Jaik Willis

"Jaik is a hardcore troubador somewhere inbetween Steve Earle and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. He has wandered around the USA like a modern minstrel, surfing sofas, car camping, and paying dues to sing the blues. It is a high energy solo show featuring Jaik's horn-like voice darting around a blistering broken-string approach to his acoustic flying V guitar, with original songs that are accessible, and message driven" - (Chicago Jams)

Jaik Willis has a style that doesn’t fit neatly into one category or another. He sings and plays the acoustic guitar, but the guitar is a flying V, and he may be singing 2 notes at once, or beat-boxing at the same time. Someone might try to call it folk music, but its certainly not of the coffeehouse variety. There’s really nothing else quite like it.

He was featured at the 2009 Bonnaroo festival with an hour long 10pm friday set in the gap between the Beastie Boys & Phish. He made 8 appearances at this years Summercamp festival, on a bill that included Willie Nelson, Los Lobos, MMW. He closed out the Chicago Metronome Celebration music festival in front of the Congress Theatre, the location of the Chicago Bluesgrass & Blues Festival.

Jaik is an educated musician, having trained at Berklee College of Music in Boston, Illinois and California State Universities' music departments, and in Hollywood's Musician's Institute as their youngest student when he was 16 years-old. He spent all of his teen-age years practicing 10-16 hours per day. After studying jazz and Euro-classical music, Jaik received an ethno-musicology degree with a thesis on microtonal guitar music from Mauritania, and then promptly moved into his car to begin years of non-stop coast-to-coast touring without stopping long enough in any one place to call it home, until finally landing in Chicago, which is now his anchoring point between shows.

"He has a most unique soaring falsetto and a wild eyes rolled in the back of his head fierce guitar style. Jaik's sound is somewhere between Anti-Folk and The Band and it is unlike anything I've heard from anyone else. His energy is fierce, his vocal range is inhuman, his beard is long. You've gotta check this guy out." - ( Independent Media Center )