Kate Yanai

Summary: Kate Markowitz (also known as Kate Yanai) is an American singer/songwriter born in Los Angeles, California. She is perhaps best known as a back-up vocalist who has recorded and performed with a number of singers, most notably James Taylor but also Shawn Colvin, Don Henley, Billy Joel, k.d. lang, and many more. Back in the 1990's Kate Markowitz had a platinum-selling single in Germany. Originally, the song was recorded as a Bacardi Rum jingle for the European market. It was so popular that she was asked to transform it into a song about summer love rather than rum. She co-wrote the lyrics and recorded it (with Arnold McCuller and Valerie Carter on backing vocals) under the pseudonym Kate Yanai. Called Summer Dreaming (The Bacardi Song) it went to Number 1 within two weeks in Germany, where it stayed for seven weeks, selling well over 500,000 copies. Recent activities: Markowitz continued to work with a number of artists. In 2003 she produced her first album, called Map of the World, on which she wrote or co-wrote a number of the songs. More information is available at her homepage: http://www.katemarkowitz.com/ Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.