Simon Chandler

One music promoter very generously described my music as “sexy, soothing, South American sounds”, which amused everyone who knows me (and especially my wife), although it is at least an accurate description (apart from the "sexy" bit, obviously) of the sophisticated, elegant style, by which my music is most heavily influenced: Brazilian bossa nova. That said, this has been a relatively recent influence, and there are many other (predominantly British left-field pop, but also American jazz) elements, which had already become an inextricable part of my musical development before I was seduced by bossa nova. In short, it would be fair to say that I compose, play and sing jazz-inflected acoustic songs with a Brazilian flavour and a dark but mellow edge. For those, who are unfamiliar with bossa nova, here is a brief potted history. Unlike jazz, it sways (rather than swinging) and, although jazz is an important spice in the bossa melting pot, its staple ingredient (samba) comes from Africa and arrived in Brazil with the slaves via the Bahian port of Salvador, just as the essence of jazz arrived in North America with other African slaves via the American port of New Orleans. From Bahia (in the north east of Brazil), samba travelled south in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with the migrant, freed slaves and their descendants, principally to Rio de Janeiro, where it mixed with Portuguese and other European musical styles (notably including the classical music of the French Impressionist composers, such as Satie, Debussy and Ravel), and metamorphosed into choro, before developing into samba canção and (eventually) bossa nova. Like bossa nova, my musical style is intentionally sparse and uses only nylon-string guitar, voice and (for occasional extra spice) light percussion, such as conga, guiro, triangle, claves, cabasa and shaker, although I have recorded one of my songs ('The Spaces') with a full jazz ensemble and the fabulous Kate Peters on vocals as a separate venture. Again, as in bossa nova, my vocal style is deliberately restrained and understated, and my music paints from a palette of the same extended jazz chords, and tends towards the soothing, the reflective and the melancholy. However, although many of my songs have classic bossa nova or other straight-eights Latin ballroom rhythms, I like occasionally to explore a range of different rhythms and time signatures. Further, whilst (also in common with bossa nova) my music aims to create a broadly coastal ambience, it is redolent of an entirely different kind of coastline, where the beachgoers are not bronzed, but wear cagoules instead! So it is that the beach, which you can see in the background, is not in Brazil, but rather on the west coast of the Scottish Highlands, evoking the subtly different, moodier and darker hues of the British Isles, which are such an inexorable part of my life (and, I hope, of my sound). I edited my profile with Thomas Myspace Editor V4.4 (www.strikefile.com/myspace)'Made By Machines' (with Nos Montes), recorded live at Acoustic Eclectic, The Q Inn, Stalybridge, on 28 November 2007'The Old Hotel', recorded live at the Winelight Club @ Automatic, Bury, on 11 March 2008 (a tribute to my father, who died on 24 February 2004)