bret harold hart
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[this bio from a 2003 interview]
"Bret Hart [1959 - ] is a through-improvisor, composer, educator, instrument builder, sculptor and published writer living with his family in Eden, North Carolina. He plays guitar and sings in his Methodist church's praise band - 'The Monkey Puppets'.
Since his first self-released project in 1979, Hart has released hundreds of improvisational, scored, and lyrical singles, albums, tapes, and CDs under his own imprints; as well as long-play records and compilation singles on other people's lables.
His graphics, photographs, and scores have been reproduced and published in the US (Cassette Mythos, Sound Choice, The Racquette) and Russia (Wapnk). The Fitchburg, Massachusetts band, 'The New Pond Fondle', took their name from a 1988 acrylic and enamel painting Hart gave them. He was a recipient of Massachusetts Cultural Council Arts grants in 1997 and 1998, is a property- sculptor, has been an invitee to 'The Northeast Open Exhibition' and shown in New England galleries.
In 1986, he was invited by SUNY Potsdam to compose and perform his multimedia performance work, ALFA, for the college's sesquicentennial (150th) celebration.
Hart's "InstrumenTales Records Presents" has been a part of the Jerome Joy's European COLLECTIVE JUKEBOX exhibitions; v. 3.0 [FRAC PACA, Marseille France 20 jan 2001 / 15 avril 2001], v.3.01 [Festival Resonances, Nantes France 12 may 2001 / 21 may 2001], v. 3.11 [Collective JukeBox 3.1 Strasbourg France 14 june 2001 / 16 october 2001, and v.4.01[ 4.01 Festival Acces-s, Pau (France) 19 nov 2002]."
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Bret says, "God bless you."Band/artist history
Bret Hart (Interview)
by Jerry Kranitz
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From Aural Innovations #16 (June 2001)
AI: Tell me about your record labels. From reading your web site is sounds like InstrumenTales is just one of a string of labels you've had over the years, some of which I saw a reference to having been in other countries.
Bret Hart: I lived in Korea for 4 years. I was a Korean translator. I spent a year and a half doing nothing but 100% immersion in Korean culture and language before I went there which was out in California around 1983/84. And this is where I met my first group of improvisors with whom I established some kind of a kinship. It's what broke me away from jazz and progressive things, and the acoustic things I'd been doing in the late 70s. All of a sudden I met some of these really interesting people. People like Jerry Ford. He used to book [Fred] Frith and [Henry] Kaiser gigs out in Santa Cruz. And did these really cool Bent Music workshops as he called them where people would get together and there would be a theme. Y'know, like everybody bring a homemade instrument tonight. And people were encouraging me to improvise. Quit falling back on cliches and things you're comfortable playing. "Do some more of that horn sounding guitar", was some of the things people used to say to me back then and it really spurred me on. And I realized that the way I play guitar is based on the fact that I started off in music on the trombone, and I really think like a horn player. At this point I know that, but back then I couldn't figure out why people had trouble learning my songs. And it's because some of the structures are melodically and harmonically really suited more for a brass section. You'll hear a lot of trombone-like things occurring, even in my acoustic music. I've been accused of playing slide when I'm not playing slide, when in fact I may be using a fretless instrument.
AI: What was the earliest label you had and how did you distribute the music at that time?
BH: Back in those days it was the cassette culture years. Dick Metcalf calls me a grandfather of the DIY movement, and actually I'm more like an older uncle because it was going on before I got there. But my first label started out in 1983 and it was called Kamsa Tapes. And that was the first moniker under which I was putting my stuff out, and at the time I was doing this really dense, harsh guitar layering music. And people were saying my name and [Al] Margolis' name in the same breath back then, and if you've heard some of his stuff you know it's really sharp. He was doing chainsaw music. But I was doing extremely harsh music back then. Like the first Asteroid Schoolhouse, Blame Your Parents... it was kind of like that. I did that for a little while and then I re-thought it all and it became O-Right Records. And that was more harsh music of that sort. At the time I was only putting my own stuff out, but there was some collaboration creeping in. There's a guy who lives down in New Mexico or Arizona. His name is Chris Venturi, but he calls himself the Frank O. Pollizzi Band. And if you go acidplanet.com, which is kind of an Mp3.com place, and search on Frank O. Pollizzi you'll find sound files out the whazoo. I met Metcalf when I was living in Korea. He called me on the phone one time. I was working in a secure space and this guy calls me. Said he was a keyboard played, lived about 40 miles away and wanted to get together. He came down that weekend and we started exchanging some tapes and have been friends ever since. Blind Pineapple Phillips did some vinyl on O-Right Records.
