Johnty Wilks is an emerging contemporary nu - jazz saxophonist, electronica artist, & meditator. Based in London & Essex, he is known for his distinctive sensual, mellow, velvet tone and his love of creating & playing relaxing chillout, ballads, nu jazz, soulful house, deep house, electronica & sacred music. He is one of the few saxophonists playing the saxophone within "new age" genre of music. He also plays modern and traditional versions of various jazz ballads and in particular is well known for his version of "The Nearness of you" Johnty started playing sax when he was 16 and after 4 months joined his first group a punk band known as "The Vamp" based in Bromley, Surrey. He played on and off in various rock bands and then due to studies at University ( He obtained a doctorate in Organic Chemistry) he concentrated on an academic life and research into medicinal plants and stopped playing for about 20 years. In Jan 2009 he took up the saxophone again and within 4 months was playing at jam sessions including playing at Ronnie Scotts famous jazz club in Autumn 2009. His love of chill out music, ambient and meditative, sacred music has led him into producing sax inspired chill out, fusion, nu jazz, soulful house, downtempo (as a soloist and with collaborators) and meditative music (with his group, Awakened Samatha). His soft mellow tone on the sax is due, he says to 20 years of meditation practise, listening and learning form the great jazz ballad players (e.g., Chet Baker, Paul Desmond, Dexter Gordon) and learning (with difficulty) to tame the sax into producing less complex overtones with minimal vibration of the reed. <a href="https://www.last.fm/music/johnty+wilks">Read more on Last.fm</a>. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.