Support Scotty Hard's Recovery

Scotty Hard, our beloved friend, mentor, music-scene stalwart, and extraordinary producer/performer has suffered a terribly challenging 2024.

On December 27, Scotty was rushed to the ER with the first of several severe and debilitating infections. He spent the next four months shuttling between understaffed hospitals and subpar rehabilitation centers. Their cursory care only made him sicker and weaker.

With the counsel of frustrated doctors and friends, Scott devised a course of home treatment customized to his specific and urgent needs. Thankfully, this plan is working.

But the extra home care, physical therapy, and specialized equipment vital to his healing and recovery are not covered by his Medicaid benefits. The out of pocket cost is onerous, almost $7,000 per month.

This GoFundMe has been established by friends of Scotty to enable him to continue with his current treatment plan—rather than resuming the awful and demoralizing loop of recurring infections, trips to the ER, and extended hospital stays.

Since his 2008 paralysis, Scotty has suffered from numerous conditions and has had several more surgeries related to his spinal cord injury. These have been covered by Medicaid and Medicare. But the current course of treatment—the home rehab, nursing, and therapeutic bed—are not, which is why we need your help.

It is expected to take one year for Scotty to completely recover, and therefore our goal is to raise $84,000.

Please contribute whatever you can. Thank you!

• • •

Scott Harding—aka Scotty Hard—is a highly accomplished and influential producer, engineer, and performer who has spent over 30 years shaping the sound of New York underground music. His rich and varied career has taken him to Africa, Europe, and North and South America to make records with a renowned community of international artists such as Nação Zumbi, Salif Keita, rhythm kings Tony Allen & Nana Vasconselos, and free jazz masters Ornette Coleman and Marshall Allen.

On February 16, 2008, as Scotty was leaving his Brooklyn studio after a late-night session, a stolen car broadsided the taxi he was traveling in, paralyzing him below the shoulders.

After complicated spinal reconstruction surgery and months of hospitalization, Scotty—remarkably—returned to the music world in under one year.

Since then, he has worked part-time from home and his specially constructed studio facility in Brooklyn, lending his inimitable touch to projects, such as the meeting of Harriet Tubman and the ever fascinating Georgia Anne Muldrow, a new album with Rob Mazurek and his Exploding Star Orchestra, a collaboration with Sexmob called “The Hard Way,”, work with Wu Tang’s RZA on several film projects and the Good Humor theme song, not to mention his monumental contribution to the sonic reconstruction of the catalog of the legendary hip hop trio De La Soul.