who i am

I am from Ann Arbor, Michigan- a bucholic, leftist-infused town full of trees and university types in the midwest. I started banging on the piano when I was four. We only had a toy one, but every year we would visit my grandmother and great grandmother in New Castle, PA(an exiting town full of boarded-up factories, empty store fronts, widows, and pizza joints). They has a baby grand, a player piano, and a giant nineteenth century music box with huge brass "records".

My grandmother's cool musical toys- on the left is my great-grandfather's "Music Box". It was entirely mechanical, and played huge, metal disks with notches punched into them. The player piano was my favorite- she had about fifty rolls, ranging from old classical parlour music to four handed versions of "The Candy Man" and "The Girl from Ipenema- even Libarace playing "The Godfather"!

I would slam my hands into pianos expecting to hear the sounds that the men I saw in tuxedos on TV made. I was sorely dissapointed. My father, who was reclusive, violent, psychotic- but also a genius and into many very beautious things- was a frustrated pianist-come-computer programmer. His parents delivered his old Spinett to him from New York when I was about seven years old. He went out and bought a book of Scott Joplin rags, and I watched him play over his shoulder. Eventually I figured out how to play some of them by watching. The vocal music teacher at school let me play the first two parts of "The Maple Leaf Rag" in class, at which the other children laughed heartily. After class she taught me how to play a "boogie-woogie" bass-line, and had me play it with the class on a holiday concert.

My very first concert, playing boogie woogie bass lines with a square suburban kids chorus who really got alot of fun out of laughing at me.

When I was twelve my parents decided to get me piano lessons with the church organist. I discovered that if I watched and listened I could play hard music, and if I tried to read it, I coudln't. I also decided that from that moment on I would play ONLY Bach and Scott Joplin. Thus became my career as a Difficult Student.

Every summer I took a kids workshop called "Cultural Arts Daycamp". It was taught by an artist, a dancer, and a theater person. I was in love with it. There were three workshps each summer, each with a different theme(dreams, mystery, science fiction, dinosaurs, etc.). We would build sets, create a script(sometimes with music), and choreograph dances. Then we'd put on the show at the end for our parents. I am quite sure everyone who taught it was an idealistic young arts student of some kind. I was very sad when I turned twelve and was too old to go anymore.

I also took drawing classees at the area's Art and Natural History museums. The Natural History museum was full of taxidermies of all kinds of animals, most of which were fifty or a hundred years old. It was an old fashioned museum, with skeletons and dioramas, and huge marble and wood fixtures and a funny mothball smell. My teacher was up in her seventies, and had assembled the museum's geological samples in the ancient days of her youth. I loved it there. And I took dance classes. My best friend was my dance teacher Linda. I would go to her house and hang out with her when I was seven or eight. But then she moved away.

When I was about ten, my best friend Charlotte brought home a violin from school(she was a year older than me). I had originally planned on playing the flute, but because of this I play violin instead. The first thing I did with it was lay it arcross my lap and try to bow it like a saw. I played little odes to her cat on it. This was because i thought her cat was a god queen, and also my "real" mother.The violin teacher at school really didn't like me very much, so I was sure I was really bad at playing and would never amount to anything at it.

I spent my time worshipping halluucinitory gods, reading greek myths and memorizing star charts, watching violent television shows with my psychotic father, playing the piano, praticing the violin, and wishing ferverently that Doctor Who would show up in his space-time telephone booth and take me to the planet I believed I was from. I thought it was still medeival times in Scotland, and decided fixedly and pointedly on a career as a wandering troubador there.

When I was a teenager, I found out there are no more troubadors in Scottland. I started out in a normal, all-american Junior High, where I was miserable. One of my amusements was to see how many days I could go without talking before anybody noticed. I went a whoIe week once.Also amusing was watching my autistic brother commit fantastic crimes against every possible social taboo in public. My favorite was when he asked men in the supermarket if they had vaginas. It was also fun when he took his pants off in the library. I went to All State music competitions every year and played marginally difficult classical music. For this I got little Blue ribbon metals. I played in various school and youth orchestras as well. My school music teacher was not supportive- she found me unfocused, badly mannered, and didn't think I was diligent enough. But then I got into the Youth Symphony at the University of Michigan. It was here that I found out about improvisation.

There was a doctoral student named Greg Koyle who started a "Free improvisation" group with the kids in the youth orchestra. He didn't play us records. He didn't call it "jazz" or "aleotoric music" or any of that. We would just play, then decide if we liked it or not, and why. By the time I was about fifteen, a bunch of kids in town started getting together at each other's houses to do this on a regular basis. It was a weird combination of Greg Koyle's class and the Dead Poet Society. . .we would gather somewhere and read poetry, play through music, improvise, and look at Art books- lots of us, ten, twenty kids at a time. A subset of this group became my first band- the Blue Sun Quintet. We were all girls, and all string players. . .and we started playing at various venues in town. Frank Pahl had us play on one of his albums, and in return(or rather, as a really kind favor) recorded our first album. We played our first improv show in Detroit on a bill with Eugene Chadbourne and Ladonna Smith when I was about 16.

