Katt Hernandez

Katt Hernandez (born May 16, 1974) is a violinist living in Stockholm, Sweden with strong connection to Boston, Massachusetts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Baltimore, Maryland. 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, Arthur Magazine and All About Jazz.

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 Dr. Arwulf Arwulf and 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 thirteen years she 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, Joe Morris, Steve Norton, Matt Samolis, 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, 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 played music from before 1937, prior to the disappearance of Amelia Earhart. She was half of the duo Doktor Selenium and Madame Margo, a performance art project depicting the actions of a frightening cartoon character and his trumpet fiddling accomplise. And she occasionally worked with Beat Circus.

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. Katt produced over one hundred concerts of new music at the Gallery, as well as many in the Boston area. In 2006 the Gallery was shut down in a hostile takeover by its landlord. So Katt left Boston in search of less Hostile surroundings.

She moved to Philadelphia for three years, where she immediately became a performer on the Bowerbird, Ars Nova, Soundfield and SciFi Philly series' of improvised music. She was also a performer and occasional performer with the West Philadelphia Orchestra. And she was on the board of the Crossroads Music series, which brings performers from many different music cultures to West Philly. She also toured the United States and Canada with Vashti Bunyan and Veitiver, joining the Welcome to Dreamland concert at Carnegie Hall,produced by David Byrne.

In summer of 2008, she traveled to Sweden to play on the Hagenfesten festival, and met her partner Bure Holmbäck there. While she waited for her residency permission to join him there, she returned to Boston to collaborate with Joe Morris, Junko Simons, Luther Gray, Matt Samolis, Steve Norton, Bowed Metal and Glass, Joe Burgio and others. She performed at X-Fest at the 119 Gallery in Lowell, Massachusetts, and at Frantasia in Maine. Finally, in spring of 2010, she moved to Stockholm. She has already become engaged with the improvised and electronic music communities, and continues to perform, compose and scheme.