Welcome! Glad to see you at the old website. If you'd like to get in touch, you can email me at marcblackmarc@aol.com. Also, facebook is excellent. (marc black and marc black music). I'd love to hear from you.
I'm glad to report, it's been an exciting season for my music. Ooh I Love My Coffee is #6 on the national Folk DJ Chart! The CD altogether reached #13 on the Roots Rock Internet Airplay Top 50 and #21 on the Folk DJ Chart.
You can purchase the Pictures of the Highway CD right here! Just click the yellow 'Buy Now' button to the left. We'll send it right out to you. Or, click the red 'Buy' button and you can download the CD!
Beside the CD, I'm also focused on the music video for the Rachel Maddow song. We've got some great footage!. A wonderful young director, Blake Farber, is shooting and editing. Should be out the middle of September.
Even though the NY Mets have been a bitch to root for this year...I would like to thank Boomer & Carton on WFAN for hosting me and Eric Weissberg a while back . We performed our You Gotta Believe, Mets! live on their morning show. Steve Somers, aka The Schmoozer and John Sebastian are both on the original recording. Eric and I were featured on the Diamond Vision screen in center field of Citi Field.
The past few months have been great. Lots of house concerts and clubs from Florida to Texas to Pennsylvania. The Towne Crier to the Living Room. One highlight was the Haiti benefit with the great Jack DeJohnette, David Sancious, Don Byram and Happy Traum.at the Bearsville Theater. The band exploded! The dancers moved the entire building and we sent over five thousand bucks to Haiti!
This year has included several trips to Texas including fabulous house concerts and a great time at the Kerrville Folk Festival where I performed for a thousands of folks from all over the Country. I was also hosted by John Platt at the Living Room in NYC. I'll be returning there on April 18.
I've also had the time to do a few commercial scores. Like this one i just scored for director, Elma Garcia.
Winning Folk Artist and Folk Song of The Year honors from ABC Radio's Fame Games! has been good for my mood. Even with all the rain we've been having. You can hear the winning song, 'Ooh I Love My Coffee', on the iSound player, just to the left.
Fame Games is an International radio program with the world's most-listened-to webcast. It has a total audience in excess of 2.5 million listeners!
'Sunshine Sunshine'...A few weeks ago, I was on a fancy songwriter's panel with Jonathan Edwards, Andy Pratt, and Jill Colucci. The program was beautifully run by an arts group in Hudson, NY..CAT. We put on a concert on Saturday night featuring the songs of Phil Ochs. Phil's sister, Sonny, was the MC. She was a delight, as well.
I've now toured in Texas three times this year. Just a few weeks before the Kerrville Festival, I played in Midland and in Lubbock (home of Buddy Holly)! Here's what a blogger wrote about the show in Midland...Marc Black Is Fabulous.
We also made it to Austin and had a great jam at Donns Depot with Chris Gage, Marsha Ball, and other great folks on Monday and attended a CD release party for Lissa Hattersly who covered one of my songs, Moonstruck Love, on her disc. She also performed it live and she was great. Check out her entire CD How I Spent My Summer Vacation. It's a joy!
In the world of advertising, etc, I recently scored a commercial that features Rachel Ray pushing her new dog food...Nutrish. It's now all over cable tv. And the campaign I did for Blue Cross/Blue Shield is getting lots of play, as well.
In case you never got a chance to see the video we put together in support of the candidacy of then Senator Obama, you might want to check it out. We did it for a nickel and I think it's pretty fun...
I also just found out I'll be featured for a week on an extraordinary radio program, November 24. It's Art of the Song Creativity Radio.
Meanwhile, Mike, Eric Parker and I have been looking for music in all the wrong places. Check out the Junkyard Jam...
Thanks to so many of your for your support for our Stroke of Genius Project, from New York to California. Following our show at UCLA, we sold out an evening at the beautiful Jacob Burn Film Center in Pleasantville on January 3rd. The performances featured live versions of the the songs off the Stroke of Genius CD, a screening of the Stroke of Genius documentary by Bahmna Soltani, and a question and answer session.
