Mark Zaretsky -- Harmonica & vocals

       Mark, The Cobalt Rhythm Kings' harp player, front man and creative leader, is the only one of the original four founding members  to remain in the band ever since it came together in 1996 at New Haven, Conn.'s cafe nine blues jam.

        Mark began his musical career as a student at the University of California at Santa Cruz, where he co-founded a blues-rock group called "Automatic Slim" and played with a second blues band backing a character known as "Big Duke." UCSC at that time was a creative crucible where his friends included musicians who would go on to play with Camper Van Beethoven, Cracker, The Monks of Doom, John Hiatt, Rod Piazza and Counting Crows.

        Mark put music aside for a number of years as he built his other career as a journalist with New Haven's daily newspaper, the New Haven Register. The blues came roaring back in the mid-1990s, however, when another friend, Kevin Sanchez Walsh, convinced him to play harmonica with one incarnation of the long-running New Haven blues-and-soul band, The Bernadettes.
 

        Mark's interest in the blues began much earlier, however. He was part of a circle of friends that followed around Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, Koko Taylor, James Cotton, Otis Rush, Buddy Guy & Junior Wells and lesser known stars of Chicago blues to see them play in bars and community centers all over Chicago before he was old enough to legally drink in the places they played.
 

        He is an avid record and CD collector who has always sought to expose the great blues stars of the past to today's audiences and make sure that people know where the great old songs The Cobalt Rhythm Kings do in addition to the band's originals came from.
 

        When not playing the blues, Mark lives to travel. He has a serious thing for old diners and other bits of vanishing America. He speaks Spanish, has spent time in recent years in Mexico, Guatemala, Peru, Bolivia, the Caribbean, Hong Kong and Thailand and has an interest in the Andean music of the South American highlands that is almost as strong as his interest in the blues. He thinks the world would be an entirely better place if Los Kjarkas and Ernesto Cavour, Bolivia's greatest contributions to world music, were as well known as The Beatles, Frank Sinatra and Stevie Ray Vaughn.

  Wendell Jones                                Greg Benn                                 Tom Smith
 

For more information, to join the Cobalt e-mail list or to book The Cobalt Rhythm Kings, call 203-415-1670 or e-mail:  info(at)cobaltrhythmkings.com .

                                                                              
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