Eric Johnson – Texaphonic Tour 2025

One of the most outstanding instrumentalists in rock over the past 40 years, Texas guitarist Eric Johnson was already a legend before he recorded his first album. By the early 1980s, many celebrated guitarists were singing the praises of this skinny kid from Austin with the mind-melting chops. Comparisons were made to such guitar heroes as Jeff Beck and Jimi Hendrix and when he joined the ‘70s Austin fusion band Electromagnets they were being hailed as “the Mahavishnu Orchestra of Texas”. With the release of his highly-anticipated 1986 solo debut album Tones, the underground guitar legend finally emerged onto the scene fully-formed. It landed him on the cover of Guitar Player magazine, which hailed the album as a “majestic debut”, and earned him his first Grammy nomination for the song “Zap”. With the release of his follow up album, 1990’s platinum-selling Ah Via Musicom, which contained the Grammy Award winning song “Cliffs of Dover”, Eric Johnson became a bona fide international guitar phenomenon.

Over the course of more than four decades, Eric Johnson has been traveling on a prolific odyssey. Along the way, his creations have cross-pollinated the various musical genres which include rock, blues, jazz, fusion, soul, folk, new-age, classical, and even country. Inevitably EJ says it best himself in sharing that regardless of the genre “It really boils down to the music and the song at the end of the day”, he explains. “The most important thing for me is to grow musically and make a more expansive and meaningful artistic statement with every new project”.