Managers Are For People Who Can’t Manage
Marbin guitarist Dani Rabin talks about the power of personal responsibility and taking ownership of your career
Marbin, based in Chicago, is a quartet centered around the Israeli-born duo of saxophonist Danny Markovitch and guitarist Dani Rabin (“Marbin” is short for Markovitch-Rabin), and they play brain-splitting, chops-busting fusion, with an occasional nod to the manouche jazz stylings of artists like Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli. They started in 2007 in Israel, moved to Chicago a year later, and spent years on the road paying dues. Their touring schedule is relentless—they play about 250 dates a year—and didn’t let up until the onset of COVID-19 in March, not that a pandemic can keep them off the road for long.
“Me and Danny are about to go on the most hilarious tour,” Rabin says. “We broke the system, and we are doing a tour playing our fans’ backyards. We are booked every day. We charged a set fee, and they are happy to pay it, and invite their friends. We are touring as a duo, and leaving the van in Chicago. We are traveling in a hybrid, saving in gas, staying with them, and playing music as an acoustic duo.”
Marbin has amassed a massive following, and between touring, physical music sales, lessons, and merch, manage to stay financially viable. Their fan base is loyal, too, although they don’t take that loyalty for granted. Between daily streams on Facebook Live, and other efforts on social media, they keep in touch, and maintain the relationship.
“I do Facebook Live usually once or twice a day,” Rabin says. “Each session is an hour long, and each one gets between 3,000 and 15,000 views. But I do it every day and never miss days.”
I spoke with Rabin about the band’s early days, the importance of doing everything yourself, the secret to getting 300,000 Facebook followers, the value of offering premium content to your most loyal fans, and the anti climax of playing through fusion legend Allan Holdsworth’s rig.
When did you put the band together?
I am from Rechovot, in Israel. Danny Markovitch is from Beit El’azari, which is a little moshav about five miles away from Rechovot, on the way to Gedera. I went to the Berklee College of Music, and he went to the IDF. We got together in 2007. We met in Israel, right after I graduated. We met a day before our first gig—it was with a friend from childhood who is a bassist—and we started playing and writing together. We moved to Chicago together in 2008. We had a very good connection, but especially when writing music together. Initially, we started a fusion band, we called ourselves Babagage, which means, “in the trunk.” We had a drummer from Chicago, and we went to Chicago, following him to start our career here. That quickly fell apart, and we started Marbin, which is just Markovitch-Rabin, our last names combined. We started making albums. The first one came out in 2009, and that’s self-titled, weird, duo music. We got in touch with Chicago musicians, Paul Wertico and Steve Rodby from the Pat Metheny Group, and they played on our second and third album. We started touring, and we got affiliated with the Moonjune label. Moonjune label head, Leonardo Pavkovic, was the manager for Allan Holdsworth, and he got us to tour opening for Holdsworth for a month, and Scott Henderson, as well. We were already touring a little before that, but after that we were just touring full time. Up to these Corona days, we’ve been on the road most of the year, every year, playing about 250 shows a year.
Marbin is a fusion band, did you have your jazz chops together as well?
I got my jazz chops together after college, when we started the band and I needed to play over changes. What happened was—with the gypsy jazz stuff that I do now—was that we were on the road so much, and we were so broke in the beginning. We had to figure out some way to make extra money, because we started at zero. As in: no help, worst gigs, bars with no PA system for five-hour gigs for guarantees, being the entertainment. We’d show up at a bar in Mississippi, and we were two Jews and two black guys at the time, blasting fusion for people who didn’t know we were coming. There would be three guys hanging out at the bar looking at us. The amazing part, is they liked it. A lot of people connected with it. We’d always get this weird redneck-looking guy come up and say, “I love Mahavishnu Orchestra.” What me and Danny did was play as a duo during the day. We would set up, and play jazz standards, and gypsy jazz on the street for money.
Was that like your day job?
Basically. We were on tour and we had all this time. We could barely afford gas and the gigs were’t paying. For a Tuesday night in Knoxville, Tennessee, or somewhere, we would make $150 at the gig, and $300 playing on the street for five or six hours before the gig. To play that long, we needed to learn a lot of songs, so we kept learning standards. I love that stuff, and we amassed a pretty extensive vocabulary of songs.
Who was booking you at that time?
Danny books everything. He always has and always will.
Does he like doing that?
He doesn’t like it, but we’re not going to pay somebody 15 percent who is guaranteed to do a worse job, with worse routing. It is a lot of work, but who is going to take care of you better than you?
What are your responsibilities?
I do all the social media things, which is Facebook live videos. I have been on that since the day that feature came out four-something years ago, a few hours a day, engaging with the people who come to our shows. Our Facebook page has over 300,000 followers.
What was it that got you over the hump, from doing horrible gigs and playing in the street, to playing venues and selling tickets?
