Jon Banks

Jon Banks is an accordionist and member of the ensemble ZRI re-inventing Viennese classics and improvising silent film accompaniments as a Hungarian-style band with accordion and santouri (cimbalom) and whose fourth CD, Café Danube, is to be released by Naxos in 2024. He has also broadcast and toured throughout Europe, the Middle East and the Americas as a member of The Burning Bush, The Dufay Collective, Sirinu and The Jocelyn Pook Ensemble, collaborated with the Society of Strange and Ancient Instruments and Notes Inégales improvisation project, and toured Uzbekistan with master percussionist Fariborz Kiani. He is a regular performer at the Globe Theatre and recent recording sessions include ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’ and Simon Armitage’s ‘Eurydice and Orpheus’. Jon studied at Oxford, spending a year in Italy as part of his doctorate, and has contributed chapters for the Cambridge History of Musical Performance and articles on itinerant santouri players, and Turkish music preserved on eighteenth-century London clocks to Early Music. He has recently written on ‘Brahms’s Hungarian Dances and the Early Csárdás Recordings’ for Music & Letters and a book, The Csárdás Craze: Hungarian Traditional Musicians in Vienna, 1850-1914, releases in 2024.