Cowboy bebop and gypsy crawl. A modern vintage troubadour, playing vintage jazz mixed with funky folk. Or folky funk. Django meets Dylan, both Dylans.

 

Jon picked up the guitar first at age 10, with a promise to his dad that he would learn the magical first chord of the Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night.”  He did learn it and by ear. A self taught musician for the first 6 years, Jon dug into every genre, lifting sounds from records and taking theory books out from the library and hand copying at home. Trying to get up to speed with “Paranoid” by Black Sabbath and “Etude in A” by Matteo Carcassi at the same time. By the time he was a mid-teen, he had tired of conforming to non-conformity. He went to Dead shows with a mohawk and punks shows in a tie-dye. He transformed from goth-skate-punk to hot jazz hep cat in a few short years.

 

Jon attended UMASS-Amherst and attained a Bachelor of Music degree-Jazz. Immediately after graduating he headed to Austin to learn the Texas shuffle. Wanderlust soon took over and he crisscrossed the country for the next two years, playing, writing, and learning, soaking up everything he could from every musician he met. “Knicking” it, as the Beatles called it. Landing finally in San Diego, after a brief hiccup in LA, Jon has managed to scrape out a living as a musician, playing everything from Avant-garde jazz to Vampire rock. Sharing the stage with acts as diverse as the Roots and Social Distortion, Gene Love Jezebel and Yusef Lateef. Along the way, he finagled a Master of Music Degree at SDSU.

 

A gifted writer and lyricist, Jon combines his love for words with his do-not-go-gently-into-that-goodnight guitar playing. Having recorded a large catalogue of songs over the past two years, he is beginning to release them in bits and pieces. The first volley being the Dear Old World EP : A Love Letter To Things As They Never Were. Think Django meets Dylan. Both Dylans.
Performing multiple times a week under different monikers, Jon entertains, amazes, and inspires music and word lovers from all over the world. Mixing melodic cocktails of light and dark, joy and sorrow, for saints and sinners alike.