Silvanus Slaughter

A WINDING ROAD

"I didn't come to composing and performing until mid-life, after careers as a journalist, playwright, screenwriter and film director. It was a logical emergence as I had collected all types of music since I was a kid on a tobacco farm in North Carolina, saving up my dimes for the next pop, hard rock or soundtrack album.  

I traveled a lot and lived in various cities to experience myself in many scenes, and I think all of this conspired to lend my songs a gravity and depth more akin to the artists of a previous era.  Their songs, which I had taken on my odd journey, shaped my own colorful and sometimes dangerous life into a modern-day CinemaScope Western.

I compose in many genres, have been commissioned for some unusual film scores and sound design, but I'm fundamentally a troubadour with a guitar and piano, a singer-songwriter who dances between storytelling and confession.  The art of fusing influences and styles has always fascinated me, as well as the beauty of language.

While I rarely-if-ever use samples, one should not be  surprised to hear a tune that  marries Glam and retro-Western with Electronica, Psychedelic Soul and the vibe of Bernard Herrmann composing for Hitchcock or Scorcese, or Michel Legrand decorating with piano for Jacques Demy.  I'm always looking for the frame that the spirit of my songs demand, which then dictates my arrangements.   

In 2004, when I put filmmaking and novels on the back burner, and first picked up an instrument, I committed myself to bringing forth and finishing two major works, a pop-folk-rock-funk trilogy called "Constellations Compromised", and a seven volume marathon called "Symphonic Jazz-Pop Abstractions."  With the release of "Miracles and Light" in 2017,  I fulfilled this mission for the trilogy. "The Wonder of It All" in 2022 represents a new beginning for my path of storytelling while fusing genres in what modern listeners refer to as 'a cinematic fashion.'   

Other volumes remain unreleased officially, but the prog-psychedelic  "The Magnificent Voyage of Tim Ben" can be purchased digitally  on the In Progress page alongside a jazz-symphonic sampler, "Many Realms".

I wear two hats: one of the cowboy, the other the jazz man. Both men sing and write about the dignity of the individual and his or her quest for love, meaning, and light, and the many roads that search creates.

Thanks for tuning in.