Peter Janson

Guitarist Peter Janson lives in Boston Massachusetts and has been forging his own path as an independent solo guitarist since 1999. Building what he considers a meaningful life, Peter’s music events are an important part of that - he performs concerts, tours regularly, founded his own Eastern Woods Music label, gives guitar workshops, and he directs jazz ensembles and private guitar lessons at the University of Massachusetts Boston. There aren’t many jazz guitarists today focusing exclusively on solo guitar, but for Janson playing solo jazz guitar is both his passion and love - he is inspired by the solo guitar works of players like Pat Metheny, Kurt Rosenwinkel, and Wolfgang Muthspiel, as well as jazz legends such as Joe Pass, Earl Klugh, and Jim Hall. Now growing in international recognition, Peter signed worldwide sub-publishing deals with STOMP Music Korea and with UK based SUPREME SONGS Limited in October 2022.

Growing up in Cambridge Massachusetts, Peter listened to his father, an accomplished amateur guitarist, play solo guitar every day. Given his first guitar at the age of seven, Peter started doing pop gigs at age 15. For the last twenty-five years he has performed extensively throughout North America; most notably at Carnegie Hall and the Montreal Jazz Festival. His music has been placed in video games, commercials and news documentaries, charted on Billboard for 11 weeks in top 10 (as a session guitarist) and has a growing base of fans from 137 countries. His latest recording, Getting To Here, is in rotation on over 75 radio stations globally, as well as on streaming formats.

“I see no difference between making music and the everyday aspects of life. Performing music, reading a novel or poetry while sipping a cup of coffee, teaching a student, they are all related. But there is a need for me to work as a solo guitar player - exploring styles and improvising. It gives me joy and helps me understand life in a way nothing else does. After many years jazz form, language, and sensibility has returned to become the place I can make music. I didn’t want too formal a structure to work on, but rather an improvisational base. I embrace traditional elements, acoustic nylon-string sounds, and form, and merge them with sound enhancing tools and chance. Sometimes my improvisations are tiny melodic or harmonic fragments of the big picture of the main song, or roll over repeating brief moments derived from the larger picture. Sometimes the song itself is drastically changed or incorporates spoken poetry, or a motif from one song may become the basis of an entirely new song.”