About
British / South African guitarist, improviser and composer Jonathan Crossley plays in the ephemeral boundaries between styles and genres, and was described as ‘the poster boy for modern guitar’ by Guitar Moderne. Trained first as a classical guitarist, then later in jazz, free improvisation, and research into hyper-instruments, his musical outputs are each carefully curated but stylistically diverse. He serves as lecturer in music technology at the University of Liverpool where he teaches free improvisation with Ableton and ‘From Hardware-hacking to Hyper-instruments’.
The 2001 classical crossover debut album Dreams of Skilia on FMR records was all acoustic, followed in 2015 by the chamber jazz album My Friends And I. In 2007 Funk for The Shaolin Monk moved into jazz rock territories with extensive touring of this and 2009’s follow up, Got Funk Will Travel with Czech saxophonist Ondřej Štveráček. In 2010 research into improvisatory practices and technological integration led to the Cyber Guitar project and a slew of recorded works: 2011’s What If The Machines Spoke Back To You, 2017’s The Settlement and 2018’s Blipz all push the boundaries of creative practice using hyper-instruments and conceiving of technology as compositional technique. In 2019 Deep Spacer synthesised strains of popular, electronic, classical and improvisatory musics into one project with a self-titled EP followed shortly by Deep Spacer’s 433 Eros in 2020 - sometimes post-rock, sometimes digital soundscapes intertwined with rock ballades and soundscapes.
2021 produced four albums under the son0_morph moniker: The piano duet album, son0_morph 02 with Katheleen Tagg, an electroacoustic work, son0_morph 03 with Cameron Harris, a solo classical crossover work son0_morph 04 harkening back to 2000’s Dreams Of Skilia and son0_moprh 01 with bassist Carlo Mombelli and drummer Jonno Sweetman.
In 2022 he released ‘Inhale’, again with Carlo Mombelli and Jonno Sweetman. Post-rock and math rock tracks such as ‘Bounce’, ‘Inhale’ and ‘In The Spring’ peppered with classical string quartet miniatures and angular compositions such as ‘First / Second Operations’ and ‘There’s No Invasion’. All About Jazz wrote:
‘Opening track 'Bounce' is a whopper, worthy of the price of admission itself. A merrily schizophrenic assault that sounds almost like The Bad Plus with guitars it works with what sounds like quantum rhythms gleefully toyed with by the here superlative Sweetman, who chews up the scenery.’
The 2022 Liverpool premiere was followed by performances in Johannesburg in January 2023 for Concerts SA and the International Society for Contemporary Music festival in late 2023 in Johannesburg and Cape Town. At this festival his latest EP, ‘Bree Street’ was released, featuring the trio of Crossley, Mombelli and Sweetman joined by trumpeter Marcus Wyatt and Slovak guitarist David Kollar.
In 2025 four research focussed albums are planned with Lukas Ligeti, David Kollar, Nick Branton, Miles Warrington (University of Pretoria), and a new trio recording with Carlo Mombelli (University of the Witwatersrand) and Jonno Sweetman. Other research areas include currently leading a multi-national investigation into traditional African instruments and Christian congregational music, conducting surveys in the UK, South Africa and the USA. He is leading a research group with Dr Jenn Kirby and Dr Paul Turowski exploring the use of bespoke musical interfaces in secondary music education.