Fred Frith

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Fred Frith at the Moers Festival 2010

Fred Frith (born February 17, 1949 in Heathfield , East Sussex ) is a British composer , improviser , multi-instrumentalist (guitar, violin, bass guitar, third bridge guitar , piano, xylophone, voice) and university teacher.

Live and act

Frith started playing the violin at the age of 5 as part of a very musical family ; later he started playing the piano and at the age of 13 the guitar . As a teenager he covered beat music , but also blues rock . During his studies at Cambridge , the genre boundaries became too narrow for him: He enriched rock with classical, Eastern European and Asian music and exploited the possibilities of playing the guitar through various alienations. With his fellow student, the saxophonist Tim Hodgkinson , he founded the art rock band Henry Cow in 1968 .

After the band broke up in 1979, he joined the Art Bears , but also played with such diverse avant-garde personalities as John Zorn , Bill Laswell , Brian Eno , Mike Oldfield , Aki Takase , Ikue Mori , Louis Sclavis , Bob Ostertag , the Free Jazz musicians Peter Kowald , Sonny Sharrock and Peter Brötzmann or the folk rock guitarist Richard Thompson . Frith founded such diverse formations as Massacre (with Bill Laswell and Charles Hayward ) or Skeleton Crew (with Tom Cora and Zeena Parkins ). He also worked with Robert Wyatt , Sally Potter , Half Japanese , Lindsay Cooper , The Residents , Amy Denio , Attwenger , Jean-Pierre Drouet , Evelyn Glennie , Heiner Goebbels and Yo-Yo Ma . He has also produced albums for The Orthotonics , David Moss , Tenko , Etron Fou Leloublan and V-Effect .

Fred Frith June 1998

In addition to compositions for ballet, film (e.g. Rivers and Tides ) and theater, he wrote a. a. for the Rova Saxophone Quartet , the ARTE Quartet , the Ensemble Modern ( Traffic Continues ), the Arditti Quartet and the Dutch Asko Ensemble . From 1999 to 2018 he was a professor at Mills College in California, where he lives with the photographer Heike Liss and their two children Finn and Lucia. The German documentary filmmakers Nicolas Humbert and Werner Penzel dedicated the award-winning film Step Across the Border (1990) to him.

His brother is the eminent music sociologist Simon Frith .

Lexical entries

Web links

Commons : Fred Frith  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Archi version of the biography of www.fredfrith.com ( Memento of 21 February 2005 at the Internet Archive ), accessed 27 June 2011
personal data
SURNAME Frith, Fred
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British musician
DATE OF BIRTH February 17, 1949
PLACE OF BIRTH Heathfield (East Sussex)