He’ll be 79 on Christmas Eve, but guitarist Jan Akkerman is still toiling away, regularly touring and even slipping out the occasional album. The man from Amsterdam is a survivor, not only of the 1992 car crash that broke his back and briefly confined him to a wheelchair, but also of leaving Focus seven years after helping found them in 1969 and playing a large part in their early success.
His steady rather than spectacular solo career incorporated guitar synths and drum machines in the 80s, alongside the guitar pyrotechnics, and evolved towards excursions into jazz-rock, but Akkerman always understood that technical expertise and feel are not necessarily incompatible.
