8 Legged Monster
US musical group
The 8 Legged Monster was an American jazz band, active from 2007 until 2015, and based in San Francisco, California. They wrote, played, and arranges music in various jazz, bebop, free jazz and big band genres. The band's founder, leader and guitarist Mike Irwin Johnson writes/arranges all the music.
History
Mike Irwin Johnson grew up in Walnut Creek, California. He began playing guitar in High School after receiving a guitar from his father. Johnson moved to San Francisco and studied jazz composition at San Francisco State University in 1999.
Johnson started 8 Legged Monster in 2007 to showcase the talent of some of the local musicians in San Francisco and to bring a more compositional approach to the San Francisco Bay Area music scene.
Members and collaborators
The 8 Legged Monster's most recent lineup includes Jaz Sawyer, Rob Barics, Mike Olmos, Joe Cohen, Matt Nelson, Fil Lorenz, Danny Grewn, Eric Markowitz & Karina Deniké.
8 Legged Monster is worked with Pursuance Records, an independent record label founded by drummer Jaz Sawyer.
Sound
The groups' sound has been compared to Birth of the Cool and Sun Ra.
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This entry incorporates text from “8 Legged Monster” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.