Katt Hernandez
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Katt Hernandez (May 16, 1974 - ) is a violinist living in Boston, Massachusetts. As a teenager, she attended Community High School, an alternative, experimental school that was in her hometown of Ann Arbor, Michigan. She was admitted to the University of Michigan in 1992, and was among the first to graduate from the school with a degree in improvised music. There she worked extensively with the Creative Arts Orchestra, with her mentor Ed Sarath. She also studied composition with George Balch Wilson and Evan Chambers, as well as jazz with Donald Walden. She also played in several jazz groups in the area, and collaborated with Frank Pahl.
She arrived in Boston in 1997, and quickly became a part of the city's rich landscape of improvised music. She regularly sat in on classes and sessions at the New England Conservatory in her first years in town, where she met her next mentor, Joe Maneri. There she also began her long collaboration with pianist and accordion player Jonathan Vincent. She began working extensively with performance artists, dancers, and video artists as improvisers. In addition to performances in the city's ever-dwindling supply of underground art-spaces, as well as appearances as a guest artist at more prominent venues, she began to participate in flamboyant street theater antics.
In the last several years she has appeared as a performer throughout the Boston improvised music scene weekly, and in many venues along the East Coast. She has also appeared on a number of festivals of improvised and experimental music, including High Zero, Autumn Uprising, Creative Soundspace, Montreaux-Detroit Jazz, Boston CyberArts and Improvised and Otherwise. She has appeared in performance with Joe Maneri, Hans Rickheit, Jack Wright, Zack Fuller, Oolanda Denosky-Smart, Saul Levine, Nicole Bindler, Andrew Neumann, Eric Rosenthal, Walter Horn, Dave Gross, Allysa Cardone, Tatsuya Nakatani, James Coleman, John Voigt, Joe Burgio, Walter Wright, Dan DeChellis, John Berndt, Adam James Wilson, Marc Bison, and many others.
In addition to her extensive work as an improviser, Katt Hernandez has also appeared with the Eurasia Ensemble,Los Bilbilicos, and various Greek and Turkish traditional musicians. She has brought the influence of Arabic and Balkan music to her own work. She has also worked on early jazz, old tyme, and parlour treacle with Matt Samolis – himself an accomplished free improviser – in their duo Lindy's Radio. They play music from before 1937, prior to the disappearance of Amelia Earhart.
In 1999, Katt became involved in the organization of the Zeitgeist Gallery. She produced and promoted concerts there and in other venues for scores of other free improvisers. She also became an advocate for the right of individuals to make music and run Art Spaces without harassment from city officials and real estate developers in the rapidly gentrifying Boston community- writing letters, appearing at town meetings, and participating in pointed merry pranks to champion the cause. And she spent a year helping to bring forth a weekly Food Not Bombs meal from a kitchen on the gallery's third floor. To date, Katt Hernandez has produced well over one hundred concerts of new music in the Boston area, and has appeared as a performer on over two hundred.
Katt's violin playing employs many virtuostic extended techniques, as well as microtones. Her influences range a vast gamut of music, and her own work is entirely improvised. She has been noted for her unique playing in many publications and on-line review sites, including Cadence Magazine, Signal to Noise, and All About Jazz.
