Sandy Bashaw

Sandy Bashaw is a multi-instrumentalist composer. Bashaw started her professional musical career at the age of 18, recording an album for Vanguard Records in New York City. (The Vanguard album, entitled "Third & Main" was re-released on CD in January 2007 by Ace Records in England. A few years later she recorded for Atlantic Records in Los Angeles, CA, with Executive Producer Don Everly. With acoustic guitar as her main instrument, she has developed a driving, percussive guitar technique as well as a distinctive finger style. She has had the privilege of sharing the stage with artists such as: Odetta, Ramblin' Jack Elliot, Eric Anderson, Maria Muldaur, John Renbourne, Tom Paxton, Dougie MacLean, Riders in the Sky, Solas, and Peggy Seeger & Ewan MacColl. During the late 1970s she played piano and sang with the legendary country-western/western swing band, the Last Mile Ramblers in New Mexico and Colorado. Sandy is a published writer and BMI member, composing songs as well as instrumental music. She also makes original, experimental, and improvisational music (which is performed with Michael Bashaw's Sound Sculpture Concert ensemble) playing guitar, Giant Kalimbas, Monzithor, percussion, melodica and other exotic instruments.

With her husband/collaborator Michael Bashaw, she created and recorded an improvised musical work, China Memory for Michael Lyons, former vice president of the Royal Society of British Sculptors. In spring, 1998, the music was played as part of Lyons' twenty-year retrospective at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in Wakefield, England.

Bashaw hosted a reception for and created a performance with principal members of the Sarajevo Circle theater company at the first anniversary of the signing of the Dayton Peace Accords in Dayton, Ohio, November 1996. Held in Bashaw's studio loft and attended by international heads of state, diplomats, peace keeping groups and international press, this powerful, emotional performance moved many in the audience to tears. Then, in June 1999, Michael and Sandy Bashaw visited the city of Sarajevo, Bosnia i Herzegovina with the Sister Cities delegation from Dayton, Ohio. While in Bosnia, they played for children in a clinic, and for local and national dignitaries at a reception given by U.S. Ambassador Kauzlarich. In November 1999, they performed with the Sarajevo Philharmonic during the Dayton Peace Accords Anniversary celebration in Dayton. They went back in the Balkans, where they performed an original composition with the Sarajevo Philharmonic Orchestra at the Bosnian National Theatre in Oct. 2004, as well as a concert in Split, Croatia. In November, 2005 they once again helped celebrate, this time the 10th anniversary of the signing of the Dayton Peace Accords, at the Schuster Center in Dayton, Ohio.

Sandy is a native Daytonian, with long-time family ties to Dayton. Her great grandfather, and great-great grandfather (Frank Joyce and Jacob Joyce, respectively) were inventors who founded the Joyce-Cridland Company (later, Joyce-Dayton). Her grandfather, Casten Roepken was an early aviator who built his own airplanes in the mid-1920s. Sandy and Michael recently released a soundtrack CD entitled "Music from the documentary Dayton Codebreakers."