You’re familiar with Money Mark’s work even if you don’t recognize his name.
You’ve heard his influences on Beastie Boys’ Check Your Head, Ted Demme’s movie Blow, or the Africafunk of Femi Kuti’s Fight To Win. Your mom even heard some of his keyboard skills when she picked up Santana’s Supernatural a while back. Mark Ramos Nishita, a.k.a Money Mark, is nothing if not prolific. His bio, which lists the albums he’s contributed to in the last few years, reads like a novella. Nishita dropped his latest solo effort, Change Is Coming, to what’s becoming ubiquitous critical acclaim for the keyboardist. Effortlessly alternating styles without seeming disjointed, the album demonstrates the versatility and originality of both Nishita and his instruments.
“I’ve never been into copying styles. I certainly take the spirit of something, but what I create just happens naturally,” says Nishita of walking the fine line between influence and theft. So what makes him so successful at co-opting sounds to his own ends? “Well, my personality…influences my songwriting, my style,” says Nishita.
Personality appears to be a driving force in Nishita’s life right now. His contribution to Femi Kuti’s new album came about because “we hit it off,” says Nishita.
“We met a while back in New York and [Kuti] asked me to play on some of his father’s songs for a Red Hot project, and then we re-connected for Fight To Win.”
Nishita’s keyboards bring even more funk flourishes to Kuti’s already mighty funky band. The experience was tremendously positive for Nishita. “I’d do it all over again in a blink,” he says. Opportunities to work with other artists are an invigorating exercise for Nishita. “Anytime I’ve had a collaboration it’s a magnetic thing. I don’t go seeking it out. I look at developing a mutual respect for each other before we even try working on anything,” he says. “You have to be mindful that you’re working with the human being and not the product.”
His creative juices are fueled when he collaborates with other artists. “Two people or more come together to create something better than themselves,” he says. The interaction and the sharing of “thought patterns” makes the best music, according to Nishita. The numerous musicians that appear on Change Is Coming bear this out. Considering all that he’s accomplished and worked at recently, it’s not hard to believe that Nishita already has his eye on new projects and experiences.
“After doing some work on Blow, I’d like to work on a movie from beginning to end,” he says. “But with the way Hollywood works, most of the time the process is bullshit.”
If he can get Hollywood’s thought patterns in line with his own, you might just be seeing the name Mark Ramos Nishita in a period piece at a theater near you.
