The project

About

An ambitious music project that started in 2025.

The GM Jon Project

The GM Jon project started in 2025. Songs fall into three main categories.

Dead Poet songs. Poetry from long-dead poets turned into modern rock or folk music — William Blake, Alexander Pope, John Keats, Matthew Arnold, Oscar Wilde, Rudyard Kipling and others.

Lyrics and music by GM Jon. Songs I have written the words for myself. Humour, current affairs, chess...

Lyrics by Professor Tudor Rickards and Steve Tranter. Two brilliant lyricists who collaborate with GM Jon, providing original lyrics on a wide range of subjects to turn into music — the Live Poet songs. Typically we work individually to create lyrics, but there have also been several collaborations as well as many idea exchanges. We also work as a team when it comes to assessing music and choosing which versions to release.

There are songs in various genres, most commonly rock or folk, but also reggae, jazz and rap. The approach is to use whatever works best with the lyrics. Male vocalists typically have a somewhat raspy voice, and the beautiful Tara Turner is the main female vocalist. There are funny songs, songs for children, topical songs covering recent news, and even a range of songs (Wisdom of the Geniuses) that have quotes from brilliant people as their lyrics.

Many singles and albums have now been released on a range of platforms including You-tube and Spotify (the most popular ones). GM Jon also has his own video channel where a selection of the songs have had videos made to accompany them.

GM Jon believes music itself matters, not who or what created the music. He thinks the best work in the future will be as a result of human and AI collaboration.

Everyone has the right to create their own music!

#GMJon
#TudorRickards
#SteveTranter
#TaraTurner
#PoetryToMusic
#DeadPoets
#SongLyrics

The people

The people behind the GM Jon Project have diverse expertise in a number of fields not related to music and each brings their own distinctive skills to the party:

Producer, lyricist, project lead

GM Jon

Jonathan Levitt is a retired chess Grandmaster who played for the very strong England team that beat Russia in Reykjavik 1990. He is an Oxford maths graduate and lives in Suffolk with his wife Maria, making a living betting on live cricket. He is also an author.

Jonathan's most recent book, *Contemplating Comedy* (The Conrad Press, 2020), explores the psychology and philosophy of humour, packed full of examples. He started producing music in 2025 under the name GM Jon, and has already established an extensive catalogue of singles and albums available on all the usual platforms, including Spotify and YouTube.

Lyricist & Adviser

Professor Tudor Rickards

The professor started collaborating with GM Jon in spring/summer 2025 and has been a major motivating force behind the project — apart from writing the lyrics to six albums' worth of songs as we approach the one-year mark. Not bad going for someone aged 85, who only started writing song lyrics at 84.

Tudor is known in several fields, among them creativity and political leadership (decision-making).

Lyricist & Adviser

Steve Tranter

Steve founded and ran a successful legal practice for over thirty years. He was always more interested in the creative side of business than the vocational side. He resumed club chess after retirement and is writing his third book in the legal-thriller genre (provisionally titled *The Crypto Killers*) to add to those already published on Amazon (*The Trust*; *Dark Justice*). Each of his books has a minor chess theme running through it.

Since teaming up with GM Jon and Tudor Rickards, Steve has directed many of his creative efforts into writing lyrics on a wide range of subjects.

Lead female vocalist fictional

Tara Turner

Tara Turner is by far the most attractive of us and is also a great singer. Like GM Jon she has a small cream-coloured cockapoo dog, and unlike GM Jon she usually wears a tartan skirt.

Unfortunately, she is not a real person.