John Clayton Mayer (surname pronunciation: /ˈmeɪ.jɜr/ ) (born October 16, 1977) is an American guitarist and singer-songwriter. Originally from Connecticut, he briefly attended Berklee College of Music, before moving to Atlanta, Georgia, in 1998, where he refined his skills and gained a following. His first two studio albums, Room for Squares and Heavier Things, did well commercially, achieving multi-platinum status. In 2003, he won a Best Male Pop Vocal Performance Grammy for "Your Body Is a Wonderland".
Mayer began his career performing mainly acoustic rock and pop, but gradually began a transition towards the blues genre in 2005 by collaborating with renowned blues artists such as B. B. King and forming the John Mayer Trio. The blues influence can be heard on his album Continuum, released in September 2006. Mayer won Best Pop Vocal Album for Continuum and Best Male Pop Vocal Performance for "Waiting on the World to Change" at the 49th Annual Grammy Awards in 2007.
Mayer's career pursuits have extended to stand-up comedy, design, and writing; he has written pieces for magazines, most notably for Esquire. He is also involved in philanthropic activities through his "Back to You" fund and his efforts trying to stop global warming.
John Mayer (b. Calcutta, Bengal, British India, October 28, 1930; d. United Kingdom, March 9, 2004) was an Indian composer known primarily for his fusions of jazz with Indian music. He was born into an Anglo-Indian family and, after studying with Phillipe Sandre in Calcutta and Melhi Mehta in Bombay, he won a scholarship to London's Royal Academy of Music in 1952, where he studied comparative music and religion in eastern and western cultures.
He worked as a violinist with the London Philharmonic Orchestra (1953-58) and then with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (1958-65), but was also composing fusions of Hindustani classical and Western classical forms from 1952 onwards. His Violin Sonata was performed by Yehudi Menuhin in 1955.
In the 1960s he worked extensively with the Jamaican jazz musician Joe Harriott, with whom he formed the group Indo-Jazz Fusions, a ten-piece featuring a jazz quintet and five Indian musicians. The new incarnation of the band, called John Mayer's Indo Jazz Fusions, was revived in the 1990s and continued to play live gigs -- featuring Mayer's son Jonathan Mayer on sitar -- until John Mayer's death.
From 1996 onwards, Mayer, though based in north London, worked part-time as composer-in-residence at the Birmingham Conservatoire where he introduced the BMus Indian music course in 1997.
