Jordan Sand – Skin

A string player and singer who specializes in extracting unusual sounds out of the bowed double bass, Jordan Sand grew up playing folk and church music, trained classically, and then spent her twenties as a freelance instrumentalist in New York. Sand took joy in serving somebody else’s vision and participating in myriad different types of gigs, ranging from film scoring sessions to appearances on SNL and NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert. But her own creative inner world—and interest in making a solo album—lay dormant.

After an extended absence from music following an isolated move to Trondheim, Norway in 2020, she gradually returned to playing music but with an approach to improvisation and sound that were profoundly altered. The music became more abstract, more impressionistic; predetermined form and lyrics took a backseat to the instinctual flow of the bass itself.

“I started to hear what the voice and the bass have to say to only each other – when they have no one to talk to but each other,” Sand recalls. “I got really interested in how my playing and what I hear on this instrument fuses inward—splitting the string open into a whole environment, rather than using the string as a conduit to perform musical roles I’d inherited from my training.”

These new modes of performance reach their full expression on Sand’s quietly captivating debut, Baby Ghost, a spectral song cycle set within the transition space between life and death. The album is out October 2nd, 2026 via Switzerland label Hallow Ground. The album borrows its title from a bizarre 1972 children’s book in which a baby ghost appears on the doorstep of a museum, heard but not seen by humans.

Today, Sand shares the album’s second single “Skin.” On it, Jordan’s stark voice intertwines with the jagged creaks and swells of the double bass.. It dovetails between beauty and discomfort, united by heart wrenching emotion.

Baby Ghost is a showcase for Sand’s particular style of solo playing, which blends high female vocalization with the bowed harmonics of the double bass. Drawing upon influences as varied as the bass-and-voice minimalism of Nat Baldwin, the radical free improvisation of bassist Joëlle Léandre, the avant-garde chamber jazz of Christian Wallumrød, and genre-bending songwriters like Kate Bush, Arthur Russell, and Joni Mitchell, Sand merges forms with ease and, on this recording, shifts from the semi-composed chamber songwriting of her past work to a more impressionistic, freewheeling modality.

Recorded in single takes—freely improvised, sans overdubs or edits—and conceived as a series of scenes of tableaus, Baby Ghost is haunting and abstract. It is beholden to no preconceived structures but unflinching in its curiosity about the liminal, end-of-life state, that which a Buddhist might call the Bardo, a Catholic might call purgatory, and a doctor the surge of gamma waves in the brain at the flatline. Throughout this piercingly original solo debut, Sand emerges from the shadows with a compositional vision that’s distinct and daring and entirely her own.

She emerges, too, with a conceptual bent that may seem bold and unusual for a debut album—why tackle death right out of the gate?—though Sand considers it natural to ponder one’s death long before it’s imminent. What could be more natural than mortality?

The artist became connected to the subject in recent years, as she grappled with the deaths of several loved ones, some her own age, some further along in life. One left a particularly indelible imprint: a beloved childhood friend, a fellow musician and first love, who had propelled her into a musical career and who suffered a debilitating stroke in his late 20s.

He passed in 2025, after Sand had already tracked the album and chosen its name. As a tribute to this friend, who was born October 8th and died October 18th, she decided to release the album in October. By then, the composer had developed a visceral sensation; that life is limited and that the process of dying has a narrative and a shape, one to reckon with while alive.

Although it is a free-form, improvisatory work, the album travels through 11 discrete tracks, or movements, as it unfolds. In this sense, it reflects Sand’s live performances, which follow a certain arc, or flow, that is sustained in between the improvisations. Each movement reflects a different stop along the journey between the point of death, or departure from the body, and the point of true dissolution as Sand imagines it.

Throughout the pieces that comprise Baby Ghost, Sand’s bass and her voice fuse together in an otherworldly communion until it’s challenging to tell where one ends and the other begins. That flowing state is an abnormal place, Sand reflects, hallucinatory and indescribable. For the musician, it almost feels like a rehearsal of sorts, “getting familiar with the bonds of life loosening.” In its own singular way, Baby Ghost steps up to the edge and reaches a hand out, into the unknown.

This project is supported by Norwegian cultural institutions Fond for Lyd og Bildet and Kulturdirektoret.

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