After graduating from High School, Howard took on a full load of units at Chabot Community College in Hayward CA while working a full time job at a machine shop during the day. One day while working at the band saw, Howard began dozing off. This put the fear of God in him. Noticing that every single one of the old timers that worked at the machine shop were missing parts of their fingers as a result of machine shop accidents, Howard vowed to find a paying music gig so that he could quit the machine shop and make a living playing guitar. In addition, he set his sights on teaching guitar as a way to make money and secured a teaching job at Baldwin Piano’s Music Store in San Francisco.
Howard began searching the classifieds for guitar gigs and soon landed a job as lead guitarist for a top 40 band called Heartbeat. Heartbeat’s members were making a living off of music working 5-6 nights a week at restaurants, hotels, casinos and private corporate gigs. The new band gig required Howard to quit his machine shop day job and his night time college classes in order to travel with the band. This opportunity led to better gigs and Howard spent the 1980’s working as a fulltime musician with the band Rival and then later Matinee, making good money playing high school and college dances in addition to opening concerts for Greg Kihn, Robin Trower and UFO. Rival and Matinee were combination bands, writing, performing and recording original material along with playing cover tunes.
As the 80’s came to a close, Howard, burnt out from the road, came off the road and accepted a day job selling tv’s, vcr’s and camcorders at Circuit City, an electronics retailer. He settled down with his girlfriend, Yvonne Flores, and bought a house in Benecia CA. He never stopped writing and recording music, however he did not make a living from music for over 5 years.
Eventually, the relationship broke up and Howard quit the day job and went back to his first love, a life teaching guitar and playing music for a living.
This time Howard teamed up with Steve Swan on bass/vocals and Paul Rahn on drums to form a blues and classic rock cover band named Straight Jacket. This was the chance that Howard was looking for to re-visit his early influences, Hendrix, SRV, and 60’s and 70’s jam bands like Cream, the Doors and the Allman Bros. Steve Swan did the high vocal songs and Howard handled vocals on the blues material.
During this period Howard was also writing songs and working on a self-produced CD. In 1998, he released “electric Rain’, an eclectic set of original material that Rock n Blues magazine desribed as sounding like a Jimi Hendrix on guitar with John Lennon’s vocals and vision. James left Straight jacket and formed a band to back his original material with David Kafinetti from Spinal Tap fame on keyboards, Paul Feia on bass and Doug Freedman on drums. The band had success playing concerts, clubs and theaters around the San Francisco Bay Area.
After this, Howard underwent a spiritual breakdown/breakthrough experience sending him on a vision quest that eventually landed him in Seattle Washington, where he began a new spiritual life of musical service. It was at this time that Howard changed his professional name from Jim Howard to James Howard.
In 2008, Howard released his second CD, a testimony to his spiritual life, called “Celebrate Life”. The 10 song track list consists of original material and Howard’s popular improvisational blues guitar take on Amazing Grace. The original music on Celebrate Life was an attempt to combine his spiritual life with his secular music combining rock, blues, latin/jazz and acoustic singer-songwriter elements.
In 2012, Howard, released a live CD called “Live in Seattle” consisting of material that was recorded live at various venues in the Seattle area.
After settling in Seattle in 2001, Howard began making by diversifying. He had his own band with John Stout on drums, Farko Dusomov on bass and Frank Holman on keys, and he worked as sideman in various projects as well as getting a decent amount of work as a studio guitarist. He served as lead guitarist in the house band at the Center For Spiritual Living, from 2001-2018. In his role as guitarist at CSL Seattle, he was charged with programming 13 inutes of instrumental music for the Sunday church services, 10 minutes of prelude music before the official service started and a 3 minute instrumental during the offertory. In 2016 and 2017, Howard released two live CD’s taken from board mixes of ithe best of these instrumentals. Howard considers the first of these two CDs, Devachan, to be his best recorded work, almost entirely improvised inspired by the congregation.
In 2012, Howard won “Best Blues Guitarist” in the Six String Theory Global Guitar Competition. Sponsored by Lee Ritenour and Yamaha, Howard won with applicants submitting from over 49 countries.
In 2015, the James Howard Band, won the Washington Blues Society’s local International Blues Challenge competition. In January 2016 the JHB spent a week competing in Memphis, Tennessee at the International Blues Challenge rpresenting the WA Blues Society. The JHB won the Washington Blues Society local contest again in 2023 and went to Memphis again to compete internationally. In 2024, the JHB advanced to the semi-finals.
Like all live music, the James Howard Band was dormant during the pandemic. Once the live music ban was lifted, James went on tour through the western states with Kevin Cook on drums and Evan Flory-Barnes on bass. Since then, Jack Dolan has replaced Evan on bass and Jim Barnes provides keys for the quartet line-up.
In July 2024, Howard fell off a ladder, retrieving a tote from an attic storage space, and broke his right tibia and fibula bones. Three surgery’s caused a complete shut-down of the James Howard Band that has led to 9 months of recovery for Howard’s serious injury. The good news is that James is now back to doing gis with his band returning to live gigging in April of 2025. James and the band are currently in pre-production to record and release a new collection original material. James is grateful for all the help he has received from his community. If you feel drawn to help financially, there is a gofundme at https://gofund.me/3b18cff6
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