Alexis Harte Band Bio, singer, songwriter and musician

ALEXIS HARTE: HIGH ENERGY ACOUSTIC ROOTS

Alexis Harte Bio

Alexis Harte – vocals, acoustic guitar:

"I've got a little blue river inside my head, the banks are lined with all my friends," Alexis Harte sings on his CD, Sunlight Loping. The river of Harte's music career has widened recently, as he and his band have played top Bay Area venues (like the legendary Fillmore and Slim's) and been dubbed "up and coming world-class rock" by San Francisco's KFOG radio. Touring has ranged the West Coast, as well as world/folk festivals in Boston and Sweden. Sunlight Loping's intelligent lyrics and sparkling riffs-highlighted by the superlative musicianship of Alexis Harte Band members Aaron Brinkerhoff (drums), Randy Weaver (Clevinger bass), and Marc Mowrey (keys/accordian)-inspired Acoustic Guitar magazine to make the album a 2003 editor's choice. These industry props echo the band's devoted following, grown in local clubs and coffeehouses over the past three years: Alexis Harte has big talent and big potential.

Though he's poised on the verge of mainstream success, Harte's song craft shows no sign of artistic compromise, but rather a deepening of his signature aesthetic: poetic, concise songwriting galvanized into a high-energy acoustic live show. Like a painter who masters the fundamentals of drafting before becoming an Expressionist or Cubist, Harte leverages his solid guitar skills as a foundation on which to build the colorful Tinker-Toy constructions of his imagination. His band mates add to these constructions in balance, never overweighing any part. Often Harte's songs spotlight moments of human interaction: "Yellow Shoes" (from Harte's first CD, Junebug-a Performing Songwriter top-12 independent release in 2001) tells how an exchanged smile with a woman on a bus prompts a man to consider the existential dilemma of urban life ("Who are you and who am I but mannequins in disguise, locking eyes with passerbys from a grimy bus or a check-out line?"). Harte shows that passing moments of human experience not only illuminate broader social dynamics, but contain endless capacity for wonder.

The story of Harte's musical development is rife with such watershed moments. Diverse melodies filled his childhood home in Berkeley: downstairs, his mother played Carole King, Cat Stevens, and classical; upstairs, his older brother spun rock, funk, and soul. In the attic was a handmade electric guitar and Memphis amp that Harte claimed, determined to become a masterful guitarist. Influenced by Jimi Hendrix's predilection for conviction over convention (especially in Electric Ladyland), Harte melded his electric-guitar prowess with his acoustic storytelling sensibilities. After earning a bachelor's degree in journalism and a master's in ecology and environmental science, Harte combined the tributaries of his intellectual and musical education in a three-year stint as an ecologist in Brazil, where his songwriting absorbed the flora and fauna of Brazilian street music. These observations became the fodder for his recording debut, Junebug.

If Junebug (mostly solo and acoustic) is akin to a writer's first story collection, Sunlight Loping has the confidence of an epic poem, with the band as chorus. The songs tell of people hovering between hero and antihero, searching for valor in an age of computers, office chairs, and get-rich-quick schemes. Amid the potential for alienation in urban living, Harte's songs make room for parrots that escape zoo cages, and blown kisses meandering through weeds. And if the course of life's "little blue river" is smooth only in imagination, songs like "Puddle of Stars" pay homage to the working stiff's hope for a better day. This hope spans Harte's songs, and peaks in the well-placed harmonic, like the gleam in a storyteller's eye as he reveals the resonance in a passing moment.

Drawing on inspiration from ecology and literature (he particularly cites John Hershey's Hiroshima, which personalizes the effect of the atomic bomb by spotlighting five of that city's residents), Harte traces the connections between the specific and the general. But he also strives to synthesize connection within each listener. Without being moralistic, he says, "I hope to show people a little bit of brilliance in their own lives, to make their lives feel a little more worth living." In this deliberate, joyful manner, can a good song go a little way toward healing society? With a grin and a sparkle in his eye, Harte replies, "Ants can move mountains if there are enough of them."

Meet This Band...

Alexis has been fortunate in attracting these superb musicians to his project:

Aaron Brinkerhoff – "vertical" drums, vocals:

Brinkerhoff’s earliest drumming memories involve a chilling tale of backing up a greasy guitar player, who shared a home with his grandmother and a live gorilla. Even after this introduction to the music business, Brinkerhoff persevered to perfect his drumming and vocal skills. During the early 90’s he played in the folksy/pop band Happy Going Nowhere who, despite their name, made a reasonable splash in the San Francisco music scene. Brinkerhoff currently plays the hell out of a self-designed "vertical" drum set (a.k.a. Sputnik) that never fails to amuse fellow musicians and crowds.

Randy Weaver – Clevinger bass, vocals:

A veteran of the Los Angeles music scene, Weaver has performed and recorded with various southern California-based artists including, the Bullet Boys, Josey Cotton, Bob Haag (Sparks) and Blood Red Roses. After moving north in 1999, he was introduced to Harte by mutual friend, songwriter Deborah Pardes. Weaver had worked with Pardes on the Songs Inspired By Literature (SIBL) Benefit CD project, serving as a board member and judge for the international songwriting competition. In an effort to continue the "vertical band" theme, Weaver now plays a Clevinger electric up-right bass.

Marc Mowrey – Keys/Accordion

Mowrey played his first professional show at the Hightstown Bowling Lanes, located just off Exit 8 on the New Jersey turnpike. Even the thunderous sound of struck pins and drunken bowlers was no match for the voluminous cacophony that issued forth from Mowrey's fledging musical enterprise. It was a harbinger of things to come. After that, while never quite becoming famous in his own right, Mowrey went on to play with people who've played with people. Along the way, he learned piano, organ, guitar, mandolin and, in his most recent leap towards virtuosity and wide-spread acclaim, accordion.

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