Christchurch Folk Music Club

20 July 2025

• Members $20
• Non Members $25
• Students (with ID) $5

Nick Jackman is a multi-instrumentalist and one-man-band based in Christchurch, with influences ranging from traditional Celtic folk to country, blues, punk rock and psychedelia.

With a career spanning five decades, he has played many hundreds of shows at bars, festivals, cafes, clubs, weddings, parties and street corners. For the last twenty years, Jackman has mostly performed as a one-man band, singing and playing harmonica, guitar and percussion all at the same time – the old school way, without the use of a looper pedal, backing tracks or other fancy tricks. Watching him perform is a lesson in extreme multi- tasking.

Harmonica is Nick Jackman’s weapon of choice, and with it he busts out anything from Celtic jigs and reels to bluegrass breakdowns and soulful blues, while laying down a solid rhythm of strings and percussion with his hands and feet.
His one-man-band was inspired by Memphis bluesmen Joe Hill Louis and Dr. Ross, folk artist Jesse Fuller, and the primitive country-punk style of Hasil Adkins. “I love the one-man-band artform”, says Jackman.

“Everybody who performs this way is unique. There’s a certain simplicity to this way of making music I appreciate. At the same time, it’s not easy trying to make it look easy, but when you pull it off, it’s an amazing feeling. There’s a lot of power in being a one-man-band.”

Jackman is also a songwriter and recording artist. His early releases were in the 1990s on UK indie labels Theme Park and Bacchanalian Revel. Under his moniker Stomping Nick, he
released Punk Blues One Man Band (2010), a collection of live in the studio recordings, and the follow up album Shake For Your Cake (2016). These albums explore his love of blues music combined with a primitive punk aesthetic. In The Time of Burning (2020) by the Blues Grenade continued this theme but with contributions from other musicians, allowing Jackman to explore more varied sonic and rhythmic pathways than he could otherwise with his one-man-band.

In recent years, he has returned to his love of Celtic music in a big way, and has added mandolin and bouzouki to his one-man-band.

These instruments have helped him add
melodic depth to his live arrangements. Jackman is currently recording traditional and original acoustic folk music. He also teaches folk, blues and country harmonica to students around the world, and he releases video tutorials on his Youtube channel, Harmonica For The Soul.