Female

34

Katt Hernandez has recently moved to Philadelphia, after living in the Boston area for nine years, playing the violin and hellping to run the Zeitgeist Gallery- a maverick Art Space that ran for Twelve years, and hosted pretty much every musician and many artists living in the Boston area. She has collaberated with a magnificently variated sea of musicians, dancers, and others including- but certainly not limited to- Joe Maneri, Zack Fuller, David Maxwell, Beat Circus, Matt Somalis, John Voigt, Vashti Bunyan, Allisa Cardone, Gordon Beeferman, Jonathan Vincent, Walter Wright, Joe Burgio, Eric Rosenthal, Jeff Arnal, Jaimie McGlaughlin, Andrew Neumann, Dave Gross, and Hans Rickheit. She has twice been invited to perfrom on the Autumn Uprising, High Zero, Mobius ArtRages, and Improvised and Otherwise festivals, and has also appeared at the Montreaux-Detroit, Brandeis New Music, Boston CyberArts, Michiania, IAJE, IASJ, and Ear Whacks festivals. She has been a guest artist at MIT, Harvard, University of Indiana and the New England Conservatory, performed in a vast slew of localized venues and- to date- any number of subway passages, urban grottos, and troglyditical performace slaces, as well as other experimental and life-making places throughout the Bos-Wash metropolii.

Katt has focused primarily on freely improvised music, working on drawing electronic-like sounds from her completely accoustic violin. She also works extensively with microtonality, drawn from a study of a mixture of sources, including traditional folk and sacred musics of the Middle East, Turkey, and Eastern Europe, and the Maneri/Sims 72 note system. Playing with as wide and unexpected a variety of other improvisers as possible is tantamount to her sonic and spiritual pursuits. She has also played music of the late Ottman empire and Whirling Dervish ceremonies with the Eurasia Ensemble. And most lately she has been doing something entirely different: playing old-time, vaudeville, and early jazz tunes with Matt Somalis(a.k.a. Shoe) whilst channelling the spirit of Amelia Earhart in the duo Lindy's Radio. She also played the mysterious incarnation of a disturbing cartoon character in the frightening music and performance art duo Dr. Selenium and Madame Margo. In fact, she plays somewhere for groups of people at least weekly, come hell or high water.

Katt grew up in Ann Arbor, MI, where she met all kinds of the most remarkable humans you might imagine, and played her violin throughout the Detroit metro-area on a regular basis starting at the age of 14. She attended Community High School as a kid- a public school based on the utopic visions of the late sixties- which gave her the opportunity to have a life worth living. She also spent two weeks every summer at the National Music Camp, wearing silly uniforms and learning about symphonic and chamber music. After attending classes as a teenager at the University of Michigan's Music School, she went there and studied composition, violin, electronic music, jazz, and improvisation, graduating in the end with the very first BFA in "Jazz Studies and Contemporary Improvisation" awarded by the school. Her teachers were George Balch Wilson, Ed Sarath, Even Chambers, Donald Walden, Elaine Sargous, Karin Swanson, Mike Grace, and Andrew Jennings. She played with a great many musicians and others there, including Only a Mother, Doctor Arwulf-Arwulf,the Creative Arts Orchestra, and the Blue Sun Quintet.

Recently she has been working on a solo album, and doing a great deal of live collaboration with Jack Wright, Walter Wright, Joe Burgio, Tim Feeney, Jaimie McGlaughlin, and many others! She has also been studying Calgia music and Rembetiko by playing with local people who Know, and recorded this past year with Beat Science and Eddy Dyer. Upon arriving in Philadelphia, she has joined Nicole Bindler's large ensemble and performed on both the Bowerbird and Soundfield series' with Even Lipson, Gene Coleman, Helena Espvall-Santoleri, Dan BLacksburg, Brandon Seabrook, and Sean Mattio. She had 60 day jobs during her time in the Boston area.