Biography
Nana Simopoulos, a native of Baltimore, began her musical journey at the tender age of five with piano lessons. Discontented with that instrument, she informed her parents of her intention to switch to guitar and commenced studies in classical guitar. Shortly afterward she relocated to Greece, where exposure to current bands and artists prompted her to perform with rock and folk ensembles while maintaining her classical technique. At nineteen she returned to the United States for an intensive immersion in jazz; upon first encountering the genre she enrolled at a guitar school and absorbed influences from Eddie Van Halen and Pat Metheney. By 1983 her growing assurance in songwriting led her to commit those skills to tape, resulting in the album Pandora’s Blues, a project shared with several fellow musicians. She then concentrated on developing her improvisational abilities, achieving notable fluency by the recording of 1986’s Winds and Air. Still Waters appeared a few years later, completing her sequence of 1980s jazz outings with another fully improvisational statement. Shifting toward avant-garde compositional methods, the distinctive Gaia’s Dream steered her work in the direction of sound paintings and farther from the conventional jazz idiom she had previously explored. From that point onward she has issued multiple albums of a highly experimental character that showcase both her guitar prowess and her role as an innovator within modern jazz.
Albums
