carry the audience across a panorama of
musical history millennia. Starting with the sweet delicate sounds of Quechua and Aymara bamboo flute melodies, the wind
blowing through the mountains and rain forest noisemakers. The performance continues with European influenced rhythms
and instruments and the power of the African influenced polyrhythm, until it reaches the ballads and songs of struggle
against authoritarian rule, spanning the period from the 1830's to the 1970's. MarKamusic closes the performance with
very high energy modern day inspired numbers.

  Since 1999, the seven-piece band, MarKamusic has been performing its unique "Pan-Andean World Beat" music before
multicultural audiences across the United States. From its conception as a small ensemble of 3 South American traditional
musicians almost a decade ago, the group expanded its size to seven members including several musicians from other countries
of the Americas. Western-European wind instruments, African influenced instruments, and jazz drums also found its way into
their music complementing the bamboo flutes and diminutive Indian guitars of the folkloric musicians in marvelous, if sometimes
off-beat, ways.

Since then, MarKamusic's repertoire has emerged as a combination of many themes: their own reinterpretations of ancient
Inca, Aymara and Quechua aboriginal melodies; songs arising from the nineteenth-century South American struggle for
independence; the rarely heard treasures and sometimes jarring, sometimes hypnotic Afro-South American music such as the
Música Negroide of Peru or the Candombe music from Uruguay; of Latin folk-rock protest music-banned in the mid 1970s
under pain of death by the military Juntas; and a handful of favorite Latin-American torch songs and high-energy pop tunes
-the kind you might hear blaring out of jukeboxes in small-town luncheonettes and bars in say, Bolivia or Venezuela. The sum
of it all is that chairs are often empty or kicked over at the end of the performance and everyone is up on their feet, prancing
or kicking about like crazy or taking part in a madcap, coiling conga-line. MarKamusic tailors its presentations to the
educational interests of each audience. By varying the length of the informative commentaries preceding each number, a
MarKamusic performance can indeed be a guided tour of South American musical forms or a complete carefree festival of
musical delights.