Born Jérôme Cotta in Marseille, Jehro moved to London at age 20, where he used to live in an artists' squat in Hammersmith, performing in the tube. He now lives in Paris and using his guitar skills he composes acoustic songs with a mixed Caribbean/reggae/folk/Latin sound. As a child Jehro’s imagination was fuelled by the dreams of his Greek-Italian-Corsican mother, and the songs of his Georges Brassens-inspired singer of a father in the Panier area of In that Hammersmith artists’ squat he immer...
Born Jérôme Cotta in Marseille, Jehro moved to London at age 20, where he used to live in an artists' squat in Hammersmith, performing in the tube. He now lives in Paris and using his guitar skills he composes acoustic songs with a mixed Caribbean/reggae/folk/Latin sound.
As a child Jehro’s imagination was fuelled by the dreams of his Greek-Italian-Corsican mother, and the songs of his Georges Brassens-inspired singer of a father in the Panier area of In that Hammersmith artists’ squat he immersed himself in pop, rock and reggae, surrounded by Spanish and Jamaican musicians. Perfecting his skills as a guitarist by covering all his favorite pop standards, he broke free from his native French by lending his voice to the songs of his new-found idols - he fell in love with Bob Marley’s music, its roots and its spirituality, when busking to it in London's tube stations.
He then moved to Paris, settling in a small hotel on the rue Marcadet in the 18th Arrondissement. A new city meant new places to play: Pigalle, Montmartre, Belleville, Saint-Germain, where he wrote the lyrics and music for his first solo album. “L’arbre et le fruit” was released by Chrysalis / EMI under his real name Jérôme Cotta, earning him well-deserved praise from the French critics in 1999. Jérôme’s songs were heard on the radio, and he took to jamming in the studio of a couple of new acquaintances he met in the courtyard of his block of flats: Christian Brun and Richard Minier. By giving him the opportunity to explore new musical avenues and Jehro moved away from his solo career and sparked a profitable artistic collaboration.
From indo-electro theme tunes for the advertising industry through calypso-pop songs co-written and sung for the Marathonians’ “A Tropical Soul Adventure” LP (Superfruit, 2003), Jehro was gradually finding his own distinctive voice. Somewhere in the South of France, in a little village full of sing-song accents and surrounded by ochre-red hills and olive groves, he came up with the first tune of an album almost entirely written in English, “Shantytown Carnival,” produced by the Marathonians duo and signed to their Superfruit record label. Jehro’s self-titled debut is an album inspired by Caribbean and American grassroots music (reggae, folk, Latin etc.), full of snapshots and tales from the lives of ordinary people.
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