DADGAD guitarist, banjo frailer, ukulele picker and percussionist, Kate's first instrument a voice that sings from a deep heart. Warm, expressive and full of life, Kate's song shares more than words; her dusky voice moves close in and echoes the heart beneath the story. As poet, Kim Stafford, likes to say, Kate "writes from the beginning of time", rendering songs that inhabit universal experiences with the feeling of tradition that crosses the borders of place and time.

Call me Alexei. My story starts a few hundred years ago, coincidentally, in the Galician Carpathians, where generations of the roving Wajchman family[Wahk-min, Watch-man], had baked bread, sold watches, tanned leather, sold books, butchered chickens, and wandered from shtetl to shtetl playing in pickup bands. By the time I was born the few of us still left had escaped persecution and caught a ship to Williamsburg, Brooklyn where rent wasn’t yet exorbitant and a career could be made playing weddings, bar mitzvahs, and the occasional circumcision. At 13 I found the life oppressive and left with a loosely knit band of performance artists who wended their way aimlessly across the American Gothic map supporting their slow journey by taking very odd jobs and busking wherever possible. It was hard traveling but it put hair on my chest. I absorbed the American Landscape and it absorbed me. One Independence Day while plying tourists for lunch money at Hoover Dam, I had the epiphany that I could write feel-good melodies and life-affirming cloying lyrics about anything. It led me directly to writing little slogans that I sold for quarters on streetcorners, tuneful aphorisms that attracted alternative music critics and fraternal lodge brothers and Chamber of Commerce climbers. Soon I was writing political copy for a Reno printer who sold templates to any candidate with a need for concise and catchy campaign posters. I had just turned 15 when I was discovered by a San Francisco Democrat passing through town. She offered me a regular gig dreaming up punchy slogans like He Gets It Done, She’ll Fight for You, Sex Workers Need Unions Too. It was a living. I stayed with it until one day a mysterious raven-haired Japanese Czechoslovakian fiddler[she carries the thing everywhere] asked me to direct her to the Great American Music Hall where a lean lounge lizard named Dawn and Her Little Dog Chu was headlining a bill of vanity acts in a Cirque de Medusa adaptation of Born Yesterday. I convinced the fiddler that we’d have a better time anywhere else. Yup. It was Annie Staninec[Stan-ee-netz]. She talked me into enrolling in School of the Arts where we spent much time playing music and converging the effects of various cultural upheavals. The rest is history. We play and sing for our supper. Let us entertain you.