John Schott, guitarist and composer, studied at Cornish College in Seattle with Jerry Granelli, Gary Peacock, Julian Priester, Janice Giteck, and Bun-Ching Lam. Since moving to the Bay Area in 1988, he has formed numerous long-term collaborative partnerships with musicians, writers, choreographers and film makers, resulting in a body of works that cuts across musical genres. As a guitarist his long term associations include: The Baguette Quartette, playing vintage Parisian valse-musette; The Paul Dresher Ensemble, premiering Classical works by Steve Mackey, Sebastian Currier and Fred Frith; the pioneering acid-jazz band T.J. Kirk, nominated for a Grammy for their second Warner Bros release If Four Was One; the clarinetist Ben Goldberg, with whom Schott made several acclaimed CDs; the author Jonathan Lethem, who has performed with Schott as 1001 Noirs; and the poet Jake Marmer, with whom he released the CD Purple Tentacles Of Desire.
For the past fifteen years Schott’s primary vehicle for his own compositions has been his group Actual Trio. Their first disc was on John Zorn’s Tzadik label; their second is self-released.
Schott’s discography includes CDs on the Knitting Factory, Songlines, Tzadik, and Nuscope, New World Records labels, numerous sideman appearances including Tom Waits and John Zorn, and several self-released recordings. As a member of the New Jewish Music Supergroup The Ark Ensemble, with Frank London, Julia Eisenberg and Avi Avital among others, Schott toured in Poland and Ukraine. He has also performed in Israel and at Jazz festivals in Finland, Sweden, the Netherlands, Spain, France, Germany, Austria and England. Other notable engagements include being a featured composer at the Other Minds Festival in San Francisco, performing with Bobby Bradford at the Knitting Factory, playing at CBGB’s and the Blue Note in the same week with T.J. Kirk, playing with John Zorn at Merkin Concert Hall in New York and at Slim’s in San Francisco, featured at the Alt Guitar Festival in New York, and a week long residency at the Stone in New York.
Schott has received grants from Intermusic SF, the Djerassi Foundation, the Aaron Copland Foundation, and Meet The Composer, and commissions/performances from the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, the Rova Sax Quartet and the Paul Dresher Ensemble. In 2002 he taught an upper-division seminar on the early music of Duke Ellington at UC Berkeley. His article “ ‘We Are Revealing A Hand That Will Later Reveal Us’: Notes on Harmony and Form in John Coltrane’s Music” was published in Arcana: Musicians On Music, edited by John Zorn (Granary Press, 2000).