Kait Dunton

Kait Dunton is a Los Angeles-based keyboardist & composer. She exudes joy when she plays and her honest emotional expression invites her audience to be open and vulnerable right alongside her. Her radiant energy and musical storytelling have garnered her hundreds of thousands of followers on social media as well as a large listening audience on Spotify. 

Starting with her first album, Real & Imagined - now a fan favorite with over three million streams - Kait has continued to cultivate her signature sound over many subsequent albums and releases, including her latest single featuring her evocative improvisational style - and with over 2.5M views on Instagram: “this one’s for you”. Her music has received 4.5 stars in DownBeat magazine, has reached top ten (twice!) on the Jazz Week radio charts, and has been heard on KCRW and KJazz.

Influenced by the work of Richard Tee, Ahmad Jamal, E.S.T., Brad Mehldau, Chick Corea, and Herbie Hancock, among others, Kait has evolved from an acoustic piano purist to a confident multi-keyboardist with her own groovy vintage sound which incorporates various styles outside the normal realm of “jazz,” including classical, pop, rock, R&B, soul, gospel, Brazilian, and Latin. As a keyboardist, composer, and songwriter, Kait’s genre-pushing original music has amassed an avid and engaged fanbase, including more than 130,000 Instagram followers, 15,000 TikTok followers, and nearly 37,000 monthly Spotify listeners. 

Kait’s new album, Keyboards - with Sean Hurley on bass and Jake Reed on drums - celebrates the sounds, timbres and instruments of the 70s - especially the classic vintage keyboards like the Fender Rhodes, Hammond B3, Wurlitzer & Clavinet. This album also represents an evolution in Kait’s sound and style—a focus more on groove and interlocking rhythmic parts, and is a shift away from complex composition and arrangement prevalent in some of her past albums.  

Kait’s latest venture as a solo artist was fueled by the enthusiastic response of her fans this past year inspiring a period of artistic and personal growth. Her music lays bare who she is as an artist. Fans are captivated by the different forces that emerge from her music–its unexpected rhythms and chord progressions, unconventional compositions, and stories with personal meaning—leaving comments about how moved they are by her performance, and how happy her music makes them feel. 

Kait says: “Playing with honest emotion and expression is the only way I know how to do it, and I like to think that this invites others to experience it with me, to be vulnerable along with me, or to just be happy and have fun!”

Surprisingly, it’s been a 20-year journey to fully embrace that she shouldn’t bother with anything else but creating and performing music. Her first voice of encouragement to pursue music as a career came from John D’earth, her music mentor at her undergraduate alma mater the University of Virginia. And even as a member of Grammy-winning jazz fusion band Snarky Puppy in its formative years, Kait was still cautious about pursuing life as a full-time artist.

Her artistic awakening would come much later after an academic pursuit resulting in a master's degree in Jazz Piano from the University of North Texas College of Music (UNT) and a DMA at the USC Thornton School of Music.

It was during her UNT program that Kait joined Snarky Puppy appearing on their sophomore record, The World is Getting Smaller.  After graduating, Kait left the band and returned home to Pasadena to take a corporate job in music marketing but soon realized this was not her calling. Drawn to academia, Kait started her doctoral work at USC Thornton where she met her future husband and music collaborator drummer Jake Reed.  

Realizing music is an essential part of her life and fundamental to who she is, Kait has been solely focused on playing, performing, improvising, and composing music professionally for the past decade. She records often for film, television, and other artists. Her playing appears extensively in the Mister Rogers movie, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, as well as in The Lego Movie 2, Downsizing, Empire, and ABC’s The Little Mermaid Live!  In addition, Kait has taught at the University of North Texas, USC's Thornton School of Music, Musician's Institute, Chaffey College, and most recently at Los Angeles College of Music (LACM) in Pasadena, where she developed their new Piano Performance program and served as the inaugural chair. 

Kait resides with her husband Jake and their young daughter in South Pasadena, CA, playing and recording out of their home studios, which feature many vintage and classic electronic keyboards, synthesizers, organs, and the heart and soul of the space, Kait’s beloved Yamaha C5 piano she’s had her entire life.