Marty

Bio:

Marty Honda plays jazz violin and bass. He is currently a member of a number of groups, including String Thing, Simply Jazz, the Angelica's Bisro Jazz Jam House Band, Levitate, and his own MZHQ jazz trio, quartet and quintet. He often is a guest in other groups, such as the Hot Club of Palo Alto. He was a member of former groups Just Friends and the Alter Ego Jazz Ensemble. Marty also plays with a number of different jazz musicians at casual gigs in the San Francisco Bay area. In addition, he has his own virtual group MGB in which he uses Garage Band to multitrack himself on various violins, basses and a mandolin, together with backing track CDs and BIAB (Band In A Box).

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Marty runs weekly jazz jam sessions at Angelica's Bell Theatre and Bistro in Redwood City, CA every Monday night from 7:30 to 10:30PM. The jam is a continuation of the Oak City and Milan Jazz Jams that Marty ran since May, 2010, and has attracted many fine musicians each week, including some of the best veterans of the craft as well as some of the best young rising stars from the local area.

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Marty also volunteers at the Community School of Music and Arts in Mountain View, California (CSMA) and organizes monthly jazz jams at the school.

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Marty is a founding member of String Thing. String Thing performs jazz with strings as the "horns" of a conventional jazz ensemble. The group is made up of two violins (Marty and Mary Helen Weinstien), a guitar (Fred Malouf), piano (Joe Roark), bass (Kevin Duell) and drums (Rick Takahashi). The group plays all the jazz standards from Monk to Jobim, as well as original compositions in the spirit of these masters. String Thing is NOT a string quartet doing jazz (like Turtle Island) or a "gypsy jazz" group focussing on Django Reinhardt and Stephan Grappelli (with all due respect to these pioneers of string jazz). And String Thing is certainly not Bond or their like.

Marty also composes jazz tunes and some of them have been uploaded to the MySpace player above. They are:

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1. "Andina", based on a theme by the British group Jade Warrior, performed by Alter Ego with Ken Okada on bass.
2. "Always You" performed by Marty Honda, Kirk Tamura, Jaro Olejar, Jim Larios, Michael Medwid
3. "YM Bossa" performed by String Thing
4. "Waltz Wednesday" performed by Marty Honda, Wenhai Pan, Michael Medwid and Mike Gendreau
5. "I Go You Go" performed by Alter Ego with Ken Okada on bass and Kirk Abe on drums
6. "Thursday PM" (video) performed by Alter Ego with Ken Okada on bass and Michael Medwid on drums

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More recordings of his original compositions will be uploaded in the near future.

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Marty's current gear inclludes electric violins from NS Design, Bridge and Zeta as well as a traditional acoustic violin. For bass he plays an acoustic upright with a custom PVDF pickup, an NS Design CR4M electric upright bass and a Fender American standard jazz bass with Ghost piezo pickups added. Marty plays through an Acoustic Image Coda amp and an AER Alpha.

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Marty started violin lessons at the age of 4. Unfortunately, as he will admit, he made the unwise decision to quit taking lessons at age 12. His interest in music, however, was reawakened in high school when he learned to play the bass for his high school big band, directed by Lile Cruse. This was his first exposure to playing jazz. He minored in music in college, but grad school, career and family occupied his life after college and he did not start playing jazz seriously until 2001. Since then he has attended the Stanford Jazz Workshop Residency Program each year and he has taken classes in jazz improvisation at De Anza College, Santa Clara University and the Community School of Music and Art (CSMA) in Mountain View. He is currently a student of Seward McCain. His past teachers include Peter Nicoloff, Lile Cruse, Victor Lin, Wayne Wallace, Rich Kuhns, Jim Witzel, John Neves, Dan Nieckarz and John Russell. His musical influences include Miles Davis, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Hoarace Silver, Joe Henderson, Wayne Shorter, Cole Porter, Chick Corea, Ramsey Lewis, Dave Brubeck, Paul Desmond, Blood Sweat and Tears, the Buddy Rich Big Band, Don Ellis, Astrud Gilberto, Burt Bacharach, the Ventures, the Beatles, Bach and Mozart.

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Marty is married to artist Yeung Ha and they have two grown children. Marty and Yeung love to travel, hike, cook, and collect ethnic folk art. Marty has a PhD in computer science from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and has spent over 20 years in technical and management positions at companies in Silicon Valley. He retired in 2001 after 15 years at Sun Microsystems, where he was most recently senior director of engineering.

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