First of all, that first era was great. Even though it wasn’t well attended, we went to every state—we still do—we played all the time, and it was wild times, and it was really fun. In no way am I telling people, “Don’t do something like that.” It’s so fun, especially when you’re 20 and learning how to play. But around 2015, we had these two guys in our band, and we played a long tour. The last shows were in Chicago, and then we had one more gig where we had to drive to Missouri to do the Jefferson City Jazz Festival. We did the two gigs in Chicago opening for Scott Henderson, and then they quit the band.
Before the last gig?
They got together, unionized, and said, “We’re done”—that was the bassist and drummer. So me and Danny got in the car, drove to the festival, showed up without a rhythm section, and played gypsy jazz. The organizers had booked a fusion band, we had to apologize, and it was very uncomfortable. We got back to town, and we had one masterclass booked at a university, and one day to shoot a video booked. We called the guys and said, “Listen, you hung us out to dry. Show up to these two engagements, and we’ll end it nicely.” And they did. The last time I saw either of them, we made those videos for “Redline” and “African Shabtay.” At that point, we had maybe 13,000 followers on Facebook—basically very little online presence—although 13,000, when it’s real people who come to your shows is a lot of people. We put out those videos, they both started catching and got to millions of views, and that started the whole thing. We were able to not only get better gigs, and some attention, but people showed up to the gigs and bought tickets. That was the initial thing, which is funny, because we never saw those two again [laughs]. It was an epic way to end, because they basically quit out of frustration, because it wasn’t going anywhere. We knew it was going to go somewhere. We always had the faith that it would happen.
Were you signed with MoonJune at that point?
It depends on your definition of signed.
They’re an indie?
Very indie and very verbal. Leonardo [Pavkovic] helped us, and he’s always been a good friend, but he taught us a lot about what management means. In the music business, you are bound to get fucked, and it is better to get it over early and with the smallest possible weener [laughs]. It was that kind of situation. People work in their own interests—that’s just the way of the world—with some people, their help can be huge. Some people do things in a very selfless way, but that is not the way it usually happens. At the end of the day, our exchanges were pretty even and it was pretty harmless, but we learned to be distrustful of people who are supposed to manage your life for you. We have a saying that’s wonderful and 100 percent true: “Managers are for people who can’t manage.” We can manage. We’re fine. Most musicians are looking for a daddy. They’ll say that they’re not—they’ll say they are looking for something else—but what they are actually looking for is somebody to make the hard choices. They don’t realize that life is a series of tradeoffs, and you don’t always know the right path to go. If you make a mistake, the accountability side of it and not having somebody to blame is hard.
For example, our last album, we didn’t put it on Spotify until seven months after we released it. We decided that we were going to give ourselves a chance to make money with people who actually like us, and decided to give them the opportunity to pay us, which is something we’ve never done before. It’s one of those tradeoffs that a manager decides for you if you have one, but you have to decide for yourself. How do you weigh those things? You made a product. It took a long time to compose and record. You put out money, and you want people to hear it, and you want the exposure. But the exposure is free. Or, you have to be patient and sell them one-by-one online on Bandcamp or a platform like that, and withhold. You have people writing you everyday, “Why isn’t it on Spotify?” Those are adult decisions that you have to make for yourself as an adult. The point I am saying to aspiring musicians, is that you have a lot of growing up to do. If you that sounds like something you can’t do, and you never make decisions full-heartedly, and you will always be conflicted about these things.
You’re saying, the manager is someone to blame. “He’s a jerk, he screwed me,” as opposed to, “I blew it.”
It’s almost like for a lot of managers, these decisions aren’t so hard. They manage a few people and they don’t care if you fail quite as deeply as you do. Maybe they care a little bit, but to them, it was a bad decision, it’s losing money, too bad. For me it’s, “What the fuck are you doing to my life man??”
Do you have an objective third party you go to when you need someone outside the bubble to help understand the situation better?
My mom [laughs].
Do you sell a lot of physical albums?
We’ve sold a lot of albums—about 40,000—since we started, and that’s mostly in person. A lot of magazines don’t acknowledge that we exist as fusion. Jazziz, Downbeat, they push their own agenda, but it is disconnected from the market, as in, who is going to shows. For example, I saw, I forget who it was, but he was playing with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. It was what we call a “soft ticket event.” It was at the Symphony Center in Chicago. And then, about six months later, he played a show in a jazz club in Chicago. At the show with the orchestra, they sell season tickets, and it was full, obviously, and great money. But his name alone—to draw hard tickets at a club—the club was empty. A lot of people are inflated with air. Fake fame. It’s stories they’re selling you. A lot of times, I’ll read a magazine, and we’ve sold more albums than everybody in the magazine put together, and there is no mention of us. It’s fine. But I think for people who want to rise up in this game, I think it is important to realize that you can go directly to the people. You don’t have to go through the machine. The machine is breaking apart, anyway, and there are barely any magazines left. But you don’t need to get great write ups, and great reviews, and European agents, and all that stuff. It helps, but I don’t know. If you’re Jewish, and you don’t like wearing Dashikis to your shows, you’re probably not going to be riding any sort of wave, because you’re not part of the agenda they are trying to push right now. [You’re not] part of the look. In the last decade, there were a lot of huge groups, everything is super-diverse, everybody is a hipster, and there’s this vibe of “community.” But we’re not about that. We just shred. We play and we find the people. The business model is crazy, but it works. It is very easy to come up with the reasons why something isn’t working if you’re not trying. But if you like it enough to put insane amounts of time into it, to write it, to get other musicians to play it, and to create this thing, and you see that people are responding to it, you need to ride this process that you put in motion.