I recently weighed in on the issue of the renewal of the Katonah Grill's cabaret license...in song. Singing my point of view to the local Town Board. Democracy in song...that's my kind of government! Here's the song I sang...A Thousand Years.
We are real happy to find our song, Lies in Red White & Blue has been on Neil Young's Living with War Site. It's been has high as #33 (out of over 2,000) and it's been on the chart for about five months, now. This song seems to strike a chord in anyone who has considered the horror and the bullshit surrounding war...in particular, those who lived through the Viet Nam War era. I just got a beautiful letter from Larry Winters, a vet who has made easing this suffering a large part of his life's work. I invite you to click on his name to visit his website and experience some of what he's doing.
As a little summer sidelight, my song about Martha Stewart and her attempt to trademark 'Katonah' (my hometown's name) was covered in Business Week Magazine , Page Six of the NY Post, a host of other print publications; on AOL's opening page, and around the world on cable and broadcast television. We've had over 30,000 views on our Youtube video of the original performance! You can go toYouTubeand search for Marc Black to see the original performance at a town meeting. A more polished version is for sale on ITunes.
I'd like to take a moment to thank the Katonah Museum for a great experience. I had a great time reading and singing to some local kids. I sang Steve Goodman's City of New Orleans and read his adaptation. Also, read and sang He's Got The Whole World In His Hands.
In October, Susan and I were in a little town I like to call 'Rome'. It was my first visit and I'm now officially in love with the place. Elma Garcia, a great friend and director with whom I've worked since about 1994, got married...are you ready for this...in the Pantheon. We couln't have enjoyed this wacky and wonderful break in our schedule more than we did. Coincidentally, we just finished up a score for a commercial that Elma shot for Blue Cross Blue Shield.
And now that winter's upon us, I'm thinking about how great last summer was...
We also accompanied a field full of Kirtan singers and then alternated with them under a beautiful half moon in Woodstock (where else would you do that). And I jammed with Jon Paris at B B King's in NYC to celebrate Phil Demtrion's birthday.
In July, we were at the Pleasantville Music Festival. Mike Esposito and I performed a set... and I joined Hope Machine, part of Tribes Hill , the Hudson Valley folk music collective, to perform 'Amercian Children'... the title song from an album I wrote and produced with my friend, Ed Bialek. It was originally sung by Richie Havens on the CD.
In June, Mike Esposito and I played at Caffe Lena in Saratoga, adn the Brattle Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts. At the Brattl show, we also screened the Stroke of Genius documentary.
Earlier, this spring I visited Los Angeles where I was a mentor at the ASCAP I Create Music Expo. And I came home to discover that the Stroke of Genius CD was that week's number one seller on CD Baby.com...and it hit one of the National charts in Billboard Magazine!
By the way, the four songs that are on the player on the top left of this page (and which should have automatically started playing when you logged on the home page) are available as downloads...just $.99 each. These songs are each off different albums.
Thanks to Levon Helm for inviting us to perform at his Midnight Ramble in Woodstock. And to Maureen Neville on WJFF and Gregg Garrine on WDST for hosting us on their radio shows.
And here's a shout out to the great folks at the Larkspur Cafe Theatre in Larkspur, California for hosting our performance in honor of Daniel Pearl in their classic, all American roadhouse. My band, The Accidental Orchestra, featuring Ian Dogole, Bill Douglas, Robert Powell, Vernon Black and Randy Kahn, was stellar. They all made my 3.000 trip to California more than worth while.
And, by the way, the joke's on you! Now you can click on the joke project.com, hear a new joke everyday with a bit of our music before and after.
And speaking of funny, if you'd like to explore the relationship between love and love handles... Fat Man!
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We've also been busy with commercials, We completed a spots for Cobra Golf, Hartford Insurance...and another for one of my favorite toys...Hot Wheels! And our animated campaign for Airheads Candy is still ripping it up on Saturday morning cartoon time.
Sept 23 House Concert Charleston, SC
Sept 18 Beczak Center (w/ James Durst) Yonkers, NY
