Jolyon Jackson

Jolyon Jackson was an Irish/Anglo-Irish musician and composer. Born in Malaya in 1948 where his father was deputy commissioner of the police (and received the CBE), he was educated in Salisbury Cathedral School and Bradfield College Reading. He studied at Trinity College, Dublin in the late 1960s, and integrated himself into the musical life of Dublin, first with the group "Jazz Therapy", and later with "Supply, Demand and Curve." He played 'cello, keyboards including organ, piano and synthesizer, and recorder. Recordings on which he featured include "Supply Demand and Curve" (Mulligan 1976), "Camouflage" by Sonny Condell (Mulligan 1977), "Taylormaid" by Rosemary Taylor (Id 1977), and the seminal "Hidden Ground" with Fiddle-player Paddy Glackin (Tara 1980) on which he plays and arranges all the music and instruments which "frame" the solo fiddle. He also appears on albums by the Chieftains, Midnight Well, Terry and Gay Woods, and Roger Doyle's Operating Theatre. Compositions for Television include the Radio Telefis Eireann series "Hands" and "Visions of Transport" and "To the waters and the wild". Jackson also involved himself in music for the theatre, most notably in the music for the Yeats trilogy based on the Saga of Cuchulain, performed in the Noh style and directed by Hideo Kanze at the Abbey Theatre, and later in music to accompany the exercises of the Gurdjieff Movement. Jolyon Jackson died of Hodgkin's disease on 18 December 1985.