Kim Davenport has been working as a professional musician since her teen years, with extensive work as a collaborative artist. As a performer, she is primarily interested in new and under-represented works. Her primary focus in recent years has been to perform and record solo and chamber works of African American composers, most notably her 2022 album featuring Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s complete Twenty-Four Negro Melodies, Op.59.

Kim holds undergraduate degrees in music and piano performance from the University of Washington, and completed her Master of Music in piano performance at Northwestern University.

Kim is active in the vibrant musical community of Tacoma, Washington, where she maintains a private piano studio, teaches at both the University of Washington Tacoma and the University of Puget Sound, and performs regularly around the city. She is especially interested in drawing connections between her life as a musician and her more academic research and writing interests. She is a published scholar of local history, with a focus on Tacoma’s musical past. Her textbook for use in non-major music classes, “Learning to Listen,” was published in May 2023.

She was active for nearly 20 years in the critically acclaimed Duo Alea, the bass clarinet/piano duo she formed with her father, Michael Davenport. The Duo’s performances and recordings brought local and world premieres of several important works for bass clarinet & piano. The Duo were also active in music publishing, forming the independent firm Alea Publishing & Recording in 1997 to produce their own recordings and establish a growing catalog of sheet music for the bass clarinet. In 2020, following her father’s passing, Kim established the Dolphy Prize for new works for bass clarinet by black composers.