Biography
Multiple Grammy nominated world-renowned guitarist and vocalist, 2020 Pinnacle Award Winner, 2019 Polar international Award recipient (Playing For Change), 2019 Grammy Nominee (producer), 2017 Arts Ambassador, 2016 Grammy nominee (The Soul of Jimmie Rogers) 2015 Albert King Lifetime Guitar Award, 2014 Cultural ambassador, 2012 Mississippi Musicians Hall of Fame inductee, and 2011 Mississippi Living Blues Legend Award winner.
Vasti (pronounced Vast-Eye) Jackson is a consummate performer, songwriter, arranger, producer, and educator. From his early beginnings performing in churches, and juke joints in McComb, Mississippi, to festivals, concerts, and theaters around the world. Vasti moves effortlessly from blues, to soul, to jazz, to gospel, to world music, and beyond.
As an actor, Vasti plays co-lead role of Ike Turner in the 2018 and 2019 international musical tour “Simply The Best” The Tina Turner story.
Vasti currently performs the lead role as Robert Johnson in the theatrical presentation Robert Johnson: The Man The Myth The Music, and as Hobo Bill in the stage play Jimmie Rodgers: Americas’ Blue Yodeler. 2019 found Vasti performing the role of Old Lucas the theatrical presentation of Hell In High Water, and serving as musical director. Vasti is a guest artist and composer with the Memphis Symphony Orchestra presentation of Stravinsky’s A Soldier’s Tale.
As an educator, Vasti communicates with enthusiasm, compassion, patience, and an innate ability to meet his audience at their needs. With the Playing For Change Foundation “Creating Positive Change Through Music, and Arts Education” Vasti has helped develop fifteen music schools in eleven countries with more than two thousand students.
Vasti Jackson has been featured in magazines such as Guitar Player, Living Blues, Back To The Roots, Nothing But The Blues, Juke Blues (England), Blues Revue, The’Sip, Blues Matters and many other publications. He has performed on Dan Akroyd’s House of Blues Radio Hour, the Starz Encore Network, WGN-TV in Chicago, and PBS. He has performed, written, produced, and recorded music for HBO, VH1, Mississippi Educational Television, the British Broadcasting Corp. (BBC), and radio and television programs in Australia, Uruguay, Finland, and Canada.
He is the only Mississippian to have two recordings nominated for the Grammy in the same category, with one win in the same year.
Vasti has played guitar on several occasions with the PFC Band and has since then become part of the family.
HEALING ANGEL PROJECT
Vasti recently launched his “Healing Angel” Project which is an expression of gratitude for those who offer their caring as a gift of health and healing, especially as we face the COVID-19 pandemic. Check out the video trailer, inspired by the music Vasti Jackson created as Artist-in-Residence at the Anne Boykin Institute for the Advancement of Caring in Nursing’s Summer Academy in 2018.
The forthcoming full-length video is designed to be an ever-expanding thank you for caring – nurses, physicians, CNAs, therapists, health caregivers, first responders, housekeepers, and all who lovingly live their caring ways to those in crisis. JOIN THE HEALING ANGEL PROJECT Please email to healingangelphotos@gmail.com a horizontal photo of caregivers you would like to honor along with their names, and places of employment so they can be included among those embraced by this music and our gratitude. https://www.facebook.com/Healing-Angel-Project-101825638180489/
“Healing Angel” is available online at all digital music platforms:
Apple Music: https://bit.ly/HealingAngelVasti
Google Play Store: https://bit.ly/HealingAngelGoogle
Spotify: https://bit.ly/HealingAngelStfy
Hometown
Hattiesburg, MS, United States