singer/songwriter Kasha
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where you canlink to Kasha's original songs on YouTube (new songs coming in April '08),enjoy and download her mp3s and other media for free,read about her current projects,read her bio and see photos,and see all the song lyrics. |
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(site currently undergoing renovation, "pardon our dust," projected completion March 24, 2008)
CONTACT: KashaInWords -at- GMAIL -dot- COM
Kasha (pronounced just like "kasha, the nourishing no-frills food") is the alter-ego of Kathleen Pierson, a musician and teacher who began singing in the Baltimore coffeehouses in the sixties and has continued crafting and sharing one-of-a-kind songs, with guitar or piano, ever since.
Philosophical and personal, Kasha's music is best suited to "intimate venues," which in these electronic times has come to include YouTube. We'll let the sociologists explain how that happened!
Kasha would love to play for your house concerts or other gigs, benefits, anti-violence/anti-war rallies, pro-interconnectivity/creativity gatherings, vegetarian potlucks, etc.
She also teaches - including song-writing, guitar, piano, college-level composition/theory and music history - one on one, or in classroom or workshop settings.
She also composes, beyond the singer/songwriter realm, with a lifelong specialty in music for choreography, and would be delighted to hear from choreographers looking for music. She will be accompanying - for the seventeenth time - at the American College Dance Festival in March 2008.
She also enjoys composing for chamber groups and for chorus, and has recently completed "Homeland Suite," which was commissioned as an alternative to patriotic standards and will be premiered May 4, 2008 by the Reuter Center Singers on the UNC-Asheville campus.
She will be teaching a short summer course at Reuter Center called "Exploring Musical Composition" in June, so if you are in Asheville and might be interested, contact either Kasha or NCCCR at the Reuter Center for details.
Ramblings for Guitarists:
There is often curiosity about Kasha's guitar tunings, which are sometimes standard (EADGBE) but more often "open" tunings, particularly D (DADF#AD) and D9 (DADEAD), and G (DGDGBD). These guitar tunings, and also Kasha's basic piano style, were learned from the first four Joni Mitchell albums of '68-'71, which are still an excellent source for brilliant songwriting insights. Kasha's occasional "more adventurous" guitar moments are a direct outcome of lucky proximity to the late great Michael Hedges during his Peabody Conservatory years in Baltimore and then later when he and Kasha were both booked to play mainstage at Sunfest in Oklahoma in 1987. All of Kasha's music is also heavily influenced by her decades of accompanying academic dance classes, and working with choreographers. Check back for soon-to-be-posted "instructional" guitar, piano, and djembe videos that should be up on YouTube by May '08.
Her guitar is a 1966 Yamaha 180. It holds the story of her entire adult life, and Kasha says:
"It has been through all manner of adventure including thousands of miles of hitch-hiking in the really old days... getting drenched with the Maryland dew when we all fell asleep gazing up at the stars with our guitars still in our hands, out at The Coop... heard in the fog under the brick arches at San Francisco's Ghirardelli Square... quietly strummed as lullaby to a lovely daughter... swamped with Ozark lake water when the crazy drivers of the party boats started playing "bumper boats"(no more party boat gigs!)... strummed as if it were a drum, for countless dance classes... used as the wake-up sign-on music for FOC-TV in Fayetteville Arkansas through the eighties... re-strung re-fretted re-aligned more times than I can count (who knew that a couple of cartons of soda, piled on just the right spot, could flatten a warped guitar back down?)... and it was once the subject of a bet: in 1972, as I was leaving the Winston-Salem radio station where I'd just done a live show, I was accosted by two guys who had bet whether it was a Martin D-28 or a Martin D-35. They were confounded to see that it was a Yamaha (I had to take it back out of the case to convince them!) - pretty hilarious, if you know guitars."