Jeff Johnson

b. 12 Dec 1954, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA. At age nine Johnson was presented with an classical guitar and quickly started teaching himself to try out. His early affects included the Beatles, Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix as well as the Moving Stones. Afterwards, he began hearing jazz guitarists, specifically Wes Montgomery, and to jazz players on various other instruments, included in this John Coltrane and Mls Davis. He shifted from acoustic to guitar but then turned to electrical bass guitar, ultimately completing the changeover to acoustic bass. Located in the Twin Metropolitan areas of Minneapolis and St. Paul, when he was 17 he started playing a normal nightly gig within a music group led by saxophonist Irv Williams. This work lasted for a lot more than two years and, at age 20, Philly Joe Jones employed him. This engagement got him to Philadelphia and NY and founded his status. Thereafter, he relocated around America, spending some rigorous study period playing in Oklahoma Town in the first 80s before ultimately settling in Seattle in 1990. In those intervening years he used numerous artists, included in this Chet Baker, Gary Bartz, JoAnne Brackeen, Eddie Daniels, Barney Kessell, Tag Murphy, Julian Priester, Claudio Roditi, Charlie Rouse, Bud Shank and Lew Tabackin. He also used Hal Galper, with whom he produced six CDs, and Jessica Williams, showing up also on six of her extremely praised albums. The Galper engagement is usually a different one which, like this with Jones, became important upon his advancement and his profession. A thoughtful and extremely supportive participant, Johnson is respectable by his peers and in the first years of the brand new hundred years was starting to attract the eye from the wider jazz target audience for whom he previously been too much time a relatively private sideman.