Jim Zeller is a musician born in 1953 in Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts in the Laurentians in Quebec. Harmonica player, all his repertoire is very impregnated with blues. He has accompanied several artists in Quebec including Jean-Pierre Ferland, Boule Noire, Michel Pagliaro, Mahogany Rush, Carl Tremblay, Nanette Workman, and Bertrand Gosselin on records and in concerts.
In the 70s, Jim met a multi-instrumentalist musician, Alan Gerber, with whom he traveled the roads of the blues, both in Canada and in the United States. The duo thus forging a reputation which culminated with the participation in a Bob Dylan concert in Quebec. Then they are given the chance to appear in Dylan’s film, Renaldo & Clara in 1978, with among others Joan Baez, T-Bone Burnett, Ronnie Hawkins, Allen Ginsberg, Mick Ronson, Arlo Guthrie, Phil Ochs, etc. While living in New York in 1982, Jim must do everything to manage to survive and he is involved in a dark story of drug trafficking. This is how he was arrested during a police operation, he will spend two years in Riker Island prison. Released in 1984, he had to return to Quebec and soon set up a group with Joe Jammer, a guitarist from Chicago, with whom he literally blew up the stages wherever they performed. Jim Zeller has only released five albums, but he’s mostly a bar hopping guy. A pillar of rue Saint-Denis, in the Latin Quarter of Montreal, we have seen him a lot for 20 years, deploying his blues music machine on the stage of the Grand Café and the Bistro à JoJo. In 1993, he was the subject of a documentary directed by Éric Michaud and Michael Hogan, 29-minute Locomotive Blues with music by Jim Zeller.
In the 1970s, he accompanied the greatest, including Nanette Workman, Michel Pagliaro and Robert Charlebois (on Long Distance, 1976).
