John Garner.
John Garner is a musician, educator, and PhD candidate based in Gateshead. A tireless experimenter, well-versed in multiple traditions, John has forged a radically unique voice as a violinist, combining a quicksilver and innovative technique with a freewheeling improvisational aesthetic. He is a senior lecturer in jazz at Leeds Conservatoire and an artist with MishMash Productions’ pioneering Musicians-in-Residence programme. John’s creative practice research, as a Newcastle University Clara Whittaker scholar, considers the ethics of musical practice as viewed through the lens of Buddhist teachings and philosophy; how various aspects of that practice, from the microscopic to the macroscopic, are transformed thereby; and how these learnings are enacted through our ways of being as musicians in community and beyond. Since 2021, John has been studying the shakuhachi with Grandmaster Cornelius Shinzen Boots of the Black Earth Shakuhachi School.