"She bows it, she plucks it, she puts peanut butter on the bow. This is a challenging album of fiddle instrumentals, spanning classical to traditional to demented."

Jim Foley, Musical Director, Radio KXCI fm, Tucson, AZ
on Hollis Taylor's Unsquare Dances

In 1986 the Oregon Arts Commission sponsored her "Symphony for String Band." Her playing is featured in two Gus Van Sant films, "My Own Private Idaho" and "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues." Her CD "Twisted Fiddle" received international acclaim and airplay for its jazz-influenced arrangements of country classics and a "1991 Folk Album of the Year" nomination by the National Association of Independent Record Distributors. She tours regularly as soloist with Grammy/Emmy award-winner Mason Williams.

The American Center in Paris awarded her a two-year residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts for 1993-94. While based in Paris, Taylor performed and recorded jazz and folk music throughout Europe and completed her fourth book of fiddle arrangements, Tricks From the Devil's Box. She regularly contributes in-depth articles, interviews, and music criticism to Strings and Fiddler magazines. She was a featured composer/performer/lecturer at Scripps College's 1995 Inaugural Symposium on Women in Music and is a member of the American String Teacher Alternative String Conference advisory committee.

As a composer, Taylor also blurs the lines of classical, jazz, and folk. European folk music in compound meter inspired Unsquare Dances, composed in Budapest, Hungary in 1995. Two works make up the CD Frames and Boxes: Trail Mix for Five Scordatura Violins (2000 First Prize winner, National League of American PEN Women) and Box Set for Solo Violin, a re-take of the J. S. Bach Solo Violin Partita in B minor reflecting Afro-Cuban, bebop, blues, and funk sensibilities, the product of a 1997 artist's residency at Altos de Chavon in the Dominican Republic awarded by Parsons School of Design in New York City. In 2000, she received grants from the American Composers Forum, Meet the Composer, and the Portland Baroque Orchestra to compose Groove Theory, a violin concerto for British Baroque violinist Monica Huggett.

Taylor's most recent works include commissions from the Elements Quartet of New York City for two string quartets (the second featuring baritone Jubilant Sykes) and from ABC Radio/Sydney for a major radiophonic piece for string quartet, vocalist, actress, and distressed piano on the life of anthropologist Olive Pink. Recent performances include an international string festival in Berlin, the Jazz Initiative in Frankfurt, Mains d'Oeuvres in Paris, jazz clubs in France, the Perth New Music Festival, and Violins in the Outback, plus "Great Fences of Australia" sound and video installation/performances in collaboration with Jon Rose at the Melbourne Festival, the Asia/Pacific Festival in Madrid and Barcelona, Spain, the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art in Porto, Portugal, the Sydney Festival, the Darwin Festival, and the Brussels Musical Instrument Museum, Belgium.

In 2004, she was violin soloist in the world premiere of “Charlie's Whiskers” by Jon Rose, a tribute to Charles Ives, commissioned by Tone Roads Festival for the Bratislava Chamber Soloists, Slovakia. Her Scordatura Project debuted at the Brussels Musical Instrument Museum, Belgium, in May 2005 and was featured at the Melbourne Festival in October 2005.