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Jon gomm
Jon first laid his hands on a guitar at the age of two (actually it was a ukulele, as his parents couldn't find a guitar small enough!) He started taking classical guitar lessons, wrote his first song at the age of six, and at twelve he was accompanying his father, a music critic, to blues gigs in his hometown of Blackpool. Jon immediately got hold of an electric guitar and began emulating Clapton and Hendrix. This led in turn to teenage years spent practising the skills of the rock guitar hero - playing very fast and very loud!
On leaving school Jon turned down a place at Oxford studying English to attend The Guitar Institute in London. While there he paid his way through college playing jazz in café-bars, recording as a session guitarist, and playing Country & Western in working mens clubs for line-dancers! Eventually he heard the call of the north and moved to Leeds, where he is now based, to study on the Jazz degree course at the music college there.
He decided to try his hand at performing solo, and discovered all kinds of new sounds could be made with an acoustic guitar - hitting the surface of it to make snare drum, bass drum and bongo sounds, re-tuning the strings to get bass sounds, and teasing high harmonics from the guitar for synthesizer-like effects.
He worked all these techniques into his own songs, and put his years of singing blues into use. He began to get high-profile gigs supporting some of the most-respected names on the acoustic circuit such as Tommy Emmanuel (Australia), Nick Harper and Bob Brozman (U.S.) He has performed at many festivals including The Italian National Guitar Festival and The London Guitar Show at Wembley.
Jon's debut album Hypertension - totally self-produced and self-released - has sold 4,500 copies at gigs and from his website alone. His mailing list is at 6,534 at the time of writing, and is increasing exponentially. He performed over 100 shows in 2004, and nearly twice that in 2005. |
