Jamie Janover

Jamie Janover is recognized as the most innovative hammered dulcimer player on tour today. His approach to this ancient percussion stringed instrument is revolutionary both technically and stylistically.
Janover's intuitive sense of compositional improvisation and his impeccable timing helped him to win the 2003 National Hammered Dulcimer Championship. Jamie is also an accomplished drummer, percussionist and a veteran of hundreds of guest appearances with artists including Phish, Stanley Jordan, Bela Fleck, Keller Williams, and Umphree1s McGee. His Evolutions CD is solo dulcimer. The Realms CD has many styles and guests including members of Phish, String Cheese and Garaj Mahal. The CD All Strings Considered is hammered dulcimer duets with Michael Masley. Now, Center of Time is the new solo dulcimer CD. Jamie is also a core member of the band Zilla that features Michael Travis (String Cheese Incident), Aaron Holstein (Future Jazz Project) and Steve Vidaic (Citizen Cope). Zilla is remarkable for it1s ability to create spontaneous compositions, especially considering that they are 100% improvisation. You see, these guys are the best of friends and they all believe in the group mind. For them, a good show is all about listening to each other so well that each individual musician1s voice melts into the collective whole to the point where the sky cracks open and the music plays the band! Jamie Janover's new CD is called "All Strings Considered". It is an album of hammered dulcimer dialogues by himself and the innovative hammered dulcimer player, Michael Masley. Michael Masley invented "bowhammers" - his own technique for playing the hammered dulcimer enabling him to pluck, bow and strike the strings simultaneously. Attached to four fingers on each hand, they are similar in shape to traditional hammered dulcimer hammers, except the striking surface is covered with horsehair, like miniature violin bows. They produce bell-like tones when used to strike the strings and violin-like tones when used to bow the strings. Michael also uses thumb-picks, which create the "plucked" string tones. He has recorded with artists as diverse as Ry Cooder, Butch Vig, Tom Waits and Zakir Hussain and is included in "Bakers Biographical Dictionary of Musicians -8th edition". "Jamie Janover takes both the idea of dulcimer as drum and idea of travel through music to their logical extremes." - Carrie Crompton, Dulcimer Player News "(The) instrument is a hammered dulcimer and Janover is it's master." - David Surchuk, The Boulder Weekly "Excellent fusion knows no boundaries. And this sampling of jazz, rock,funk and folk shakes your moneymaker in delightful ways. Gotta give Jamie Janover an "A" with creative engineering on the songs (on this CD)." TJM - Dirty Linnen - The magazine of folk and world music. "An artist who scores heavily in the originality stakes is Jamie Janover. He plays the hammered dulcimer, and boy, does he play it! Realms is his (fifth) album to date, and what a gem it is. Janover has an all-star cast of heavy friends including members of Leftover Salmon, String Cheese Incident, Phish and The Jazz Mandolin Project, as well as Darol Anger, Sally Van Meter, Tony Furtado, (Kai Eckhardt and Howard Levy). But rest assured; it's Janover's incredibly diverse and imaginative playing that occupies the limelight. The music he tackles is far more complex and experimental than of most hammered dulcimer players." Mick Skidmore, Relix Magazine "All musicians play music, but it's rarer the player who's so at home in his craft that he can let the music play him. Jamie Janover is that precious sort of musician who seems to create from the very source of music itself. His liquid, haunting, seemingly effortless lines ring with uncanny familiarity because there are so many traditions flowing through Jamie's dancing hands: Celtic Highland folk forms, modal jazz reflections and odd time mountain echoes, all in the flux of improvisation. Jamie's music always sounds fresh because it's always in the process of discovering itself. It can be followed note-for-note with all the intensity a careful listener can muster, and it's fertile explorations weave shimmering backdrops for deep human occupations, like reflection on What Matters and making love." Steve Silberman, coauthor of Skeleton Key: A Dictionary For Deadheads (Doubleday) "I've never seen anything like it - amazing! A very great musician!" - Trey Anastasio, guitarist, Phish
Genres: 
World Rhythms
Acoustic