The Record Tent

Sandy Scofield is a multi-award winning composer, musician and singer. She has studied classical, jazz and electro-acoustic music. A Métis from the Saulteaux and Cree Nations, she hails from four generations of fiddlers, singers and musicians.

Among her four recordings to date, she has won four Canadian Aboriginal Music Awards, received three consecutive Juno nominations and took home the 2003 Western Canadian Music Award for Ketwam, featuring songs by Sandy, Lisa Sazama and Shakti Hayes.

Over the years, she has mentored innumerable young First Nations singers and songwriters in the way of rudimentary music theory, vocal techniques, songwriting craft and music-industry protocol. She has toured to festivals on four continents, and composed for dance, film and theatre.

Her passion for electro-acoustic music and sound design is not new for Scofield, who has been playing with sounds for a long time. In a feature in SOCAN’s Words & Music magazine in 2001, Alexander Varty talked to her about using noisemakers or toys, such as the toy piano on “Get High”, each time she embarked on a recording project.

She has taken the tool box that she has enhanced as a touring musician, through her composition work at SFU, and from the young musicians she mentors and applied them to her sense of melody, harmony and rhythm, resulting in what writer Phil Paine described as “a high-level synthesis of jazz, blues, rock and pop” with First Nations traditions. “Her music is original, refined and intelligent.”

Genre

First Nations

Country

Canada

Website

www.sandyscofield.com