Fred Frith was born in 1949 and raised in Yorkshire, England in a household where music was considered an essential part of everyday life. After starting violin lessons at the age of 5, Frith taught himself rudimentary piano technique, sang in the church choir, lurked at the back of the school orchestra and eventually picked up a friend’s guitar which changed everything. There followed a period of exploration of any and all forms of guitar playing, from The Shadows to Villa Lobos via the Blues and Flamenco. Learning tunes from a Yugoslav schoolfriend gave him a life-long interest in the music of the Balkan countries.
At Cambridge Univesity in 1968, Frith co-founded the group Henry Cow as a Dada Blues Band, but sudden exposure to all kinds of exciting new music from Berio to Beefheart caused a radical shift in direction. The group eventually became an enduring and influential rock collective, touring Europe more or less continuously and providing Frith with a formative musical and political education. Meanwhile, in 1974, he released Guitar Solos, a collection of improvisations now recognized as a landmark in the history of the electric instrument. Since that time he has led parallel lives, one as improviser and the other as composer and songwriter. In the former category there have been hundreds of concerts ranging from the solo guitar-on-the-table approach to work with large groups such as Derek Bailey’s Company or Eugene Chadbourne’s 2,000 Statues. Frith can also be heard in duos with John Zorn, Hans Reichel, Tim Hodgkinson and Tenko on an intermittent but continuing basis.
As for composing, Frith has written three albums of songs with Chris Cutler and Dagmar Krause, (as Art Bears), contributed numerous pieces to other groups (Curlew, Aksak, Maboul, Material), and collaborated on projects such as Skeleton Crew, with Tom Cora and Zeena Parkins; Massacre, with Bill Laswell and Fred Maher; and recordings with Henry Kaiser and René Lussier.
His more personal obsessions are revealed on the albums Gravity, Speechless, and Cheap at Half the Price. He has also received commissions for dance and theatre (partly documented on The Technology of Tears), and composed the music for the Canadian feature film The top of His Head. Recent work includes Long On Logic for the Rova Saxophone Quartet, The As Usual Dance Towards the Other Flight to What Is Not , for four guitars, Allies for choreographer Bebe Miller and In Memory, a collaboration with poet Sara Miles and film animator Pierre Hébert commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
Much in demand as an instrumentalist, Frith has played on dozens of albums of all descriptions, tours regularly in a variety of contexts and is currently the bass player in John Zorn’s Naked City. His own group Keep The Dog was assembled in 1989 to perform selections from a cross-section of his music from the last 15 years. In 1990 he will spend six months in France creating an opera with theatre director François-Michel Pesenti and young musicians from Marseille. Frith is the subject of an award-winning documentary film by Nicolas Humbert and Werner Penzel, "Step Across The Border".