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. I then worked at the University of Oregon Computing Center from 1992 - 2005 until I was forceably retired by an inner-ear condition called hydrops, which gives me vertigo attacks, affects my balance, and cuts my energy level about in half. This is because I have no balance from my inner ears anymore and my feet, musculature, and eyes are doing all that work.
Currently, when time and energy allow, I play for fun with various local bands in Oregon including The Swingin Marmalukeys, Rusty Still, The Traceys, and The Left Coast Saxophone Quartet as well as being featured regularly on the "Front Porch Review" radio show on KLCC FM 89.7 in Eugene. Lately folks have been sending me their partially finished-tracks on CD and I have been adding dobro (resonator guitar), pedal-steel, mandolin, or saxophone parts in my own studio and sending them back to them. This is a lot of fun.
(c) 1995 Jonathan Neher