Marbin’s Harbinger

Syracuse-bred bassist Ian Stewart blazes a trail for his Chicago pals when their jazz-fusion band visits the Dino

By Jessica Novak

Local musician Ian Stewart made a trip to Chicago in September 2009 to check out the music scene. Two years later, he’s still living there and touring often with the jazz-fusion outfit Marbin, who will bring their Rage Against the Machine-tinged live show to the Dinosaur Bar-B-Que, 246 W. Willow St., on Monday, Sept. 26, 9 p.m. (Admission is free; call 476-4937 for details.)

Although it may sound like a contradiction—jazz and Rage in the same sentence?—the result is a sound that has been equally contradicting, according to Stewart, who says the band’s music leaves some listeners perplexed and others addicted. Regardless, the 25-year-old bassist has found a niche in a city he never planned to visit.

Stewart grew up in Syracuse and attended Nottingham High School. He picked up the bass around age 12 and was initially inspired by, and later taken under the wing of, Gustav Hoffmann, son of guitar virtuoso Mark Hoffmann. “I met Gus on Halloween at the Westcott Community Center,” Stewart says. “I’d been playing bass for like two weeks. Little kid. He was playing with some piano player. He had long hair at the time and vampire teeth or something like that, the usual Goose {Gustav’s nickname} stuff.”

The two kept running into each other and Hoffmann began inviting Stewart over to jam with some older kids who helped pull him along his eventual musical path. That path led Stewart to join the 315 All- Stars, the former scholastic group led by Manlius Pebble Hill School music educators Howard Potter and Joe Colombo. After the All-Stars came acceptance into SUNY Purchase, where Stewart majored in jazz studies and worked with an impressive slew of professors: Steve Wilson, John Riley, Doug Weiss, Timothy Cobb, who plays with the Metropolitan Opera orchestra, and Todd Coolman, who has played with Horace Silver, Stan Getz and Benny Goodman.

While at Purchase, Stewart also worked with John Abercrombie and well-known bassist Kermit Driscoll, who studied with Jaco Pastorius.

After graduating in May 2008, Stewart took a music position for Norwegian Cruise Line and P&O Cruises, where he performed every day, including jazz in the lounge, themed dance nights and as backup for guest entertainers. The job took him to Australia and the Mediterranean, but monotony quickly settled in during his 10 months traveling the world. When Stewart returned to the Salt City, he planned a Manhattan move but things changed during a visit to Pastabilities when he reconnected with Preyas Roy, a childhood friend and All-Stars alum. Roy had gone on to study at the University of Chicago and continued living there, so he invited Stewart to look over the Windy City.

“I kinda happened to get there {Chicago} by accident,” Stewart says. “A lucky accident. I went there to visit and never came back.”

Within just a few months, Stewart had landed gigs with various groups, mostly Latin jazz stylists as Chicago boasts a substantial Latin music scene. He also networked with musicians and various ensembles around town, plus he nabbed a teaching position at The Music Room in Palatine, Ill., where he still works.

His first gig was with Roy at The Red Line Tap, appropriately named since the bar is near one of the Chicago Transit Authority’s Red Line train stops. The band that played after Stewart was named Rabak. “I remember they were so obnoxiously loud,” he says. “I went outside to smoke a cigarette and listen to them because I couldn’t be in the room with them. Your ears were bleeding. But the music was great. I remember I liked it and I was like, ‘This would be a cool thing to do.’” Rabak would later morph into Marbin, headed by Israeli-American guitarist Dani Rabin and Israeli saxophonist Danny Markovitch. In April 2010 Stewart was asked to fill in on bass. “So they show up with their Jeep full of crap, pull up to my house, stuff me in the back seat,” he recalls. “The event was running like three hours late. We were there forever. We played for a grand total of 15 minutes because it was just a showcase kind of thing. They were just doing it for kicks. They kinda whispered the tunes in my ear before we played it and they were like, ‘OK, cool. We’ll call you again.’ And they started calling me more and more.”

Within months, the gig went from a single showcase to four or five days a week with many out-of-town shows. Stewart and touring drummer Justyn Lawrence, however, are not on the latest Marbin release, Breaking the Cycle (Moonjune Records), which features jazz veterans Steve Rodby and Paul Wertico from the Pat Metheny Group. Yet Stewart notes that several of their live shows will include opening for modern legends Scott Henderson, Jeff Berlin and Mike Clark during the tour that will swing them through Syracuse.

The touring life is not all glamour, as Stewart readily admits: “It’s an adventure. We go out, we barbecue, we meet the weirdest people. . . ” The group packs into a trailer and Jeep and heads to redneck taverns and big-time city spots, yet somehow Stewart and Lawrence always manage to get home to Chicago in time to play for Sunday-morning gospel church groups.

The stories out of the backwoods bars especially entertain. Marbin was at a barbecue in Carbondale, Ill., where they were met by Karl, a gigantic Irish bricklayer from Brooklyn with swastika tattoos up his arms. “He had no teeth on the side of his face and he looked at us and was like, ‘Who the fuck are you people?’” Stewart recalls. “Turns out he’s a huge fusion fan and here he is hanging out with two Israelis, a black guy and me, this Italian-Turkish kid from New York state. This guy with all these neo-Nazi symbols came to our show and loved our music.”

Crazy as it all seems, Stewart’s enjoying the ride. “If I’ve learned anything since graduating from college, it’s that I never know what’s going to happen,” he says. “I was a very planoriented person at one time. The journey is gonna take you where it takes you and you have no control over it. You can be proactive with it, you can try to move it forward, but ultimately it’s going to go where it’s gonna go. . .

basically it’s about not becoming complacent and not being afraid to take risks.

“Even with Marbin, you can’t really become complacent because things change so radically. We’re always on the verge of our car breaking down or running out of gas or getting kicked out of a venue in the middle of nowhere and having to drive back to Chicago.”