Tin Hat (formerly the Tin Hat Trio) is an acoustic

chamber music Chamber music is a form of classical music that is composed for a small group of instruments—traditionally a group that could fit in a palace chamber or a large room. Most broadly, it includes any art music that is performed by a small numb ...

group currently based in

San Francisco, California San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17th ...

. Their music combines many genres of music, including jazz, southern

blues Blues is a music genre and musical form which originated in the Deep South of the United States around the 1860s. Blues incorporated spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts, chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads from the Afr ...

, bluegrass, neoclassical, eastern European

folk music Folk music is a music genre that includes traditional folk music and the contemporary genre that evolved from the former during the 20th-century folk revival. Some types of folk music may be called world music. Traditional folk music has b ...

, and

avant-garde The avant-garde (; In 'advance guard' or ' vanguard', literally 'fore-guard') is a person or work that is experimental, radical, or unorthodox with respect to art, culture, or society.John Picchione, The New Avant-garde in Italy: Theoretical ...

. Since its formation in 1997, the original Tin Hat Trio has often expanded its trio format by inviting other musicians to join them. All of their CDs feature guests, among them

Tom Waits Thomas Alan Waits (born December 7, 1949) is an American musician, composer, songwriter, and actor. His lyrics often focus on the underbelly of society and are delivered in his trademark deep, gravelly voice. He worked primarily in jazz during ...

Mike Patton Michael Allan Patton (born January 27, 1968) is an American singer, producer, film composer and voice actor, best known as the lead vocalist of the alternative metal band Faith No More. Noted for his vocal proficiency, diverse singing techni ...

and

Willie Nelson Willie Hugh Nelson (born April 29, 1933) is an American country musician. The critical success of the album ''Shotgun Willie'' (1973), combined with the critical and commercial success of ''Red Headed Stranger'' (1975) and '' Stardust'' (197 ...

, as well as friends like

clarinet The clarinet is a musical instrument in the woodwind family. The instrument has a nearly cylindrical bore and a flared bell, and uses a single reed to produce sound. Clarinets comprise a family of instruments of differing sizes and pitches ...

ist

Ben Goldberg Ben Goldberg is an American clarinet player and composer. Career In the early 1990s, Ben Goldberg performed alongside electric bassist Dan Seamans and percussionist Kenny Wollesen as the New Klezmer Trio. They went on to produce three albums an ...

and

harp The harp is a stringed musical instrument that has a number of individual strings running at an angle to its soundboard; the strings are plucked with the fingers. Harps can be made and played in various ways, standing or sitting, and in orche ...

ist

Zeena Parkins Zeena Parkins (born 1956) is an American composer and multi-instrumentalist active in experimental, free improvised, contemporary classical, and avant-jazz music; she is known for having "reinvented the harp". Parkins performs on standard harp ...

. Parkins appears on 2002's ''The Rodeo Eroded'' and 2004's ''Book of Silk'' and has performed live with the trio as the resident

sound effects A sound effect (or audio effect) is an artificially created or enhanced sound, or sound process used to emphasize artistic or other content of films, television shows, live performance, animation, video games, music, or other media. Traditi ...

artist in their live music/silent film projects. Goldberg has been a frequent guest of Tin Hat Trio and contributed to both ''Memory Is an Elephant'' and ''The Rodeo Eroded''. When founding member

Rob Burger Robert Burger (born March 26, 1971) is an American composer, arranger, multi-instrumentalist, and music director. Biography Burger began playing piano at an early age, starting his formal training at age six with the pianist Jeffrey Marcus. He pla ...

