Four time Grammy nominated world renowned guitarist, vocalist, composer and producer Vasti Jackson has been awarded with the 2022 JMA Lifetime Achieve recipient, 2019 Polar International Music Award (Playing for change), 2017 Arts Ambassador, 2016 recording artist Grammy nominee (The Soul of Jimmie Rogers), 2015 Albert King Lifetime Guitar Award, 2014 Cultural ambassador, 2012 Mississippi Musicians Hall of Fame inductee, and 2011 Mississippi Living Blues Legend Award recipient.
Vasti (pronounced Vast-Eye) Jackson is a consummate performer, songwriter, arranger, producer, and educator. From his early beginnings performing in churches, and juke joints in McComb, Mississippi, to festivals, concerts, and theaters around the world, Vasti move effortlessly from Blues, to Soul, to Jazz, to gospel, to world music, and beyond.
As an actor Vasti plays roll of Ike Turner in the international musical “Simply The Best” The Tina Turner story. 2019 also finds Vasti performing the starring role of Old Lucas in the New Stage Theatre presentation of Hell In High Water, serving as composer, and musical director.
Vasti currently performs the lead role as Robert Johnson in the theatrical presentation Robert Johnson: The Man The Myth The Music, and as Hobo Bill in the stage play Jimmie Rodgers: Americas’ Blue Yodeler. He is a guest artist and composer with the Memphis Symphony Orchestra presentation of Stravinsky’s A Soldier’s Tale.
As an educator, Vasti communicates with enthusiasm, compassion, patience, and an innate ability to meet his audience at their artistic, academic, intellectual, and emotional. With the Playing For Change Foundation “Creating Positive Change Through Music, and Arts Education” Vasti has help develop fifteen music schools in twelve countries with more than two thousand students, from elementary school age children to adults in masters degree programs. Vasti utilizes oral history traditions, humor, vocalization, instrumental virtuosity, interactive participation, to lift the spirit, and heighten intellect through the medium of music.
Vasti Jackson has been featured in magazines such as Guitar Player, Living Blues, Back To The Roots, Nothing But The Blues, Juke Blues (England), Blues Revue, The’Sip, Blues Matters and many other publications. He has performed on Dan Akroyd’s House of Blues Radio Hour, the Starz Encore Network, WGN-TV in Chicago, and PBS. He has performed, written, produced, and recorded music for HBO, VH1, Mississippi Educational Television, the British Broadcasting Corp. (BBC), and radio and television programs in Australia, Uruguay, Finland, and Canada.
Vasti Jackson is the only Mississippian to have two recordings nominated for the Grammy Award in the same category, with one win in the same year.
Vasti Jackson (guitar & voice)
Alex Zayas (guitar)
Roberto Olori (drums)
Jaime Julián aka JJ Bass (bass)