Tanya Kalmanovitch

Born in Fort McMurray, Alberta, violist and violinist Tanya Kalmanovitch now lives in the spaces between modern jazz, classical music and free improvisation. Actively performing in New York City since 2004, she has been named “Best New Talent” by All About Jazz New York, while Time Out New York identified her from a small pool of suspects as “the Juilliard-trained violist who’s been tearing up the scene”.

Tanya’s debut recording with her quartet Hut Five was hailed by the Montreal Gazette as “an exceptional recording, one of the more engaging recordings heard in some time” and was garnished with a number of stars by DownBeat magazine. Her latest recording, Heart Mountain, with pianist Myra Melford, will be released in May 2007.

Tanya has performed in Europe and North America with a diverse range of artists including Mark Turner, Benoît Delbecq, Mark Helias, Dominique Pifarély, Andy Laster, Tom Rainey, Ernst Reijseger, Mat Maneri, and the Turtle Island String Quartet, Martin Hayes, John Cage and Shujaat Husain Khan. She has travelled frequently to India where she has studied Karnatic music with violinist Lalgudi G. J. R. Krishnan and veena player Karaikudi S. Subramanian while conducting doctoral dissertation research on jazz exotica.

Tanya teaches regularly at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London UK and the Koninklijk Conservatorium in Den Haag NL, and is a member of the faculty of the department of Creative Improvisation at Boston’s New England Conservatory. She frequently presents workshops on improvisation for string players, classical musicians, jazz musicians, and musicians in general in the Netherlands, Ireland, the United States, and the Czech Republic.

She is a founding member of the Brooklyn Jazz Underground, a collective of ten independent bandleaders based in New York City. She is also the Canadian representative to the International Association of Schools of Jazz, a founding member of the Jazz String Caucus of the International Association for Jazz Education, and a mentor to the Sisters in Jazz Program.

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