Rene Hart is a Brooklyn-based bassist and electronics player known for blending acoustic jazz with pop, folk and avant-garde vocabulary, frequently running his double bass through a looper and other effects rather than treating electronics as an add-on. By his own account, he is drawn to "strong melodies and long walks on a modal vamp" and to "the interaction of really good acoustic sounds and electronics," a description borne out across his catalog as a leader and an in-demand sideman.

Hart is a founding member of the Brooklyn trio Honey Ear Trio, formed with saxophonist Erik Lawrence and drummer Allison Miller. The group's 2011 debut, Steampunk Serenade (Foxhaven Records), drew strong reviews, including a JazzTimes notice from Bill Milkowski praising the "remarkable chemistry in this extremely elastic acoustic trio" on a "startling debut." Saxophonist Jeff Lederer replaced Lawrence in the lineup starting in 2013, and this version of the trio, with Miller and Hart continuing as co-leaders, recorded Swivel (Little (i) Music), tracked at Brooklyn's Bunker Studio in May 2014 and released in 2015. Reviewing the album for All About Jazz, Mark Corroto singled out Hart as the trio's "bassist plus electronics wizard," and DownBeat's account of the trio's 2016 Chicago debut at Constellation noted that despite a rig built around "a looper, a modulator and a few other effects," his playing "still sounded natural and never over-processed."

Hart also co-leads a separate trio with Israeli pianist Anat Fort and Belgian drummer Lieven Venken, billed on record as the Lieven Venken / Rene Hart / Anat Fort Trio. Its one album, Bubbles (Hypnote Records, 2019), is described in its own liner notes as music "newly re-discovered" from a 2005 recording session in New York, where, in the label's words, "the Venken-Fort-Hart collective was formed," making the group's working relationship considerably older than its eventual release. The nine originals and one Police cover on Bubbles are shared out among Fort, Venken and Hart as composers, and Hart plays bass throughout the album.

A separate co-led trio project, with guitarist Will Sellenraad and drummer Eric McPherson, produced Greene Street, Vol. 1 (Deko Music, 2019). Reviewing it for JazzTimes, Britt Robson traced the group's history to Sellenraad and McPherson's teenage friendship and noted that Hart's own family lived across the street from Sellenraad, with the two beginning to play together in college; the album, recorded in a Greene Street space that once served as a painting studio for Sellenraad's father, is "suffused with familial warmth," in Robson's phrase, and Hart contributes double bass, electronics and one original composition, "Allegorical."

Beyond his own co-led projects, Hart has built a wide-ranging sideman career spanning jazz, folk, and pop/R&B settings. His own biography lists engagements with David Amram, James Hunter, Pete Seeger, Bill McHenry, Myra Melford, Don Braden, Julian Priester, Branford Marsalis, Joan Osbourne, Dakota Staton, George Russell, Kirk Knuffke, Steven Bernstein, John Medeski, Seamus Blake, Eyvind Kang, Chris Cheek, Phillip Harper, Sarah Manning, Mark Ronson, Jessica Lurie, Abraham Burton, Wayne Horvitz, Sasha Dobson, Bobby Watson, Eric Mingus, Skerik and Didi Gutman, among others; his own promotional biography additionally credits engagements with Tracy Bonham, Janis Ian and cornetist Butch Morris. On record, his credits include bass on Bilal's neo-soul landmark 1st Born Second (2001, Interscope) and on saxophonist Sarah Manning's Harmonious Creature (2014, Posi-Tone), plus recurring work with saxophonist Erik Lawrence outside Honey Ear Trio and, as recently as 2025, bass and co-production on singer-songwriter Tracy Bonham's Sky Too Wide. Hart has performed at the Newport Jazz Festival, the Montreal Jazz Festival, the North Sea Jazz Festival and the London Jazz Festival, and has appeared on television on The Tonight Show and Late Night with Conan O'Brien.

Hart's playing sits at the junction of acoustic jazz bass tradition and live electronic processing: reviewers consistently note that his effects (loopers, modulation) thicken and colour the sound of Honey Ear Trio's tenor-trio format without ever taking over from the instrument itself, a balance DownBeat specifically credited him for maintaining live. His writing and arranging favour strong, singable melodies over abstraction, even inside otherwise exploratory settings, and his catalog moves comfortably between straight-ahead postbop contexts (Greene Street, Vol. 1), electronics-inflected small-group jazz (Honey Ear Trio), and R&B/pop side work (Bilal, Tracy Bonham, Mark Ronson), reflecting a stated aesthetic that treats jazz, avant-garde, pop and folk as parts of one continuous vocabulary rather than separate lanes.