PAUL R. HARDING

Paul r. Harding was born in New York and attended college in Buffalo, NY, where he was tutored by saxophonists Archie Shepp and Charles Gayle. He moved to the West Coast, where he got to know bassist Michael Bisio in the mid-1980s. They did many performances in galleries, bars, and performance spaces. Paul thinks of Michael as having something that very few other bass players have in that he is both completely free and lyrical at the same time-he marvels at how Mike is "on it in an organic fucking explosion"-and how Mike "is always there." Paul r. Harding is a pure expression of a linguistic analog to jazz. He has deep, deep knowledge of the music-of a lot of musics, for that matter-and he has worked long and hard to make words swing and sing in a pure vocal inflection. Paul has told me that Amiri Baraka called for poets read more...