IHeartGuitar blog has posted a NAMM Show article featuring quotes from Tom and Grover Jackson from GJ2 Guitars about their collaboration on the awesome Zora guitar line;Tom also talks about his lifelong love of rock music and his past experience with Grover’s previous guitar lines. We again wish Tom and GJ2 Guitars the very best in launching Zora.
Zora
Tom Dumont has been road-testing various Zora prototypes with No Doubt, and the guitar accomplishes that rare feat of being a single-cutaway instrument that has its own personality. And the attention to detail on these babies close up is phenomenal. Let’s turn it over to Tom to talk about the Zora and his association with Grover Jackson and GJ2 Guitars.
“So, Grover makes guitars. Everybody knows Grover’s history as one of the greatest guitar makes of the last century. When I was a teenager, I grew up listening to classic rock: I was a rock music lover. And I started playing in bands when I was 12 years old. When I was about 15 or 16, all of a sudden these new guitars came on the scene and they all had his name on them: Jackson Guitars. I grew up in Orange County and everybody here either wanted these guitars or played one. So they were a big part of my growing up.
Another part of my story is, my older sister was a guitar player as well. She’s the one who actually kinda taught me to play guitar. And she acquired, early on, a used Charvel guitar, which was from a punk band. I’ve spoken to Grover about it and he remembers the guitar and the band. But she bought this white, Strat-bodied Charvel and it played like no other guitar I’d ever played. Now, admittedly I’d played mostly cheap guitars at that point in my life, but this thing was just fast and sounded great. It was so much better than anything else. This was the guitar which, in my family and my group of friends, that we loved. And what’s really interesting is so many years later, about a year and a half ago I met Grover Jackson and I found out he was starting a new company and they were going to start making guitars in his shop, not far from where I live, fortunately. And it became an exciting opportunity. And we collaborated on a guitar design. And I get the same feeling from his guitars today that I got so many years ago with that Charvel. Years ago he had bought the Charvel shop and was manufacturing guitars as Charvel, then changed the name… and the G2J Guitars feel the same. They play fast, they feel good, they sound great, they’re made by this man in Orange County in the United States, and most of the parts of this guitar are also made here. These things are beautiful and I’m just thrilled to be involved with him.”
Grover Jackson: “I’m very fortunate to work with Tom, because he’s really one of the most consummate professionals I’ve worked with. I’ve been in this business quite a while – actually over half a century. And I’ve had the great fortune to work with a lot of great artists. Randy Rhoads, Jeff Beck, Allan Holdsworth, and what we’re doing today with GJ2 is the summation of my life’s work. GJ2 is a one-year-old company, so we’re young, we’re small and we’re really hungry. We’re really pushing the envelope as hard as we can.”