Summers I got to go to Interlochen for two weeks. This is an intense, competitive summer camp for aspiring classical musicians. I went on the University's budget program, which was alot harder and even more intense than the standard program offered for a longer stretch of time. I loved it. Completely lived for it. Back in Ann Arbor, I ran around the neighborhood with my friends, pulling pranks at the local strip mall, and was in baroque and medeival music groups with other kids from the area, arranged by a local viola teacher.

I was lucky as shit to be born in ann arbor. because in ann arbor we had community high school. imagine a high school started by abby hoffman, howard zinn, dorothy parker, and rodolfe salis, and you'd have my high school. kids went there because they were too smart, too slow, too odd, too rich, too poor, or just plain old too bizarre to be able to cope with "normal" high school- everyone from a kid who pulled a knife on somebody to a kid who went to harvard two years early. . .all together. it was utopic. it was even public, and thus free. the only music program was run by a jazz musician- Mike Grace-so it was all jazz bands, and whatever other project you wanted to bring to him for coaching. i did orchestra over at the "normal" high school for a while, but it was clear that the conductor did not like me in the slightest, so i stopped. instead, I started learning standards, and playing out with various kids in the jazz bands. I also got a piano/composition teacher and a new violin teacher in high school. they were amazing, and i learned all kinds of things from them- Elaine Sargus and Karin Swanson.

i read alot, mostly sociology, history, and random fantasy books. i practiced and composed music, hung out with my boyfriend, and did evrerything short of running away from home. When I was sixteen, my brother attacked me and injured my hand, and I really stopped being around- didn't even sleep there half the time. I told my mother it was just tendonitous, and it took a year for it to get better. This made me extreemly sad and despondent, because I couldn't play any music. So I spent the year getting fantastically well-aquainted with the city's Arboretum, in sun, rain, and snow. I also explored all over the university buildings, and read lots of books at the graduate library. i started having visions of ghosts and impressions of human spirits, and would follow them about town, talking to them, at night.

Senior year I started sitting in on composition classes at the University of Michigan, as well as the Creative Arts Orchestra- a sort of student model of the Vienna Art Orchestra, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and Mahavishnu Orhestra- when my hand started getting better. i was already praticing at the music school every day because my brother was violent and insane, along with my father, and I thought it safer. I even kept my violin in a friend's locker there. I tromped around the town's cafes and bookstores, in addition to my time in the woods. I took fencing classes at the Y, and hung out in coffee houses with chess-playing, poet bachelors, and in the liberal arts dorm where by boyfriend lived. I only slept at home half the time, and refused to use the plumbing there, finding the Y to be more sanitary. This gave me ample opportunity to go to the Music School and pratice.I wrote, practiced, and played every day, all the time, in the Blue Sun Quintet, and orchestra, and jazz band, and little chamber groups, and alone. I slept in my boyfriend's dorm half the week, and if I didn't feel like seeing him, I'd sleep in libraries and near heating grates and the like. In the afternoons I would bottle and can with various members of the city's drunk, smakc-addicted, homeless lost hippie collection. This way I could stretch out my "lunch" money to cover dinner, so i would not have to be at any family meals. Evenings I would go to the Music School, pretend I was a student, and practice. Then I'd go back downtown and either crash out or have my mother pick me up late at night.

I entered music school officially at the end of high school, even though I had really already started my studies there. I was the first person to graduate with a BFA in Jazz and Contemporary Imprpovisation from the University of Michigan. This is because my last name begins with an "H", and there were no others with early letters in their names. i was once again lucky as shit, because as colleges went, it wasn't too outlandishly expensive, and my mother and grandmother and great grandmother paid for it. I lived in a communal house called "The Chicken Coop" with the Blue Sun Quitet women and some other Ann Arbor folks. We put on performance parties every month or so featuring music, dance, film, skits and performance art in our living room. I particularly remember doing a rendition of "Sunshine Day" from the Brady Bunch where I played the middle male brady, followed by one of the cellists interpretive dancing in a sun mask to Peter Maxwell Davies "Eight Songs for a mad King". We also made vegan cakes, home-made ice cream, and other food. Lots and lots of people came. By the end of the year there were twenty two people living in the chicken coop, even though it was a five bedroom house. It was the first in a long string of problematic cooperative living situations in my life.

