Mike Block is a pioneering multi-style cellist, singer, composer, and educator, hailed by Yo-Yo Ma as the "ideal musician of the 21st-Century", and acclaimed by the NY Times for his "vital rich-hued solo playing". While still studying at the Juilliard School, Mike joined Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble, with which he has toured extensively throughout the world, and won a 2017 Grammy Award for Best World Music Album. Mike is also an active recording artist of original material, folk music, cross-cultural collaborations, and he has an ongoing project to record all of the Bach cello suites in acoustically glorious bathrooms of famous concert halls, via BachInTheBathroom.com. As one of the first wave of cellists to adopt a strap in order to stand and move while playing, Mike was the first standing cellist to perform at Carnegie Hall, using a cello strap of his own design, called the Block Strap, a performance which the NY Times called "Breathless ... Half dance, half dare." As a music educator, Mike is passionate about emphasizing creativity and collaboration, leading to the founding of the Mike Block String Camp in 2010. Mike is also the founding Director of the Silkroad’s Global Musician Workshop, bringing together musicians from around the globe, and he created the online Multi-Style Cello School at ArtistWorks.com, with an extensive library of instructional videos. In 2012, Mike was appointed Associate Professor at the Berklee College of Music. Mike lives in Boston with his wife, fiddler Hanneke Cassel.
Mike Block
