BGS Presents ...

Janet Feder with Harry Tuft

September 25, 2023

A performance crossing genres and generations

A native of Boulder, Colorado, Janet Feder is most widely known for pioneering composition for prepared guitar. Free from genre, her music both acknowledges and is simultaneously unmoored from the trappings of jazz, classical, avant-garde, folk or pop, creating a new musical lexicon and aesthetic ideal alike.

She has been featured on numerous recordings, radio programs, and film scores including the internationally acclaimed solo albums Songs With Words (2012), T H I S C L O S E (2015); compilations Walk My Way (577 Records, 2021), The $100 Guitar Project (Bridge, 2013) and more.

Janet is a lecturer at the University of Colorado. Touring and teaching internationally, she has performed and collaborated with a diverse landscape of renowned musicians including Paolo Angeli, Nels Cline, Amy Denio, Bill Frisell, Fred Frith, Erin McKeown, Ron Miles, Tatsuya Nakatani, Pauline Oliveros, Jane Rigler, Elliott Sharp, among many others.

Harry Tuft started his singing career with the Dartmouth College Glee Club. Listening to recordings by Leadbelly, Pete Seeger, and Bill Broonzy, he quickly took up guitar, and upon graduation was a regular in the Sunday “hootenannies” at the legendary Gilded Cage Coffeehouse in his native Philadelphia. Skiing in Colorado led to gigs in Georgetown and Aspen, and a permanent move to Denver, where he opened the Denver Folklore Center. While running the music store, Harry engaged in a series of musical endeavors. He was a radio disc jockey on a 70’s free-form radio station, he has sung and recorded with Steve Abbott and Jack Stanesco in the popular Denver band, Grubstake, and he also did numerous jobs as a soloist, and with a variety of free-lance bands.

In 1978 he recorded his first album, Across The Blue Mountains, for Folk Legacy Records. “This was a classic folk album that featured traditional music and a half dozen songs by contemporary singer-songwriters.”

In 2012 popular demand and his own musical ambitions led to another album, Treasures Untold. “I retain a keen interest in ballads, traditional and contemporary, unaccompanied and with instrumentation. I continue to respond to songs new to me, with an eager desire to learn them. As a result that album is a mix of folk, country, R & B and the ‘Great American Songbook,’ a mix which I continue to expand on today”.

Harry was instrumental in the establishment of the folk music organization, Swallow Hill Music Association, and hosts two shows for them.

These days, Harry has retired from business to concentrate on his much-neglected musical ambitions as a performer and teacher.