At school, I started out being a composition major. But my first teacher, George B. Wilson- who was brilliant and helped me in every concievable way- retired after my freshman year. My second teacher-who shall go un-named- was a complete asshole. Then my father died of mysterious causes, and I became blocked and eventually went insane, so I dropped out of school around the end of my second year. I spent the summer looking for some weird place that I called "the summer country" in my mind. I walked all over town, looking and looking for it. Finally, at the end of the summer, I was sitting near the pond at the Music School, and looked out at the Arboretum . . .and somehow the whole world was transformed, and it was the summer country, and I was in it. After that, everything got easier. (Yes, it did happen. No it didn't happen to you. So there. )

So I transfered into the Jazz Department, which my teacher Ed Sarath, who rocks, was in the process of starting. I became very invovled with the Creative Arts Orchestra- . . . I loved it, and followed it. I also did some work in the electronic music studios with Evan Chambers, who also rocks. I had a semi free-jazz, semi funk band called the Nu Front Line which played at the Ann Arbor Brewing company every week. Our most requested song, as I recall, was called "Lots of Crack in the CIA", written by our drummer, Eric Roth. I praticed, composed, went to class, or rehersed pretty much non-stop my last year of school. And before leaving town I put on a recital with my band, a duo with guitarrst Jeff Enderton, my quadrophonic electronic piece, the piano piece I had written for my father, and a performance of The Lark Ascending.

I got married to my college steady as my first mistake in adult life. After that, having realized that staying in the same town as my psychotic family was probably not a good idea, I made for Boston. There was no particular reason. I just headed out. I spent much of my first few years in Boston broke and wandering, insane and full of energy. I didn't know a soul. I arrived exhilerated and terrified. I immediately got involved in housing and anti-gentrification activism. And I played with various people- mostly a drummer named Marilyn at first, who has since gone to New York. I made my living subbing in the Bangor, Portland, and Boston Philharmonic Symphonies, as well as in the awe-inspiringly dull, boring and horrific ensemble of Tim Janis. I met one really cool violinist who I still work with sometimes, named Rick Slevira, but on the whole these things made me want to hoof it off a bridge, so I stopped doing them.

I started getting involved with better things. I was playing english and then sephardic folk music with David Farewell, and then I met Fred Stubbs, who is a phenomenal Ney player, and learned a little but about Turkish Mevlevi Sufi music from him and the other people invovled with the Eurasia ensemble. Then I met another fellow, Turgay Erturk, who taught me a little about Turkish folk and urban dancing music. I became involved in the Zeitgeist Gallery scene playing in the multi-genere jam performances on Rob Chalfen's "subconcious cafe"series. He knew a ton of musicians, and would combine me and Fred Stubbs with David Maxwell and Sergio Brandau, Jerry Leake, and all manner of other beautious and bizarre combinations. I was also there almost every week for the now-defunct Playground New Music Series, which show cased all kinds of Boston free improvisers, often with guest artists from all over the world.

One night, very soon after I got here, I went to a concert of Joe Maneri and Matt Maneri, and was blown completely away. I attended Joe's seminar in microtones for three years after that. It was here that I met a fellow named Jonathan Vincent who played piano and accordion. I had heard of him before, from his roomate who I had happened to meet at marylin's studio. And he must have heard of me as well, because as I was talking to the cellist to my left- Dan Levin, whom I played a show with two hours ago as I write- Jonathan pointed at me from the right, and said "You're Katt!". We played amazing together, and worked on it pretty constantly for three years. These two men- Joe Maneri and Jonathan Vincent- opened up my ears and my conciousness to more possibilities, dimensions, and universes than anyone else I have ever yet known. We played in Joe Maneri's microtonal class at NEC at first, then at the Zeitgeist, and other places around town. . . We worked with dancers in the outside art collective and put on a show at Mobius involving accordion, violin, pots, pans, and a trash can full of water. We participated in a number of things some performance artsists from mass art were doing, including a several miles long noise parade through a mortified boston, and a terrifying portrayal of the pastoral american tableu involving beer, porn, television, and vanilla icing. We played with Zack Fuller, who is a dancer who doesn't dance like anyone else I have ever seen, and Margarita who is a kind of slowed down bacarachian caberet singer, except she sings in spanish. We played with Jeff Arnal, who's a drummer, and Dave Gross, and Judith Berkson, and Adam Wilson, and oh, a whole host of people from all over. We played all kinds of stuff with all kinds of people, almost every week.

We were also trying to start an artists' collective called Brainville. Eventually- with many painful convulsions- the friendship intensified to the point that it blew apart with sparks and fire, killing itself, and along with it my marriage(which was going down the tubes anyway) and more than a couple of my close friendships. I did not work with Jonathan for three years. However, we have since made up, and it would be criminal not to include something I did with him at that time on my site, since it was easily some of the best shit I have yet created, and he is a great musician.

