Graham Campbell
Biography Graham Campbell
Graham Campbell
is a composer, arranger, guitarist, and producer. He creates colourful and melodic chamber music grounded in jazz, folk, and cinematic music. As a guitarist, he performs an eclectic mix of styles including jazz, Brazilian samba and choro, psychedelic rock, klezmer, reggae, and folk. He is based in Toronto, Canada, a culturally diverse city that has nurtured his love and curiosity for music of all kinds.
His music is frequently featured at many major festivals across Canada and Europe, including the Ottawa Chamber Fest, The Festival of the Sound, and the Tiberius International Chamber Festival. From 2014 to 2019 he helped create and present over 20 risk-taking and adventurous concerts as an artistic producer with Spectrum Music, a Toronto-based composers collective. He collaborates often with his father, world renowned clarinetist James Campbell, including the full-length album As You Near Me, which features Graham as a composer, arranger, guitarist, and producer. His film scoring credits include the post-apocalyptic sci-fi "My Girl, Skelly", which was an official selection at the Markham International Film Festival and a finalist at the Vancouver Independent Film Festival, and the animated short "Predestination" for which his orchestral score won Best Original Score at the Anatolia Film Festival in Istanbul.
Graham has performed with some of Canada's best musicians including violin virtuoso Mark Fewer, jazz singer and pianist Laila Biali, jazz icon Gene DiNovi, the award-winning Afiara String Quartet, and Brazilian/Canadian singer and percussionist Aline Morales. He is a member of psychedelic Brazilian rock band Os Tropies, reggae band The Human Rights, Brazilian choro trio Manjericão, and avant-klezmer group Queen Kong. In 2016, his indie band Words Around the Waist released House, a full-length album produced by Jean Martin and featuring many of Graham's songs.
As an arranger, Graham is frequently commissioned by artists such as Brazilian/Canadian singer-songwriter Bruno Capinan, fiddler and step dancer Dan Stacey, and musical theatre star Robert Pilon.
A passionate music educator, Graham has spent over 10 years working with Strings Across the Sky, a program that teaches traditional fiddling to indigenous children. He has shared the gift of music in dozens of public schools around Ontario, and also teaches privately. Although an experienced teacher, he considers himself a student for life and sees every project as an opportunity for personal and artistic growth.
