John Ellis

There are at least two artists that go by the name of John Ellis.

1. John Ellis, the tenor saxophone player, grew up with a love of baseball, dewberry cobbler, and turkey and stuffing. Raised in rural tobacco country in North Carolina, he was more familiar with the sounds of hunting rifles and the dangers of snapping turtles than he was with the sounds and dangers of jazz. He was a pretty unlikely candidate for a career in music at all, as a matter of fact, but somewhere between singing hymns in his father’s church, fooling around with Scott Joplin Rags on the piano, and marching in the high school band, he began to realize that music was the only thing he really wanted to do.

Read full Bio