Jonas Hellborg & Shawn Lane

Shawn Lane was born in Memphis, Tennessee. At the age of eight he accompanied his sisters on the piano, but did not play guitar seriously until he was ten. Lane progressed very rapidly on the guitar, and he found it to be his natural instrument. At thirteen, he began to practice heavily, developing his technical abilities. Word began to spread around Memphis about a talented young guitar player, and at fourteen he auditioned for the lead guitar spot in Black Oak Arkansas.

Black Oak Arkansas had been a popular country rock band but at the time when Lane joined the band's popularity was declining. At age fifteen Lane saw Allan Holdsworth perform at a UK concert and was inspired to develop his own method of playing guitar. Shawn toured with Black Oak Arkansas for the next four years. As the original band members dropped out, Lane began recruiting players from his high school days and began to play a style closer to fusion than the country rock style for which the band was known.
At eighteen Shawn Lane was married and burnt out from touring with Black Oak Arkansas so he decided to take a break and learn more about music. Over the next eight years he studied music and composing on his own and mainly worked on playing piano.
Lane had psoriasis his whole life and also suffered from psoriatic arthritis from the age of about 13. On September 26, 2003 Shawn died in a hospital in Memphis.

Hellborg began his music career in 1976 in Sweden touring with local Rock Acts. He was spotted by percussionist Reebop Kwaku Baah in a small club in Stockholm 1979 and he moved to London for a year to work with Reebop on different projects. He played the Montreux Jazz festival in Switzerland in 1981 and met Mike Brecker who introduced him to John Mc Laughlin, Billy Cobham and other fusion stars. He was asked to join John Mc Laughlin's reformed Mahavishnu in 1983 and he stayed with Mc Laughlin until 1988 touring and recording with Mahavishnu and also doing several duet tours with McLaughlin during this time.
In 1988 Hellborg moved to New York and started his own band which first included keyboardist Aydin Esen and drummer Kenwood Dennard, later the Johansson Brothers Jens on Keys and Anders on drums.
In 1993 he sold his part in the studio to Laswell and resettled in Paris, France. The following year he teamed up with guitarist Shawn Lane, a cooperation that would last 9 years. The first record was ?Abstract Logic? with Ginger Baker's son Kofi on drums. Followed by Michael Shrieve's ?Two Doors?. By the third record they were joined by drummer Jeff Sipe and embarked on long stretch that produced 4 records and a lot of touring between 1995 and 1997. After Shawn Lane's tragic death in 2003, Hellborg has continued to explore amalgamations of Indian and ?Western? music.


Discography
With Jonas Hellborg:

1996 Temporal Analogues of Paradise
1997 Time is the Enemy
1999 Zenhouse
2000 Good People in Times of Evil
2002 Personae
2003 Icon