Kitty Margolis

Margolis grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area exposed to a wide range of music influences and began playing guitar at age 12 inspired by Joni Mitchell, Bonnie Raitt, folk, country, blues and the eclectic concerts she attended at The Fillmore and Winterland.[1]

Margolis began playing gigs while attending Harvard University in the mid-1970s as a singer and rhythm guitarist in a western-swing band.[2] She began to study jazz after she attended a "life altering" concert by Rahsaan Roland Kirk at New York's Village Vanguard.[3] She eventually returned to San Francisco where she attended San Francisco State University, learning recording engineering and studying under saxophonists John Handy and Hal Stein.[1] Margolis was the first woman to attend Stein's improvisation class, and eventually she took over his weekly gig at Peta's in San Francisco's North Beach neighborhood.[1] The regular gig launched Margolis's professional career in 1978.[1]

In 1988 Kitty Margolis and Madeline Eastman co-founded the first women-owned label on the West Coast, Mad-Kat Records, in order to make their own music with no commercial or artistic constraints.[4]

In 1997, Margolis won the BAM Bammie award for outstanding jazz vocalist after being nominated for her album Evolution in 1994.[5] She was nominated for the Soul Train “Lady of Soul" Award in 1999,[6] and has been recognized in the DownBeat Critics' Poll numerous times.[3] Jazz critic Stanley Crouch observed that “Kitty Margolis is an original who has made the heritage of all the great jazz singers her own... She is, as they say, 'the real thing.'"[7]

Margolis has toured extensively, including appearances at The Kennedy Center, Holland's North Sea Jazz Festival, The Boston Pops, the Monterey Jazz Festival, the Telluride Jazz Festival, the Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival, London's Royal Festival Hall, and the San Francisco Jazz Festival.[6] In 2022 she performed at Ronnie Scott’s in London as part of a celebration of her former bandmate and close friend, the late saxophonist, composer, and arranger Pee Wee Ellis.[8] Also in 2022, she was the first jazz artist to perform at the newly renovated and re-opened Presidio Theater in San Francisco.[9]

She was a VJ for BET on Jazz[10] and was featured on Marian McPartland's syndicated radio show "Piano Jazz" in 2006.[11] In 2005 she was the subject of a one hour radio program, Melanie O'Reilly's “Jazz Across the Bay” on Ireland's National radio station RTE; the show was reformatted and rebroadcast on KCSM in 2022.[12]

Margolis has worked with various non-profit organizations. She served as Solo Jazz Vocal representative on the International Association of Jazz Educators (IAJE) Resource Team for 8 years. In 2009 she participated on the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) "Jazz Masters Live" panel.[10] In 2011 she co-moderated a panel "Exploring the Recording Artist/Record Producer Relationship: A Dialogue About Creative Synergy" with Concord Records VP Nick Phillips at the Jazz Education Network (JEN) Conference in New Orleans.[13] She has also been a guest lecturer at many universities and high schools.[14]

Margolis served on the national board of trustees of The Recording Academy (Grammys) from 2011 through 2015, after serving on the executive committee of the Recording Academy’s San Francisco chapter board from 2008 through 2010[15].  She is on the Advisory Board of Music in Schools Today (MuST), which serves over 10,000 children and youth annually advocating to restore music as an essential principle of primary education.[16] Margolis is also in the Circle of Advisors for "Bread & Roses Presents,” an organization that provides live music and the performing arts to individuals in institutional settings in the San Francisco Bay Area.[17]

Margolis and her husband, Alfonso Montuori Ph.D., also teach educational seminars that explore "collaborative creativity" and the "improvisational mindset" of jazz artists for non-musical environments such as the workplace,[18] which has been presented at the Esalen Institute,[19] the Italian energy company Enel,[20] and UCSF School of Medicine.[21]

In 2021 Margolis became a contributing writer to San Francisco’s Nob Hill Gazette, writing about music and culture.[22]