"This is not a cheerful Dixieland jazz in the mandatory white costumes. This is underground - in mesh stockings and black dress." (Maria Kosheleva, kulsi.ru)
Born in Fort McMurray, Alberta, violist and violinist Tanya Kalmanovitch now inhabits 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 as “the Juilliard-trained violist who’s been tearing up the sceneâ€.
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 with pianist Myra Melford, is titled Heart Mountain (Perspicacity, 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.
