Biography
Jon Tiven (born January 3, 1955 in New Haven, Connecticut) is a composer, guitarist and record producer. He has produced albums by Wilson Pickett, Frank Black and Don Covay as well as a series of tribute albums paying tribute to the songwriting of Don Covay, Arthur Alexander, Otis Blackwell, Curtis Mayfield, and Van Morrison.

Early Career
He was a founder of the bands The Yankees and The Jon Tiven Group. Tiven began his career as a music journalist in the late 1960s, writing for Rolling Stone, Fusion, Melody Maker, and a host of other magazines. Initially an alto saxophonist, he taught himself to play a variety of instruments and became fairly adept at guitar, enough to write songs and accompany himself. In 1975 Tiven went to work for Chess Records in New York, but quickly saw that working inside a record company was not his calling, and travelled to Memphis to produce Alex Chilton's first solo album Bach's Bottom a.k.a. The Singer Not The Song at Alex's request.
 
Productions and Projects
Upon returning to New York, Tiven licensed the Chilton masters as well as other Memphis recordings he had made to Ork Records, the first New Wave/punk rock label. He soon split to produce for Big Sound Records, where he produced records by Van Duren and his own band The Yankees, but losing faith in those running the label he became totally independent. In addition to playing on sessions for artists such as Major Lance ("I've Got A Right To Cry") and The Rolling Stones ("Jivin Sister Fanny"), Tiven honed his craft as a member of The Jim Carroll Band, as a guitarist/organist and also cowriting with Carroll the title song of the second album ("Dry Dreams"). Befriended by John Belushi, he formed a The Tom Davis Experience featuring Al Franken with the two comedians, and had a featured acting role as well as writing five songs for their film One More Saturday Night (Columbia Pictures, 1986) produced by Dan Aykroyd.

Compositions
Other artists such as Rick Derringer, Barrence Whitfield & the Savages, and The Symptoms started recording his songs, and Tiven dedicated himself to primarily writing songs for other artists. In 1985 he renewed a friendship with his hero Don Covay, and they wrote, performed, and recorded together through 2001. A label approached him to make his own record, and so was formed The Jon Tiven Group who recorded two albums, Blue Guru and Yes I Ram in 1996 and 1999 respectively. The band featured Jon Tiven on guitar, Alan Merrill on lead vocals, Todd Snare on drums, and Tiven's wife Sally on bass. Tiven started having some Billboard top 100 chart success with covered songs recorded by Huey Lewis & the News and The Jeff Healey Band, and Tiven then submitted some songs to B.B. King to record. To his surprise King's manager asked him to produce B.B. The sessions Tiven produced and wrote by B.B. King were parcelled out on several releases, including Here And There, a European release Lucille & Friends, and the Grammy-award winning box set King Of The Blues. From that time on Tiven would distinguish himself in the Soul/Blues field, writing and producing new albums by Don Covay, Syl Johnson, Donnie Fritts, Freddie Scott, and Sir Mack Rice to name but a few. He coaxed Arthur Alexander out of retirement in 1990 and in 1998 produced and cowrote Wilson Pickett's first album in seventeen years, It's Harder Now, which won three prestigious W.C. Handy Awards and in addition was nominated for a Grammy. Tiven continued to have his songs recorded by other artists--- Robert Cray had a top seller with the cover "24-7 Man," Johnny Winter with "I Smell Smoke," Buddy Guy with "Midnight Train," Shemekia Copeland with "Married To The Blues," Irma Thomas with "Trying To Catch A Cab In The Rain," and Australian Ian Moss with "Mr. Rain."

Current
After the Jon Tiven Group disbanded, he was not content to rest on his laurels, so Tiven busied himself in the new millenium by discovering, producing and cowriting a series of albums with soul/blues singer Ellis Hooks who was heralded as following in the tradition of Otis Redding, Sam Cooke, and James Brown. Moving from New York to Nashville in 2002, he produced a series of well-received albums by Frank Black, previously best known as lead singer and songwriter with the band Pixies. In 2004 he produced and cowrote what would become Little Milton's last recorded effort Think Of Me, which received glowing praise from critics and five W.C. Handy Award nominations. In 2005 he convinced legendary singer/songwriter P.F. Sloan to make a new record, which Tiven produced.

Moving into high gear in the production field, Tiven wrote and produced a series of albums by r&b legends Garnett Mimms (Is Anybody Out There?), Howard Tate (Blue Day), Betty Harris (Intuition), Steve Cropper/Felix Cavaliere (Nudge It Up A Notch), Willie Jones (Fire In My Soul) as well as coproducing Steve Cropper’s Dedicated, a tribute to the 5 Royales, with Steve. Other productions include Creed Bratton’s cd (he of Grass Roots fame and also the TV show The Office), guitarist Troy Turner’s Whole Lotta Blues, and Mason Casey’s Sofa King Badass. He didn’t slow down on the writing front for a minute, cowriting chartbusters for Leslie West, J.J. Thames, Ruthie Foster, Colin Gilmore, Erya Lyytinen, Tara Holloway, Alabama Mike, Guitar Shorty and Shaun Murphy.

In 2011 Tiven formed a duo YOMAMA with lyricist/poet/singer Stephen J. Kalinich. Kalinich is best-known for collaborating with Brian Wilson and his brother for both Beach Boys songs and solo outings (including the Paul McCartney/Brian Wilson duet “A Friend Like You.”), as well as P.F. Sloan. Together they made a two-cd set (Symptomology/Shortcuts to Infinity) followed by a single (Each Soul Has A Voice), both of which were mixed by and coproduced with Mark Linett. Tiven and Kalinich also produced a new Ellis Hooks record in 2015, Needle In A Haystack, released in Europe on the Music Avenue label.

In 2016, in addition to cowriting “Calling” on Tinsley Ellis’ very successful Red Clay album, Tiven had several productions released that had been “lost in the archives.” First off, the Numero Group released an anthology Ork Records: New York New York that collected the first recordings Tiven made (Alex Chilton, Prix, Mick Farren, and even Richard Lloyd’s “Get Off My Cloud” on which he plays bass). The set received outstanding reviews and two Grammy nominations, and 15 of the 49 tracks were Tiven productions, many of them written by JT as well. HoZac Records then decided that the Prix album---which at that point was out of print and had only been issued in Japan---was worthy of a U.S. release, and put it out with some extra tracks. Again, the positive reviews came forth and the vinyl is current in its 4th run for a band that in its day only had two singles released. In 2017 there will be “new” Chilton and Prix releases of material that no one has heard before….why not?

Lastly Billie Ray Martin decided that the album they started in the late 1990s was too good not to finish, so she completed her vocals and mixes and released The Soul Tapes to rave reviews and top ten chart positions worldwide (#8 on the Billboard Dance/Club charts).