Kari was born in Cape Town, and moved to Pietermaritzburg in 1980.  She started learning to play musical instruments in 1979 (starting on piano), and then progressed to the clarinet at the age of 13.  She started composing music from about this age, in a very informal and improvisatory way.  

On completing school, she started studying for a B.Mus at Durban University in 1989, and then moved to the College of Music in 1990, when she moved back to Cape Town with her parents.  It was here that she was first exposed to jazz theory and harmony, which she fell completely in love with.  Although she majored in Orchestral Studies (clarinet), she included some jazz components in her studies, and also started composing – although again in a very informal way – more complex pieces for the piano, which she casually wrote down, in order to remember the richer jazz chords that resonated so much with her, and were a distinctive part of her “film music” sound.  

One piece she wrote in about 1992 became the composition better known as “Kari’s Song”, which appears on Christopher Duigan’s album, Midnight Blue, with David Salleras playing saxophone.

 

Kari moved to the Netherlands in 2019 and works in data analytics, and finding meaningful patterns in data.  She is married and the mom of three children.  She still plays the piano and the clarinet, and enjoys improvising on the piano.