>>PREVIEW
KRISTA HARTMAN
Friday, August 12
Karma Local Arts House
Saturday, August 13
The Ship & Anchor Pub
She may be a Peace River native, but singer-songwriter Krista Hartman has captured the sound of the whole world in her music. That’s due in part to her vast experience with travel and in part to her old-soul world view. While teaching English and travelling in places like Australia, Indonesia and Korea, she found herself, and then she returned to Alberta and found her band.
While living in Calgary in 2003, she recorded with Zuckerbaby’s Reed Shimozawa, and more recently hooked up with AA Sound System’s Lane Arndt, who co-produced her recent album, Passport, and brought Marek Tyler into the picture as occasional drummer. During two recent Winnipeg gigs, she and the AA Sound System boys shared a bill and a band. During her upcoming Calgary gigs, she will swap Tyler for drummer Mario Laquintana and add Dave Aide on keyboards.
Hartman agrees that her time on other continents has influenced her sound, but finds that no matter where her feet are planted, music runs through her soul.
"Music is, in a sense, like an intricate quilt of connected universality," Hartman says. "One thing I learned out there was that no matter where I was in the world, even if I didn't know the language, music was always the common thread. Almost anyone anywhere can sit down, write a song and sing it decently. But very few have the genuine gift – the transcendence factor. Capturing the foreign landscapes and the human character through original song has always been intriguing to me. It's interesting to bring home a foreign perspective and jam it into a melody."
But all that time spent strumming on various continents can’t erase the fact that one of her most memorable gigs was played in Peace River while she was still underage. "My band in high school, Daze 27, was hired to play a really shabby bar called The McNamara Hotel…. I was singing a rock song and a 23-year-old country hick was copping a feel off a 75-year-old drunken Grandma while they were grinding in front of the stage. How do you keep singing when something like that's happening in front of your face?"
Despite these odd Prairie memories, Hartman has recently been spending her time in Northern Alberta and Saskatchewan. It has given her the chance to work on her material rather than slaving at a day job. Instead of sticking within one genre, she says her music escapes definition.
"I don't like boxes and never have. The music goes where it needs to go naturally and takes on a shape of its own. I wrote almost all of the songs on the guitar, so they do have a roots influence. I try to let it happen naturally – you can't force a great melody." |
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