Musical artist
Eric Gorfain is an American violinist and founder of The Section Quartet, a string quartet that plays cover versions of rock songs. He is married to singer-songwriter Sam Phillips, with whom he has toured and recorded.[1]
Gorfain studied music at UCLA and won a scholarship to spend a semester at the Sakuyo Junior College of Music in Japan. He worked as a studio violinist and became fluent in Japanese.[2] Beginning in 1991, he toured and recorded with musicians in Japan, then returned to Los Angeles three years later. In 1995, he was hired to work on the reunion tour of Robert Plant and Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin. He followed the tour to Japan where his knowledge of Japanese allowed him to act as translator.[3]
The Section Quartet
Soon after the Robert Plant and Jimmy Page tour, he formed the Section Quartet, which calls itself "a rock band with strings". Gorfain said the quartet was inspired by his time with Plant and Page and by an ambition to play lead guitar in a rock band. He wrote an arrangement for the song "Dazed and Confused" by Led Zeppelin and recorded it on the album No Electricity Required (2004). The album includes cover versions of songs by the rock bands Coldplay, Kiss, Iron Maiden, and Queens of the Stone Age.[4]
The quartet's members are violinists Eric Gorfain and Daphne Chen, cellist Richard Dodd, and violist Leah Katz. They are classical musicians who also work on soundtracks and pop music albums, such as Stripped (RCA, 2002) by Christina Aguilera. The quartet's performance on the song "Beautiful" from Aguilera's album caught the attention of the songwriter, Linda Perry, and she produced their album Fuzzbox (2007) for Decca Records.[5]
Gorfain has written string arrangements for Sam Phillips, Ryan Adams, A Perfect Circle, Band of Horses, Neil Diamond, Sean Lennon, and Cassandra Wilson, and has worked as an arranger and orchestrator with producers Jon Brion, Glyn Johns, and Jacknife Lee.[6]
