Mike Marshall

Musician · b. 1957 · New Castle, Pennsylvania · mikemarshall.net
Best known for Mandolin Composer

Mike Marshall is a mandolinist whose career has been a steady argument that the instrument has no natural limits. He came out of Florida bluegrass, joined the David Grisman Quintet as a young man, and has since built a working life out of Brazilian choro, classical chamber music, jazz and new acoustic improvisation — usually several of them in the same year.

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  • Born Michael James Marshall on July 17, 1957, in New Castle, Pennsylvania, he grew up in Lakeland, Florida, and at eighteen won the state championships on both fiddle and mandolin.
  • He joined the David Grisman Quintet and spent years in it, touring alongside Stéphane Grappelli, Mark O’Connor, Tony Rice, Béla Fleck, Jerry Douglas and his fellow quintet member Darol Anger.
  • With Anger he formed a long-running duo, and later Psychograss; the two of them are the through-line of the post-Grisman new acoustic scene.
  • From 1984 he was part of Montreux with Anger, pianist Barbara Higbie and bassist Michael Manring, a chamber-folk group that recorded for Windham Hill.
  • He founded the Modern Mandolin Quartet, which put four mandolin-family instruments into a string-quartet format and recorded four albums for Windham Hill, making its Carnegie Hall debut in 1995.
  • His long immersion in Brazilian choro produced Mike Marshall & Choro Famoso (2004) and a partnership with the Brazilian ten-string mandolinist Hamilton de Holanda, beginning with New Words (2006).
  • He has recorded Bach and Vivaldi on mandolin, written for chamber ensembles, and collaborated with Chóro and classical players who had never encountered the instrument as anything but a folk curiosity.
  • He teaches through an online school he runs himself and through camps, and is one of the most methodical instructors in acoustic music.
  • In this catalog he appears on the early Grisman-circle instrumentals “Cedar Hill” and “Janice,” and on the Monroe tribute True Life Blues.

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