So I got out of the service and moved to Massachusetts. I was working as a commercial artist in Boston and doing printing and things like that, and started up a new label called Hipworks Records. And Hipworks was the label that was putting out the group Hipbone. And then when I got on the internet, which was about 1996, we changed that to Hipworks Productions because I was also doing poster art for bands in the area and other commercial art stuff and it was all under one big banner. Right around then I got approval from the Massachusetts local cultural arts council for an arts grant to put a CD out that met the criteria of the grant, which basically meant that I was going to use Wooster, MA musicians, was going to record in a Wooster studio, and I was going to record songs that were written in Wooster. So they gave me money and that's how I put my first CD "No More Bandages" out. Then in 1998 my wife and I moved down here to North Carolina and that's when InstrumenTales came about. And I'm going to stick with that for as long as I live in North Carolina.
AI: You also sent me this newspaper article which describes the fund raising you're doing for your school with the Delicate Furies compilation CD. I think it's pretty cool you're doing that with experimental music.
BH: Thanks. I've also run a couple of electives at school. One of them was I put together a percussion ensemble of non-musicians, and I taught them how to play tunes like Jingle Bells on big orchestral drums and kettle drums and things like that. These are kids 6th-8th grade. And then another semester I took a group of kids and every Wednesday we'd get together and jam. And I'd always roll tape while I was there. I took bits of these recordings and put them all together in a kind of collage way and created this lengthy recording, and over it is a reading of this African myth of where drums came from. I also taught a college course here locally on do-it-yourself music marketing. Delicate Furies will be available, I hope, around September. Everybody that's involved with it is doing so on a voluntary basis and I'm waiting for the art, and I'm not going to push. It sucks when you rag on a volunteer.
AI: Did you get much interest in the DIY college course you offered?
BH: I had a class of about 6 folks, and taught it during the summer. We met at a public school in a classroom where I had brought my entire studio. We met once a week and by the end of the summer I had produced for each of the people in the class, with their involvement, a studio recording of one of the tunes they had written. They got a glimpse of multi-track recording and I talked to them about marketing your own stuff. I showed them that most of what you need, you already have access to it, and that you can exercise control over your own product. That's always been my thing is that I like maintaining creative control over as much of what I put out there as possible. And when I do hand off songs to people to produce it's because I trust them. And I don't live or die by whether my CDS move very much. I'm a teacher. And that's what I do for a living. And that's what pays my bills. And that's really what permits me to have the kind of freedom that I have in the arts.
AI: That's what makes it easier to stick to your ideals I imagine.
BH: It does. And also the whole paradigm of my relationship with people when it relates to music can be more of a friendship one than a dollar sign one. So that's the way I like it. And I don't know what I would do if it got really big. Teaching is really important to me. There's such a collapse of the family these days. I know that for many of the kids I teach I'm about as much of a dad as they're ever going to have. So I really feel that despite a lot of the flak that some schools get, and probably some schools deserve, my classroom is a sanctuary. And it's be a place where you can learn something that'll help you to not be a jackass for the rest of your life. So I like doing that and I'm not going to stop it.
AI: Hipbone is actually the first of your music I had heard prior to this batch of CDS you sent.
BH: And it's pretty poppy stuff really. It's pretty radio friendly music when you think about it. Hipbone is something that has very little to do with me actually. Except that I sing the main vocal and some occasional harmony. Because some of the things I come up with other people find hard to harmonize with. But I do mostly just vocals and guitars, and the occasional midi instrument. And it's always produced by someone else. So the arrangements are not something I have much to do with. I write the songs, I play the guitars, and then I back off. Hipbone formed in late 1992. And we were what you might call a power trio. Kind of like Cream or the Jimi Hendrix Experience. We were like a 3-piece rock band that sang and took these big improvisational excursions in the midst of songs. And we really did take Cream and Red-era King Crimson as our working model. We were coming up with things that would hopefully target those kinds of folks. And we did really well. We put out a bunch of records, and we were very well received in central Massachusetts. Hipbone dissolved as a performing unit in 1996, but goes on recording. So since that time we've produced two, very distinct from one another, records of which Decopage is one. The other one is called is Cho-Rok, which is the Korean word for green. It sounds like if Peter Gabriel wrote for The Byrds. That's what people have said.
