Sandy Scofield

Artist Website

It’s a long way from playing Cajun party music to acapella vocal arrangements of First Nations songs to composing music and sound design for theatre, dance, including Vancouver Opera’s Missing (about the murdered and missing Indigenous Women in Canada) and for the Aboriginal Welcoming Song commission for the 2010 Winter Olympics Opening Ceremonies.

Sandy Scofield has invested a tremendous spirit, navigating and negotiating through a life dedicated to music, sometimes on her own, and sometimes with collaborators. She studied full-time at Vancouver Community College taking their two-year jazz music program. She holds an undergrad degree in music composition acquired at the esteemed Simon Fraser University School for Contemporary Arts, studying under the likes of Canadian new music composer Owen Underhill and electroacoustic music with pioneer Barry Truax.

Sandy Scofield is a multi-award winning composer, musician, musical director, singer. songwriter and performer. She has studied classical, jazz, African, Indonesian gamelan and electro-acoustic music. A Métis from the Saulteaux and Cree Nations, she hails from four generations of fiddlers, singers and musicians. Among her five recordings to date, she has won five Canadian Aboriginal Music Awards, a Canadian Folk Music Award, an Indian Summer Music Award (U.S.A.), a Western Canadian Music Award and received three consecutive Juno nominations.

Over the years, she has mentored innumerable 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 five continents.

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.”