Jo first met Humphrey Lyttelton in her birthplace, Edinburgh, when she was a fifteen-year-old playing tenor saxophone in the West Lothian Big Band. She had just won the Young Scottish Jazz Musician of the Year Award of 1992, and impressed both Humph and Acker Bilk when she played at a ‘seminar’ held by them during the Edinburgh Jazz Festival.
In 2005, she sent Humph her debut CD, ‘Here and Now’, revealing that since that meeting in Edinburgh, she had studied at the Guildhall School of Music in London and at Berkley in America, played in the orchestra for West Side Story at an opera Festival in South Africa, toured with the contemporary dance company, Flying Gorillas and, after moving South, established herself on the London gig scene.
As a result of her CD the circle of events was completed when she appeared alongside Acker Bilk as a guest with Humph’s band at the Edinburgh Jazz festival 2006, thereafter joining his now eight-piece band as a permanent member.