Kimberly Allison

Originally hailing from Kansas City, Missouri, guitarist Kimberly “KC” Allison now makes her home in Los Angeles, where she pursues an instrumental style rooted in blues yet open to a broad spectrum of other idioms. Although her core sensibility remains blues-centered, she avoids strict adherence to conventional 12-bar forms, drawing instead upon rock, soul, funk, jazz, and multiple regional blues approaches. Her single-line phrasing and tone reflect the legacies of B.B. King, Albert Collins, and T-Bone Walker, while also nodding to both the Texas and Chicago traditions those artists represent. At the same time, her work incorporates the expansive techniques of Jimi Hendrix—widely regarded as the first authentic heavy-metal and hard-rock guitarist—along with the innovations of Jeff Beck and Stevie Ray Vaughan. Jazz exerts an equally strong pull: she admires fusion-oriented players such as John Scofield, Larry Coryell, and John McLaughlin of the Mahavishnu Orchestra, as well as straight-ahead bop guitarists including Kenny Burrell, Grant Green, Wes Montgomery, and Joe Pass. Allison earned a jazz-guitar degree from the University of Southern California, giving her the technical facility to sustain a career devoted solely to jazz should she choose that path; instead, she elects to weave jazz elements into a larger, more varied musical fabric. This stylistic breadth yields performances that shift without warning from hard-driving blues-rock to introspective fusion and, on occasion, to soul-jazz or hard-bop excursions, resulting in recordings whose direction is rarely predictable.

Allison maintains an active teaching practice throughout Southern California. Her debut release, the 2001 album Old, New, Borrowed and Blues, appeared on her own Starliner Music imprint and included guest vocals from the Texas singer known as Mister Blues. Two years later she issued the entirely instrumental follow-up, Beyond Blue, again on Starliner.