GM Jon

The project

About

An AI-assisted 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 Jon has written the words for himself: 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. They typically work individually but also collaborate, exchange ideas, and assess music together as a team.

Songs span rock and folk most often, but also reggae, jazz and rap — whatever fits the lyrics best. Male vocalists tend to have a somewhat raspy voice; the (fictional) Tara Turner is the main female vocalist. There are funny songs, songs for children, topical songs covering recent news, and a range of songs (Wisdom of the Geniuses) that take quotes from brilliant people as their lyrics.

Many singles and albums have been released across YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon Music. GM Jon also has his own video channel where a selection of the songs have videos to accompany them.

GM Jon believes the music itself matters, not who or what created it. He thinks the best work in the future will come from human and AI collaboration. Everyone has the right to create their own music.

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

The people

Each person on the project brings their own distinctive skills, mostly from fields nothing to do with music.

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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.

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Lyricist

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).

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Lyricist

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.

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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.