Praised as “important to the future of music as an advanced art form,” Simone Baron is an Italian-American Jewish pianist, accordionist, composer, and instigator of infectious energy. Equally at home with notated and improvised music, she has performed throughout Europe, Israel, and North America at venues ranging from Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center and the Hirshhorn Museum to jazz clubs, Berlin highway medians and Alpine mountaintops. After earning degrees in piano and conducting at the Oberlin Conservatory and Tel Aviv University, she fell in love with the accordion. Its vibrant sounds and pulsing bellows breathed new life into her musical world, opening the door to multidisciplinary collaborations with dancers, puppeteers, and visual artists. In 2016 she founded Arco Belo, a unique chamber jazz ensemble that she composes, arranges for and leads. A fierce advocate for new music, Simone is frequently sought after as both a composer and performer by many prestigious ensembles in the US, Canada and Brazil. Recently an artist in residence at the Banff Centre, Strathmore, and the Washington Jewish Music Festival, Simone’s work focuses on experimenting and reimagining a sound at the junction of the familiar and the avant-garde.
