Mickey Hart Band

The Mickey Hart Band has announced a 19-date tour kicking off with a hometown show at Yoshi’s in Oakland, CA on November 28th. Hart is donating 100% of the ticketing fees from tickets sold on MickeyHart.net to Music Therapy. In August, Hart’s new band debuted to packed houses in New York and San Francisco. The line up for Hart’s new band features vocalists Crystal Monee Hall and Tim Hockenberry, bassist Dave Schools, drummer Ian “Inx” Herman, guitarist Gawain Matthews, percussionist Sikuru Adepoju, and keyboardist Ben Yonas. The show will feature brand new material as well as selections of his greatest hits and Grateful Dead songs.

Hart is currently in the studio recording his new album to be released in the Spring of 2012. Hart recently sat down with Andrew Greene of Rolling Stone to describe the album:
“For the last two or three years I’ve been sampling light waves from the cosmos, starting 13.7 billion years ago with the Big Bang,” he says. “The signals come from radio telescopes around the world and I work closely with NASA to take the light waves and bring it into our limited spectrum of hearing. Then I add a little spice to them with some reverb and some delay. It makes for a hot little stew.”

Hartælast released the Global Drum Project with Zakir Hussain, Sikiru Adepoju, and Giovanni Hidalgo in 2007, which took home theæGrammyæfor Best Contemporary World Music Album.Hart previously won Grammy for Best World Music Album with Planet Drum in 1991, which also hit #1 on the Billboard World Music Chart, remaining there for 26 weeks.

On October 11, 2011, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings will release the “Mickey Hart Collection” to preserve and further the Grateful Dead percussionist’s endeavor to cross borders and expand musical horizons. Smithsonian Folkways will make many of Mickey Hart’s music projects available digitally (stream and download) for the first time while keeping physical versions in print as on-demand CDs. The Mickey Hart Collection begins with 25 albums drawn from ‘The World,’ a series Hart curated that incorporated his solo projects, other artists’ productions, and re-releases of out-of-print titles. Six of the twenty-five albums form the “Endangered Music Project,” a collaboration between Mickey Hart and the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, which presents recordings from musical traditions at risk.

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