Who is Jumpin Jon?

Hi, I'm Jumpin Jon. My given name is Jonathan Neher. Jumpin Jon is my stage name. It was given to me by fellow "Roadside Attraction" band members in Santa Cruz, CA circa 1975 because of my habit of jumping between instruments (pedal-steel guitar, dobro, mandolin, various saxophones, or 6-string guitar) in the middle of tunes.

From 1974-1984 I was a full-time musician playing country, blues, rock, and jazz in local Santa Cruz and San Francisco Bay Area bands and with nationally-known artists such as Elvin Bishop and Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown. I got sick of living on the road in motels and not really having a home and quit Elvin's band right before a tour of eastern steel towns in the dead of winter.

In 1984, I started working at an Apple-oriented computer publication called "A+ Magazine." This led to a technical writing job at HP where I learned Unix system administration and got into software engineering. I moved to Sun Microsystems as a software engineer in 1986 and finally saved enough money to drop out of full-time computer work and moved to an A-frame on 11 beautiful acres in Fall Creek (east of Eugene, OR) in early 1991.

Currently I play with various regional bands in Oregon including The Swingin' Marmalukeys, Rusty Still, and The Left Coast Sax Quartet. In addition, lately folks have been sending me their partially finished tracks on CD and I have been adding dobro (resonator guitar), pedal-steel, mandolin, and saxophone parts in my own studio and sending them back to them. This is a lot of fun.

In addition to music, I love windsurfing, biking, skiing, landsailing, giant croquet, hiking, camping, reading, my wife Hilary and my little doggie, Emmy.

 

(c) 1995 Jonathan Neher

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