Social media has changed a lot in the last 10 years, particularly Facebook, with their algorithm. How has that impacted your efforts?
I feel like every success story you see has to do with the conscious, or unconscious, way that people gambled on social media platforms. For example, Snarky Puppy made a big gamble on YouTube and it worked. We put our chips on Facebook because it was working for us. In 2015, the game plan at Facebook was to reach as many people as possible. Anytime you shared something, it really went to your entire group. There was no option to boost posts. Everything was free. During that time, our music spread, initially, like wildfire. When they started monetization, we jumped on that immediately, and always kept a low simmer on pushing our music that way. In retrospect, it was a wise gamble, and we chose well out of the platforms. Our content would have been good on YouTube, too, but the way that they are targeting didn’t fit with what we were going for. We needed something that was much more surgical, because we are always traveling. We needed to hit people in specific pockets of the U.S.
Is YouTube more global?
It’s more global and less specific in terms of genre. You can set your ads in Facebook. You can do a thing called “look-alike audiences.” They have an algorithm that figures out who would like things, who has similar tastes to your audience. That has been very effective in the last two years. It allowed us to dial in our ads in a way that we reached people who really like the music. But I think if there is a valuable lesson that I can give other people about the music business, it is this: We were playing a show in North Carolina last year, right before Strong Thing came out, and we hung out with one of the guys who manages Snarky Puppy—he’s a part of their team. He told us that the business model changed from getting a little bit of money from a lot of fans, to getting a lot of money from a few fans, even for Snarky Puppy. At his recommendation, we did what we called a VIP package when the album was released. We sell that for a $100, and it had stuff like a book, a shirt, a signed CD, some other knickknack things, and we offered it pre-sale before everyone else. And we sold a lot of them. I think that idea is true. It’s always about the fans. Also, I feel like we’re the kind of band, where we’re their favorite band. There is a lot of music out there nowadays. You need to find people who your music isn’t just nice to listen to, but fans. There’s an urgency there. You have to be involved in their lives. They have to be involved in your life. Through social media you open the door for that. I think that is part of the game now. Building your audience has to be ongoing and constant. Even with that, when you have a release, you have to give people the option to get something that has more value, and creates a package that is at a price point where people who are excited about you, get something that’s worth that value. I am not talking about swindling them. You do something that is worth the money for the people, but you still make a nice margin on. You make something that allows you to sell it for $100, and allows them to get it, and be happy about it.
What else did you do with Facebook?
Anytime anybody clicks the like button or comments or does anything, before your page gets to 100,000, you can invite them to like your page. We used to sit there all day long. The whole point of the ads, when we were under 100,000, was to get likes. It was to get interaction with the post. That was not because we wanted to inflate our numbers, but because we wanted the ability to get people to our page. For the first 100,000 people, we would sit there for hours a day and invite them one by one. That feature goes away after 100,000. Anyone who liked a post, we would invite. I don’t know if you have every clicked on 70,000 people’s posts, but that takes a lot. I would much rather practice guitar or write a song or make an album, but I didn’t because it was less important at the time.
It built your audience.
All these people go to shows. It’s how we let people know where we are.
How do endorsements work, do you get free stuff?
The irony is that you get all that stuff—that’s either a great deal or free—when you can afford it. Not that it's not nice, it is. But it’s a strange to have, as a grown man, to want something for free that costs like $4,000 as your endgame.
Do you have to go to NAMM?
No, we’ve always had gigs [laughs]. People will buy my guitar because they like my band or playing and think the sound is hiding in the wood, which is ridiculous. I love gear, but it is such a silly obsession. It’s an amazing realization the day you realize that good tone can’t live in bad playing.
It’s in your fingers?
I don’t know where in the human psyche it is. I had this experience that changed my life when we were opening for Allan Holdsworth. My whole childhood, I was obsessed with Holdsworth. I was standing on stage, it was the first show of the tour, and I asked, “Can I play your rig, Allan Holdsworth?” He said sure. I stood there, and it sounded exactly like me playing through Allan Holdsworth’s rig [laughs]. It was so anticlimactic and obvious. I am playing guitar the way I play guitar, playing the lines I know how to play, with some distortion, delay, and reverb—like everybody does—through his headless guitar that just had 10-gauge strings and medium action and a humbucker. It was like, “Dude. Nothing. No secret.” It was a good sound. Not the best. This thing with upgrading the minutia of your tone—when you’re obsessed with being the technician and translating the fine details of fidelity to your audience—your mind is in the wrong place.