Coming to the Seattle area on a whim in the eighties, cellist and composer Lori Goldston found what she was looking for — a place where the rules were loose and imaginative work was being made. For an artist of wide-ranging tastes with an instrument that takes on many voices, the pliable Cascadia culture was an excellent creative pocket.
From her work with Nirvana, where she saw artists gain world attention but not lose their political and social consciousness, through her collaborations with bands, singers, film makers and choreographers, Lori feels at home in a context that is continually being refined and reinvented.
For many years as the founders of the Black Cat Orchestra, she and her partner Kyle Hanson dug through Seattle’s record bins and library shelves to find songs to arrange for the band to perform at weddings, openings and parties throughout the Northwest, and a longstanding monthly gig at Seattle&$8217;s O.K. Hotel. The repertoire ranged far and wide: Eastern and Central Europe, the Middle East, Latin America and the US. Their original and cover songs conveyed a slightly surreal sentimentality, creating a place for people to be together and re-imagine the past, present and future.
Early formal training included cello instruction from Aaron Shapinsky, jazz and folk guitar from, among other places, the Guitar Workshop in Long Island, and course work at Bennington College with Milford Graves, Vivian Fine, Maxine Neumann and Bill Dixon; her work has led her to study and perform music from Turkey, China, Brazil and Japan.
Currently she performs as a solo cellist, with the experimental rock band Earth, and with a constantly shifting assortment of ensembles.