Cat Toren

Canadian-born pianist and composer Cat Toren draws from the socially conscious spiritual jazz of the late 1960s to craft her harmonically expansive and exploratory sound. Early recognition arrived through her role in the Juno Award-winning jazz quintet Pugs and Crows, yet her own releases have drawn equal notice, among them the 2010 album Goodbye Farm and the 2020 recording Scintillating Beauty issued with her Human Kind ensemble.

Vancouver was the site of her birth, where classical piano formed the core of her childhood training until jazz captured her attention during adolescence, particularly through the work of Herbie Hancock, Keith Jarrett, and Bill Evans. Following high school she completed an undergraduate degree in Jazz Studies at Capilano College in North Vancouver, British Columbia, then earned a master’s in Music Composition at the State University of New York at Purchase College while also pursuing private study with pianists Andy LaVerne and Sophia Rosoff. Her first project as leader, the independently released Cat Toren Band, appeared in 2008 and was succeeded two years later by Goodbye Farm. Additional visibility came from her membership in Pugs and Crows, whose 2012 album Fantastic Pictures earned a Juno Award. Since the 2010s she has resided in Brooklyn and holds a Sound Healing Training Certificate from the Sage Academy in Woodstock, New York.

The atmospheric, modern creative album Inside the Sun arrived in 2015, featuring guitarist Ryan Ferreira, bassist Pat Reid, drummer Nathan Ellman-Bell, and additional musicians. Two years afterward she introduced the Human Kind ensemble on the self-titled Cat Toren’s Human Kind, which presented saxophonist Xavier Del Castillo, guitarist and oud player Yoshie Fruchter, bassist Jake Leckie, and drummer Matt Honor. That same lineup returned for Scintillating Beauty in 2020. The next year Toren joined saxophonist Yuma Uesaka and drummer Colin Hinton for Ocelot, the debut recording of their collective trio.