JONATHAN CROSSLEY
MUSIC
'Solace' - coming 2026 - by Jonathan Crossley, David Kollar and Lukas Ligeti, with special guest Arve Henriksen, on 7D Media
This recording documents a live improvised performance at the University of Pretoria on 20 May 2025. Warrington uses feedback from Crossley’s live processing to shape sound through spectral and frequency filtering, spatialisation, and software instruments, all controlled via a custom iPad OSC interface. These processes intersect with Harris’s hyper-processed wind instruments, creating evolving textures and immersive sonic spaces.
Inhale (2022) is an expansive, genre‑defying album by guitarist and composer Jonathan Crossley, featuring original compositions realised with Carlo Mombelli (bass) and Jonno Sweetman (drums). The record weaves post‑rock, jazz, math‑rock, ambient textures, and string arrangements into a singular sonic narrative that shifts effortlessly between intricate rhythmic interplay and richly layered soundscapes. All About Jazz praised the opening track “Bounce” as “a whopper… a merrily schizophrenic assault that sounds almost like The Bad Plus with guitars,” highlighting the trio’s rhythmic agility and textural depth. Texx and the City described the album as “refreshing and relevant in its adaptive, explorative – yet quite deliberate and considered – nature,” noting its ability to lead listeners into unpredictable musical spaces while retaining emotional resonance.
The EP Bree Street follows up on Inhale, introducing new material and featuring Marcus Wyatt (ZA) on flugelhorn and David Kollar (SK) on guitar, further expanding Crossley’s explorations of texture, rhythm, and ensemble interplay.
The early Son0_Morph albums are rooted in fully improvised recording sessions with no conventional compositional material prepared in advance. Instead, pre‑designed systems and sonic materials were used to foster heightened inter‑subjectivity and empathetic interaction within each session — inviting performers to listen, respond, and co‑create in deeply interconnected ways. Texx and the City described the series as mediating “a sonic conversation between human and machine,” where each album becomes a space of dialogue, discovery, and unpredictable interplay.
The first release, 01:Trio, places Crossley, Mombelli, and Sweetman in dialogue with a shared sonic environment, including a hardware‑hacked Suzuki Omnichord and a suite of generative modular synthesis patches. These elements act not as fixed structures, but as catalysts for real‑time collaborative exploration.
02:Duo pairs Crossley with Kathleen Tagg in a performance where Tagg’s piano improvisations drive the music while Crossley responds on guitar and through live electronic processing. Auxiliary microphones embedded in the piano are captured, transformed, and fed back to Tagg, collapsing the boundaries between performer, instrument, and system.
The third release, 03:Duo, sees Crossley join Cameron Harris for an electroacoustically informed duo, further exploring mediated listening and interaction. This work was premiered at the Bowed Electrons Symposium in 2021.
The series concludes with a solo album for classical guitar and electronics, juxtaposing classical repertoire with original works. Here, the project’s core questions of agency, mediation, and responsiveness are reframed within a single performer–system relationship, bringing the improvisational ethos into an intimate, self‑contained context.
Between 2007 and 2014, The Jonathan Crossley Electric Band released two albums—Funk for the Shaolin Monk and Got Funk, Will Travel—and toured extensively across South Africa and Europe, performing in Spain, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Turkey. Rooted in contemporary jazz-funk, the project featured original compositions by Crossley, drawing inspiration from artists such as Medeski Martin & Wood and John Scofield.
Operating as a fluid, international ensemble, the band maintained a rotating line-up that included Ondřej Štveráček and Lukáš Kytner (CZ), Lloyd Martin, Jonno Sweetman, Carlo Mombelli, Roger Hobbs, Paul Gibbings, and Martin Wolfhaart (ZA), among many others—reflecting its transnational and collaborative ethos.
My Friends and I (2003) presents a chamber-jazz recording inspired by Miles Davis’s Birth of the Cool, blending Crossley’s original compositions with works by Carlo Mombelli, Johnny Mbizo Dyani, and others. Featuring striking wind and brass octet arrangements by Mombelli, the album brings together an exceptional line-up of South African jazz luminaries, including Mombelli himself, Marc Duby, Marcus Wyatt, and others.
Dreams of Skilia (2001) marked the debut release by guitarist Jonathan Crossley, issued on the London-based label Future Music Records. The album brings together original compositions and free improvisations, and features a distinguished line-up including South African jazz guitar legend Johnny Fourie, alongside guitarist Reza Khota and pianist Wessel van Rensburg.