After that happened I fled our crumbling co-op and moved in with my new boyfriend, Hans Rickheit. Hans is a surrealist cartoonist. He was living- as he had for five years- in the unheated, unplumbed basement of the old zeitgeist gallery. I still miss living there like crazy. I started helping out with publicity and shows and stuff, and found myself deeply involved there. someday i'll write all kinds of things about that place and the people involved with it, because its really a pretty unbelievable story. anyway, the landlord caught us living down there, and we had to leave. Right around then I was floundering around looking for a new set of people to work with. I did a trio with harmonic canon(adam wilson) and flute(arto artinian), and a duo with a bass player(john voigt), and another duo with a table top-come-blues guitarist(marc bisson). I started doing trio work with Gordon Beeferman and Jeff Arnal in new york on occasion. I also started working with Walter Wright, a video artist, mitch ahern, who builds all kinds of insane instruments from washing machines and vacuum cleaners, and a drummer will buchanen.

After a brief stint in Al Nidle's attic, we moved first to new hamshipe, then to maine, then to michigan, then back to new hampshire, then to vermont. I had inherited some money and, having no idea what to do with money, bought a bizzarre, circular house with it. But when I realized we lived on a tertiary dirt road and the winter was coming, I paniced, and we hoofed it back to cambridge. fast as fast can go.Maybe when I am older I will go back up there and try starting a cooperative again.

I got settled, and started working a little with Dan DeChellis and the Chamber Music ensemble again. That may-2002- the zeitgeist gallery burned down, and I was subsumed in rescheduling forty five shows, helping get the new space ready, and helping to run it. The new place seems to have stabilized a little. i hope it does not stabilize too much. Two people who really don't get whatteh Zeitgeist is all about- A fellow I half trust and a fellow i can't stand- just recently bought the building to save it from the bank and the evil cambridge developers and such, so i have withdrawn a bit from organizing- and producing. i needed a rest from it anyway!

In 2001, while still in Vermont, I got invited to go and play at the High Zero festival for the first time.

This had a profound effect on me- that is, I was so happy about it, and all the musicians I found down there, that I almost decided to move there as soon as I could. I still might sometime. Everyone should go visit there, at any rate, and see what amazing thigns are transpiring.

The next year I broke my arm, so I couldn't play in high zero again, even though i'd been invited to. i went down to listen, though. again, i wsa blown away bythe music i heard, and also by how well organized everything seemed to be down there. when i got back, i decided i had to do some of my upcoming shows, broken arm or no. This gave me the opportunity to beat an autoharp with mallets and toy microphones in public for a few months. When my arm got better, I started playing on a Stroh violin which my Mom got me for christmas. After a stint on lovely, lovely Winter Hill(a neighborhood in Somerville that would make Archie Bunker proud), I moved into a one bedroom apartment back in Cambridge that had inadequate heat and costs too much money. I got heavily involved with Food not Bombs, an organization that collects all the vegan food that was going to be thrown away by markets and bakeries, and feeds it to homeless people in the form of hot meals. and i got really angry at Bush and the facism which seems to come with him, and started going to protests, and writing letters to city, state, and federal officials who pissed me off. You will find a field recording of me playing my stroh violin at an anti-FTAA protest on the music page.

Then I heard that a new art space had opened in Andrew Square, in south boston. Hans and I exitedly packed up all our stuff and moved in. It was two giant warehouses, rough and spacious, housign space for ten artists to work. It was run by a guy with a graphic design firm. I was tremendously exited and happy to be there, since i needed a change from the zeitgeist gallery, and was looking forward to doing shows and events and building community and making music there. However, the building was full of toxic mold and other maladies, and after the space organizer's conflict with the landlord over this we all got evicted. So that was the disasterous end of that. I still dream of art spaces and living in the, daily, nightly, and all the time.

In March 2006, Gil Aharon, one of the Landlords of the Zeitgeist Gallery's space, decided taht we were making money, and evicted teh Gallery(or rather kicked it out since he and the otehr landlord had never actualy given it a lease). He opened up his own club, and ran without a sign for a short while- but a letter to the city put a quick stop to that. As a final act of grotesquitude, he evicted all his tenants on fourteen days notice when his first "Cease and Desist" order came. Happily he was hit with tens of thousands of dollars in repairs he had to do, and picked the silliest name on the planet for what i'm sure will be an ill-fated and incompetantly run venture. But This was the last straw for me in Boston- to see something so many people had poured so much into over a period of many years snapped up like nothing by a rich, spoiled, spectacularly UNtalented, frat-boy-like bully who spent most of his time stoned, drunk, abusing his dogs and threaening people. So when I saw my last, favorite piece of house art- a stained glass window featuring a wise woman with a lion and a hawk- dissappear under the developers' shovel, I decided it was a BIG signal to get the HELL out of the gentrified ruins of Cambridge.