(the trio's

accordion Accordions (from 19th-century German ''Akkordeon'', from ''Akkord''—"musical chord, concord of sounds") are a family of box-shaped musical instruments of the bellows-driven free-reed aerophone type (producing sound as air flows past a reed ...

ist and pianist) left the trio in late 2004,

Mark Orton Mark Orton is an American composer and musician. An alumnus of the Peabody Conservatory and the Hartt School of Music, he is a founding member of the San Francisco-based Tin Hat chamber music group, and is best known for his score for the Academy ...

and

Carla Kihlstedt Carla Kihlstedt (born 1971) is an American composer, violinist, vocalist, and multi-instrumentalist, originally from Lancaster, Pennsylvania and currently working from a home studio on Cape Cod. She is a founding member of Tin Hat Trio (1997, ...

replaced him with both Goldberg and Parkins, presenting a new, though closely related, ensemble—the Tin Hat Quartet—for two short concert tours in the U.S. in January and April 2005. While on tour, they invited another musician to come under their hat, San Francisco's Ara Anderson—known as one of Tom Waits' favorite sidemen in recent years. Like the departed Burger, Anderson plays myriad keyed instruments as well as

trumpet The trumpet is a brass instrument commonly used in classical and jazz ensembles. The trumpet group ranges from the piccolo trumpet—with the highest register in the brass family—to the bass trumpet, pitched one octave below the standard ...

and

glockenspiel The glockenspiel ( or , : bells and : set) or bells is a percussion instrument consisting of pitched aluminum or steel bars arranged in a keyboard layout. This makes the glockenspiel a type of metallophone, similar to the vibraphone. The glo ...

, thus adding new colors and strokes to the already large canvas of Tin Hat's sound. In 2005 Tin Hat Trio's song "Fear of the South" was featured on the ''

Everything Is Illuminated ''Everything Is Illuminated'' is the first novel by the American writer Jonathan Safran Foer, published in 2002. It was adapted into a film of the same name starring Elijah Wood and Eugene Hütz in 2005. The book's writing and structure recei ...

'' soundtrack. In 2013 the film score to ''

Nebraska Nebraska () is a state in the Midwestern region of the United States. It is bordered by South Dakota to the north; Iowa to the east and Missouri to the southeast, both across the Missouri River; Kansas to the south; Colorado to the southwe ...

'' was composed by Tin Hat member Mark Orton. The score also includes performances by other members of Tin Hat, providing the first time the three original members have reunited since 2005. A soundtrack album was released on November 19, 2013, by Milan Records.

Discography

* '' Memory Is an Elephant'' (1999, Angel/EMI) * ''

Helium Helium (from el, ἥλιος, helios, lit=sun) is a chemical element with the symbol He and atomic number 2. It is a colorless, odorless, tasteless, non-toxic, inert, monatomic gas and the first in the noble gas group in the periodic table. ...

'' (2000, Angel/EMI) * '' The Rodeo Eroded'' (2002, Ropeadope) * ''

Book of Silk The ''Divination by Astrological and Meteorological Phenomena'' (), also known as ''Book of Silk'' is an ancient astronomy silk manuscript compiled by Chinese astronomers of the Western Han Dynasty (202 BC – 9 AD) and found in the Mawangd ...

'' (2005, Ropeadope) * '' La giusta distanza (The Right Distance)'' ( OST, 2007, Radiofandango) * '' The Sad Machinery of Spring'' (2007,

Hannibal Hannibal (; xpu, 𐤇𐤍𐤁𐤏𐤋, ''Ḥannibaʿl''; 247 – between 183 and 181 BC) was a Carthaginian general and statesman who commanded the forces of Carthage in their battle against the Roman Republic during the Second Puni ...

) * '' Foreign Legion'' (Live recording, 2010, BAG Productions) * '' The Rain Is a Handsome Animal (17 Songs from the Poetry of

E. E. Cummings Edward Estlin Cummings, who was also known as E. E. Cummings, e. e. cummings and e e cummings (October 14, 1894 - September 3, 1962), was an American poet, painter, essayist, author and playwright. He wrote approximately 2,900 poems, two autobi ...

)'' (2012,

New Amsterdam New Amsterdam ( nl, Nieuw Amsterdam, or ) was a 17th-century Dutch settlement established at the southern tip of Manhattan Island that served as the seat of the colonial government in New Netherland. The initial trading ''factory'' gave rise ...

)

References

External links

Official website for Tin Hat
{{Authority control American instrumental musical groups Musical groups established in 1997 Rykodisc artists Musical groups from San Francisco