Comment on this story What: Jennifer Hartswick Band w/ Addison Groove Project When: Monday, Sept. 20, 10 p.m. Where: Barley’s Cost: $5

Jennifer Hartswick parlays her past into a pleasure

by Clint Casey

If you’re familiar with Phish, odds are you’re familiar with the sounds of Jennifer Hartswick. She added trumpet lines to 1998’s The Story of the Ghost and 2000’s Farmhouse on “Birds of a Feather” and “Gotta Jibboo,” respectively. The 24-year-old Hartswick belongs to the 10-piece Trey Anastasio Band—an eponymous side project of the now-defunct Phish frontman—and leads her own project, the Jennifer Hartswick Band.

Hartswick, a native of Burlington, Vt., met saxophonist Dave Grippo (a former member of the Phish collaboration project the Giant Country Horns) at a high school jazz festival, where Grippo asked the 16-year-old to join his band. She played in the sextet for a few years, and during her senior year, Grippo introduced her to Anastasio.

After high school, Hartswick left for New York City to enroll in acting school, before heading to the University of Hartford to attend the Hart School of Music. But she never felt content. After deciding to leave school—literally as she was driving off campus—she got a phone call from Anastasio asking her to join his then-side project TAB. “Music school just wasn’t the appropriate thing for me to be doing at that time, so I left and met up with Trey the next day,” she says.

Hartswick went from relative anonymity to playing venues ranging from 2,500 capacity to 90,000 people at the recent Bonnaroo festival in Manchester, Tenn. However, Hartswick says she doesn’t get anxious in front of large crowds.

“I’ve always been on a stage, whether it’s acting or singing or playing music,” she says. “It always was comfortable growing up, and it always is now. I don’t get nervous because I think there’s really nothing to get nervous about. It feels almost like a second home.”

In fact, Hartswick is often the most delightful element of a TAB show, offering the crowd her grin and a mischievous wink. Whether she’s fencing in an imaginary swordfight or dancing the sexy bump, she looks as though she’s bouncing on a cloud.

A year and a half ago, she took her experience with that band and parlayed it into the JHB, citing Anastasio as an influence on her songwriting. “Always working with someone that closely, you pick up things and look at things in a different way. I listen to music differently because I know him, and he listens to music in such a different way than I used to,” Hartswick says. “He’ll sit there and listen to every single detail of the parts so far back in the mix that no one else will hear. Listening all the time to things that are going on that aren’t prominent is one of the things I picked up from him.”

On Fuse, her debut solo release, Hartswick blends jazz, soul and funk into loose grooves that translate into improvisation-heavy performances. The album isn’t necessarily innovative, but it is addictive and fun. Hartswick’s charisma soars from her warm voice, governing fluid, driving rhythms, and bouncy arrangements. Fuse is a Friday night on the town with Hartswick at the helm.

However, the album’s standout—and Hartswick’s favorite— track, “All Along,” finds Hartswick changing gears, wrappings her voice around a jazz ballad, crooning: “Don’t tell me it’s me when we’re sure that it’s her / I think you don’t see what I see / You said that we should probably go separate ways but that didn’t seem a solution / Hoping that maybe a year or two later we would have been right all along.”

The music on Fuse is altogether different from what Hartswick grew up hearing. She says she enjoyed writing the songs on the album, but doesn’t really know where the influence on her style came from. “I grew up listening to primarily classical music. My dad loves listening to popular music of the ’60s and ’70s, and I got introduced to that music through him,” she says. “It wasn’t until I had gotten into college that I discovered what most people had already discovered in terms of genres of music.”

The size of the band varies from eight to 12 members, and it’s comprised primarily of Hartswick’s friends and young players from Burlington’s musical community. “I have a firm belief that chemistry comes before musicianship,” she says. “Great bands are friends first and musicians second. It just so happens that I grew up with a bunch of kids that are now phenomenal musicians.”

As difficult as it may seem to get as many as a dozen people to coherently improvise together, she says that it’s harder to get everyone in the same place at the same time. “We have everybody trapped on the first day of tour in the van, then it’s great; everything else goes like clockwork.” She adds that part of the fun of traveling with a large band is seeing how small a stage they can fit on.

Hartswick doesn’t harbor any illusions about why audiences come out to see her perform initially, mentioning her involvement with TAB. “I figure that’s probably why most people come out the first time, and then the second time people come back because they had a good time. If people come out because they’ve seen me with that band, then that’s wonderful.”

September 16, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 38 © 2004 Metro Pulse