Thomas Hart, Contrabass
Thomas grew up on the Great Plains of Nebraska where his family often gathered ’round the old Zenith, listening to such favorites as “The Sabre Dance” and “An American in Paris.”
He migrated to San Francisco in 1963 (getting a jump on that great “Summer of Love” migration), where he graduated from San Francisco State College with a BA in English Literature and Language Arts. He earned a Masters Degree in English in 1988 and also did some graduate work at the School of Education at UC Berkeley.
Thomas’ first musical attraction was to being a rock and roll drummer and playing in many local groups in the 1960s San Francisco scene. As a kid, he had admired Gene Krupa and he later drew inspiration from Ginger Baker (Cream) and Mickey Hart (Grateful Dead). “That was a great time to perform music,” he says. “There will never be another time like it.”
However, until 1978 when he joined the City College of San Francisco Percussion Ensemble, Thomas was an amateur and mostly untrained musician. The music teachers at City College taught him the art of percussion, and he played in the college concert band under the Director Joe Alessi and Todd Fleming, two great musicians from the Bay Area. Thanks to them, he also began studying and practicing the contrabass. He joined the Prometheus Symphony in 1993.
Thomas now teaches writing at Merritt College and keeps even busier writing essays, stories and books about people who experience and discover their true identities by their resistance and opposition to ignorance, violence and meaningless materialism.
~Joyce Vollmer