AI: So on the one hand you've got the kind of music that Hipbone plays, but on the other hand you've got the music heard on the Duets series. Is the more experimental music what you're more into playing?
BH: Yeah, recording-wise it is. I don't know how far back you go with independent publishing prior to the web publication, but Factsheet Five, Option, Sound Choice... I wrote for all of them. I still do the occasional review. Like if I hear something I think people really ought to be listening to I'll just write a review and send it to everybody that publishes. But I used to receive big boxes full of independently... and by independently I mean it was no more mainstream than Homestead, SST, or Touch n Go. And most of what I got was stuff proHave you performed in front of an audience?I play out live as often as parenting and holding down a F/T middle school English teaching position permits. My wife and I have performed with our acoustic hillbilly band, THE CAT'S PANTS, for 7 years here in NC. AUTOMATIC MUSIC, an improvisational collective I have been involved in 9 CDs with was able to snooker a few places into letting us raise the roof with organized noise. I get solo singer-songwriter gigs most often, and they tend not to send you home broke as often as do the experimental music gigs. I've had the pleasure of performing with some very remarkable musicians during my three decades on stages and in studios.
Your musical influences
Early on, as a fledgling guitarist in my teens & twenties, I enjoyed Jimi Hendrix, Frank Zappa, Terry Kath, Steve Hillage, Steve Tibbetts, Daevid Allen, Albert Lee, Amos Garrett, Clarence White, Brian Jones, J.J. Cale, Neil Young, Adrian Belew, David Torn, Allen Holdsworth, Larry Coryell, Robert Fripp, Richard Lloyd, Jeff Beck, Robbie Robertson, Phil Manzanera, Robert Quine, Jody Harris, Lou Reed, Steve Howe, Glenn Phillips,
and other players who stretched the boundaries of Rock-and-Roll as I knew it.
Having grown up on 60s Pop and 70s Rock (Beatles/ Kinks/Stones/Who/The Mothers of Invention/Grateful Dead/Them/Boxtops/Procul
Harem/Yardbirds/etc), I was first attracted to players who stood out, in some way, from the fray. Unique tone, *passion*, and attack probably
snagged me initially. The whole idea of guitar solo was an awakening and a challenge.
During the 80's and 90s, I became increasingly familiar with and fond of the work of Derek Bailey, Loren Mazzacane, Fred Frith, Hans Reichel, Eugene Chadbourne, Nick Didkovsky, John Fahey, Glenn Branca/Sonic Youth/Rhys Chatham, Richard Thompson, Dot & Betty Wiggin, Ennio Morricones guitarists, Robbie Basho , Snakefinger Lithman, the many Magic Band
guitarists, Davey Williams, Rene Lussier, Greg Ginn, Chip Handy, Arto Lindsay, Col. Bruce Hampton, Henry Kaiser, Mark Ribot, and other
noise/fusion players who stretched the boundaries of what music could be.
Through discovering these players, I found myself seeking out their mentors and influences. Here, I discovered the work of such composers as
Ives, Cowell, Nancarrow, Partch, and Mingus. From reading essays and biographies of these men, I was sent back to obscure ethnic music; in
particular, those of the Asia and Indonesia. . Interestingly, the deep roots often pointed directly back at *groundbreaking* contemporary music.
Living in South Korea for four years deeply impacted on my scalar sensibilities, how I hear melody, and what can constitute a coherent rhythm
within a composition. Simultaneously, I was delving deeply into Delta and Country Blues and
grasping what I could about the origins of guitar-style from their available recordings. Sleepy John Estes, Lightnin Hopkins, John Lee Hooker, Son House, Robert Johnson, Leadbelly, Big Joe Williams, Petey Wheatstraw, Howling Wolf & Hubert Sumlin, and many others found their way into the growing pantheon of players who fit into the huge scheme of guitar-music as I knew it.What equipment do you use?
stringed instruments, voice, percussion, keyboards, ethnic and homemade instuments, signal-bent sonic toys.
For more info and pictures, visit:
http://hartsongs.tripod.com/instrument_garden_page15.htmAnything else?
http://hartsongs.tripod.com/bret_hart_page1.htm
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