by Andrew Alonzo | aalonzo@claremont-courier.com

At 7:30 Saturday night, Peter Harper will take a familiar stage: Claremont’s Folk Music Center. As the youngest son ofFolk Music Center General Manager Ellen Harper and the late Leonard Harper, he’s trod those boards since he was able to walk.

But this time he’s the one under the lights, with a concert and screening of “The Heart Tour,” a short documentaryabout Harper’s recent performance with a choir of 450 children in Saint-Martin de Crau, France.

It will be the fourth time Harper has played his homebase, family venue. This performance will include his full band, The Last 3, featuring multi-instrumentalist Joti Rockwell, bassist Miguel Martinez, and drummer Cougar Estrada. Saturday’s show will include new material and cuts from his three records, “Peter Harper,” “Break the Cycle,” and “Survive.” His new single, “We’re Coming,” will be released in the new year, and a summer tour of France will follow.

Once Harper was nervous about playing to his “hometown crowd,” but after several tours and three records, those days are mostly gone.

“I’m relishing this moment,” Harper said. “This is a special space that won’t always exist. And sure enough, you know, multiple years later having played multiple times … I’m not really that nervous.”

Harper’s Claremont bona fides are unimpeachable; the 51-year-old attended Sycamore Elementary and El Roble Intermediate, and is a Claremont High School and Pitzer College graduate.

His grandparents, Charles and Dorothy Chase, founded “the Folk” in 1958. And, like most members of his family, he worked there in his youth and while in college, fixing instruments under the tutelage of his parents and grandparents.

His first artistic focus was sculpture. That changed in the mid-2000s when, while touring the Louvre on holiday in France, he noticed people were more interested in taking selfies with da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” than admiring it.

Peter Harper performs at 7:30 p.m. Saturday at the venue his grandparents Charles and Dorothy Chase founded in 1958, Claremont’s Folk Music Center. Courier photo/Andrew Alonzo

“I just thought to myself, ‘Wow, you’ve got maybe 60 seconds with this painting where you can really take it in before you’ve got to move and give over to the person behind you and that’s how you’re spending your time capturing it?’” he said. “If that’s how people are taking in the most famous painting in all the world, then the sculptures that I’m making aren’t having the impact that I want them to have. And I thought I should maybe try a different medium.”

So, at 37 he decided to turn his attention to music. His initial foray got a mixed review from a knowing critic: his mother Ellen, who, along with running the family business, is also an accomplished singer-songwriter.

“She said ‘Your voice is excellent … Your lyrics are incredible, really powerful lyrics, really love the melodies that you’re singing, but your guitar is terrible,’” Harper recalled. “And I thought, oh, man, that’s no good. So I put the guitar down. I picked up the ukulele and I just played it everywhere I went.”

Later, he picked up a tenor guitar.

“I started playing it and it was like, yes, this is exactly what my songs need to sound like,” he said. “And it’s become my obsession.” He also plays the ukulele, tenor banjo and bass, and is currently learning the cello.

Of course, being Ben Harper’s youngest brother has its advantages. But the relationship has been a “double-edged sword.”

“I think a lot of people feel like, ‘Oh well of course you’re out on tour, your brother’s famous, so he must have just, like, set it all up,’” he said. “But he was pretty hands off. He was like, ‘Oh you’re doing that? That’s awesome, get after it!’ … That’s exactly what I’ve done. Some people were like, ‘I love what your brother does, I think it’d be cool to work with you.’ So that was one edge of the sword. And other people would say, ‘Why are you asking to play at my venue? Just go out on tour with your brother and open for him. You don’t need to come play my little venue.’ And they would close the door. That would be a different edge of the sword.”

He’s happy for his famous brother, but Ben isn’t the only gifted musician in the family tree.

“To lay it all at his feet would be aggressive,” he said. “I mean, between him, my mom, my grandmother, my brother Joel, I mean you’re talking about, literally a family of phenomenal musicians. He’s definitely included in that, I mean he’s incredible, but in a family of incredible people, he’s one of them.”

Tickets are $25 for Peter Harper’s 7:30 show at the Folk Music Center, 220 Yale Ave., Claremont, available in advance at the store, or day of show at the door. More info is at folkmusiccenter.com or peterharper.net.