Mr. B

Mark Braun, known professionally as Mr. B., ranks among the finest practitioners of blues and boogie-woogie piano, having issued multiple outstanding recordings that restore vitality to the classic idiom. He first sat down at the keyboard at age 15; although pop and rock dominated the airwaves at the time, a Jimmy Yancey album his father brought home fixed the musical direction he would follow. Frequent trips to Chicago allowed him to meet and absorb the approaches of Little Brother Montgomery, Blind John Davis and Sunnyland Slim, while in Detroit he caught Boogie Woogie Red’s weekly Monday-night performances at the Blind Pig for eleven straight years. Regional band work throughout the mid-1970s built his local standing.

Remaining based in Ann Arbor has kept his profile lower than his talent warrants, yet he still produced two notable albums for Blind Pig—Shining the Pearls in 1987, which includes J.C. Heard and Marcus Belgrave, and 1988’s Partners in Time, again featuring Heard. In 1991 Schoolkids, an Ann Arbor imprint, released My Sunday Best; three years later the same label issued the big-band project Hallelujah Train, recorded with the city’s Bird of Paradise Orchestra. Each summer Mr. B. can be found at the Ann Arbor Art Fair delivering boogie-woogie to crowds of visitors, and during baseball season he takes the mound for his amateur team at Vet’s Park.