ABOUT

Jordan Sand is a bassist, vocalist, improviser and composer working between song and experimental sound. Fusing wordless voice with the resonances of bowed double bass, she creates overtone-rich music that moves between fragile melody and raw noise. Her solo sets have been described as “impressive” (New York Times) and “Joni Mitchell meets Ligeti” (Omaha Under the Radar).

Based in New York City for many years, Sand worked widely as a bassist across the interlocking scenes of folk, pop, classical, and contemporary music. She has played Carnegie Hall, NPR’s Tiny Desk, Saturday Night Live, and the Apollo Theater, and toured extensively both as a freelancer, often focused on new music, free jazz, and klezmer, and as a solo artist, drawing from her own evolving repertoire for voice and bass.

In performance, Sand moves fluidly between polyphonic composition and free improvisation. Her solo world is both intimate and expansive, populating the architecture of song with radical sound palettes: layers of string noise, crooked melodies, siren-like singing, and at times harrowing counterpoint between voice and the bowed textures of her instrument. She has appeared as a soloist at experimental and underground venues in Europe and North America since 2012. Since 2020, her sound design and composition has also been featured in collaborations with visual artists, filmmakers, researchers, and poets. Her music and research has been supported by the Norwegian Arts Council, the Harriet Hale Woolley Foundation, Trondheim Kommune, and Norsk Komponist Foreningen.

Originally from the U.S., Sand has lived in four countries, driven twice cross-continent in July, and plays on a Hungarian double bass of otherwise unknown origin. She holds a PhD from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, and is currently based in Trondheim, Norway.