Updated: July 18, 2023
Born: September 20, 1983
Kait Dunton is a Los Angeles-based keyboardist & composer. She exudes joy when she plays and her honest emotional expression invites her audience to be open and vulnerable right alongside her. Her radiant energy and musical storytelling have garnered her hundreds of thousands of followers on social media as well as a large listening audience on Spotify.
Starting with her first album, Real & Imagined - now a fan favorite with over three million streams - Kait has continued to cultivate her signature sound over many subsequent albums and releases, including her latest single featuring her evocative improvisational style - and with over 2.5M views on Instagram: “this one’s for you”. Her music has received 4.5 stars in DownBeat magazine, has reached top ten (twice!) on the Jazz Week radio charts, and has been heard on KCRW and KJazz.
Influenced by the work of Richard Tee, Ahmad Jamal, E.S.T., Brad Mehldau, Chick Corea, and Herbie Hancock, among others, Kait has evolved from an acoustic piano purist to a confident multi-keyboardist with her own groovy vintage sound which incorporates various styles outside the normal realm of “jazz,” including classical, pop, rock, R&B, soul, gospel, Brazilian, and Latin. As a keyboardist, composer, and songwriter, Kait’s genre-pushing original music has amassed an avid and engaged fanbase, including more than 130,000 Instagram followers, 15,000 TikTok followers, and nearly 37,000 monthly Spotify listeners.
Kait’s new album, Keyboards - with Sean Hurley on bass and Jake Reed on drums - celebrates the sounds, timbres and instruments of the 70s - especially the classic vintage keyboards like the Fender Rhodes, Hammond B3, Wurlitzer & Clavinet. This album also represents an evolution in Kait’s sound and style—a focus more on groove and interlocking rhythmic parts, and is a shift away from complex composition and arrangement prevalent in some of her past albums.
Kait’s latest venture as a solo artist was fueled by the enthusiastic response of her fans this past year inspiring a period of artistic and personal growth. Her music lays bare who she is as an artist. Fans are captivated by the different forces that emerge from her music–its unexpected rhythms and chord progressions, unconventional compositions, and stories with personal meaning—leaving comments about how moved they are by her performance, and how happy her music makes them feel.
Kait says: “Playing with honest emotion and expression is the only way I know how to do it, and I like to think that this invites others to experience it with me, to be vulnerable along with me, or to just be happy and have fun!”
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- Mountain Suite by Dan Bilawsky
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Read more articles“Dunton brings a Technicolor sensibility to everything she touches.” – DownBeat
“Thrilling and original.” – PopMatters
Rated "BEST CD OF 2009" on SomethingElseReviews.com
“She throws cold water on any notion that the piano/bass/drums format is an exhausted one,” S. Victor Aaron of Jazz.com "Real & Imagined is one of the top two or three jazz records I’ve heard put out by anybody in the past year, a statement I don’t make lightly" - S. Victor Aaron, Jazz.com
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band / orchestraEdward Simon
pianoEric Reed
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woodwindsJarrett Cherner
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