Jonathan Mayer

Sitar player and composer Jonathan Mayer has a long family connection with India. His father, John Mayer, also a composer, who played western classical violin, was born in Kolkata. Jonathan has traced his paternal family’s presence in India almost from the East India Company's founding. He is a direct descendant of Christopher Mayer, a Persian-to-Bengali language translator in the 1780s; so one could say that Jonathan’s ancestors represent the exchange that has taken place over the last three hundred years between India and the UK. 

At his home in London (his father moved to the UK in 1952 to study at the Royal Academy of Music), music was the nine-to-five, ‘not a relaxation or a shared activity to be enjoyed after a day’s work, because it was the work’, he recalls. Both parents were full-time musicians – his mother studied piano and played violin with several orchestras, and his father was a first violinist with The London Philharmonic, amongst others. Jonathan recalls his father being preoccupied with writing scores. Incidentally, John Mayer wrote music for Ram Gopal, who teased the ‘Indianness’ out of John, reminding him of his Anglo-Indian origins, so much so that John Mayer always wore a kurta over his trousers after encountering Gopal. Although John Mayer’s Indo-Jazz Fusions is one of his best-known albums, he actually wanted to be known for his ‘symphonic work’. Jonathan no doubt picked up his father’s love for composition from the early years of observing his father’s absorption in the process. 

He began playing music at the age of five, learning the violin from his grandfather, Albert Hepton, piano from James Methuen-Campbell, and composition from his father. At sixteen, he took up sitar under Western sitarist Clem Alford, a disciple of the Senia Gharana. In 1993, he earned his B.Mus. (Hons) from Birmingham Conservatoire, where he studied composition with Andrew Downes and sitar performance. He then refined his technique in the Imdadkhani gharana with Ustad Wajahat Khan and the Senia veen-kar style under Pandit Subroto Roy Chowdhury. Today, he continues advanced training in the Lucknow-Shahjahanpur gharana with Ustad Irfan Muhammad Khan and studies taal talim with Ustad Yousuf Ali Khan. 

Alongside his apprenticeship in sitar, Jonathan studied composition at Birmingham Conservatoire under Andrew Downess and earned a Bachelor of Music (Honours). The facility to read and write music, together with his knowledge and experience of the Western and Indian musical heritages, puts Jonathan in a unique position to compose and score. 

Fluent in Western notation, Jonathan has crossed genres, from Indian classical to jazz, electronic, and film music, performing with artists such as Anup Jalota, Pandit Debasis Chakroborty, Ustad Akram Khan, Kathryn Tickell, Kuljit Bhamra, the London Philharmonic, and the BBC Concert Orchestra, Kala Festival, among others. As a composer, he has written for jazz ensembles, dance productions, and symphony orchestras; his works have been commissioned by the LPO, Pilsen Philharmonic, and his father’s Indo-Jazz Fusions. With ZerOclassiKal, he led three Arts Council–backed projects, Perseverance, Altered Boundaries, and Raga Music, and arranged Borodin’s Nocturne for sitar, sarod, cello, and tabla for the Amina Khayyam Dance Company. 

Jonathan can be described as having a ‘portfolio career’ – he is a session musician, a composer who has his piece played by some of the best orchestras in the world, a concert artist, a mentor, but equally, he will do weddings (three on the day I ran into him at a niece’s wedding!). He is also the co-director of First Hand Records, which produces classical music and albums of his father, a guru amongst others. The main thing is that Jonathan has managed to live as a full-time musician, supporting a family and pursuing his calling. One cannot think of a better way to live, work and contribute to society.