Kay Ashley
It all started in a gravel pit in the North Maine Woods. A reluctant graduate student in geology, Kay Ashley was withering under the flinty stare of the noonday sun, hacking away at 10,000-year-old glacial sediments with an army issue hoe pick, all while providing lunch to the legendary northern Maine black flies—and she thought, “there must be something better than this.” So, Kay decided to leave the rocks in the gravel pits where they belonged, and to return to her first love: music. This prompted a move to New York City's vibrant singer-songwriter scene, and the rest is but a nanosecond in geologic history.
Kay Ashley is a unique singer-songwriter whose influences range from The Beatles and Led Zeppelin, to Joni Mitchell, Nick Drake, and Hindustani classical music. Her music is impressionistic yet infectious; catchy yet harmonically adventurous. Her songs settle into your consciousness as if they've always been there, yet they take you on unexpected twists and turns.
Kay's first full-length CD project, "HELIOTROPE", co-produced by Grammy Award winner Michael Leonhart (Steely Dan, Lenny Kravitz), will be released in early 2008, and features performances by Michael Leonhart, Martha Colby (October Project), Raquy Danziger, Timothy Hill (The Harmonic Choir), elizabeth!, Jenny Goodspeed, Sean McCaul (Philip Glass), Bill Dobrow (Sean Lennon, Martha Wainwright), and David Pilgrim.
Kay has performed in many New York City venues, including Rockwood Music Hall, The Living Room, and Columbia University's Postcrypt Coffeehouse, and has performed abroad at Sätra Brunn resort in Sweden. Kay has also appeared as a member of the David Pilgrim Band in both the Celebrate Brooklyn! Music Festival and at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s BAM Café; and has performed at the New School's Tishman Auditorium with Marie Afonso (formerly of Zap Mama) and Ken Butler in Jenny Lynn McNutt's experimental multimedia performance piece "33 Swoonings". Kay has also performed at Lincoln Center's Avery Fisher Hall and on Good Morning America! with the New York Metro Mass Choir.
Kay has studied Hindustani classical vocal music for the past several years with Ustad Mashkoor Ali Khan, a revered master vocalist and faculty member at Calcutta's ITC Sangeet Music Research Academy and with Ustad Mashkoor Ali Khan's senior western disciple Michael Harrison. She has performed live (tamboura accompaniment) with Ustad Mashkoor Ali Khan, bansuri flute virtuoso Steve Gorn, vocalist Sounak Chattopadhyay, vocalist Sabina Mumtaz Islam, sitarist Prasanna Kumar Thokchom, and pianist/composer Michael Harrison. Kay is also an acclaimed kazoo player and has been known to compose Haiku based on the Fibonacci sequence.