You never know what you’ve got until it’s gone. Acoustic guitar virtuoso Jon Gomm is learning that lesson firsthand: For the moment, he’s lost his ability to play.
Gomm recently suffered an intra-articular displaced capitellum — or as he bluntly puts it, “a smashed elbow.” The injury is especially troubling because he’s no mere flatpicker. His percussive style involves flailing his arms in seemingly otherworldly ways, fretting the guitar both above and below the fretboard while his right hand strikes and taps the acoustic so it functions almost like a drum.
The accident occurred on February 5 while he was performing in Setúbal, Portugal.
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“I was nearing the end of a lovely concert,” Gomm explains in a post on his website. “The venue was a cinema, so the stage was the bit in front of the screen.
“I guess it was a strange shape, and the edges weren’t marked. Everything was pitch black, except for two spotlights pointing upwards into my face from the floor. I couldn’t see, basically. I’d asked for the lighting to be changed from the stage, but to no avail.”
At one point in the show, Gomm decided to climb down and perform a song among the audience. Feeling for the front edge of the stage with his bare feet, he edged forward — and suddenly there was nothing beneath him.
“Somehow I just missed it and stepped off.”
He doesn’t remember the fall itself, only the aftermath.
“I must have taken the full weight on my left elbow. I guess it was about a two-meter drop to a concrete floor.”
Naturally, he also worried about the guitar that went down with him. An Ibanez signature artist, Gomm has two models — the JGM10 and JGM11 — both equipped with his triple-source Fishman PowerTap Earth Pro pickup system. He hasn’t said which guitar he was playing that night, but the instrument fared much better than its owner.
“My guitar, hanging at my right side, was virtually unharmed,” he relays with relief.
Gomm was rushed to the hospital, where X-rays revealed that the end of his humerus had been “snapped almost clean off,” he says. The injury required a massive plaster cast followed by surgery.
At a second hospital, where he received a CT scan and scheduled surgery, Gomm made sure the doctors understood exactly what was at stake. He made them watch videos of him playing guitar “so they could see how badly I need this elbow fixed please!”
Among them was the clip for “Passionflower,” which vividly demonstrates the acrobatic, percussion-heavy right-hand technique that has made Gomm a viral acoustic phenomenon.
The surgery left him with two 28mm screws in his humerus, along with a lengthy recovery before he can play guitar again.
Injuries are far from uncommon among guitarists these days. Electric guitar virtuoso Adrian Belew was sidelined by carpal tunnel following his tour with the King Crimson tribute act Beat, and Brian Setzer was forced off the road temporarily after an autoimmune disorder left him unable to play guitar.
For now, Gomm is focused on healing and adapting to the limits imposed by the injury. At times, the emotional toll has been difficult to process.
“I've potentially lost: my income, my career, my life's passion, my expressive voice, my connection to the world—my value to the world,” he writes. “My superpower, my hiding place. My songs.”
He admits that the experience left him “pretty depressed” and withdrawn for a while, though he also recognizes how much worse the fall might have been.
“I could have broken my neck,” he notes. “I reply to myself that I wish it had been my neck. But I don't mean it. I choose not to mean it.”
Progress has been slow but steady. Gomm says his elbow moves “but not much, and it's very stiff and weak.” Much of his time is now devoted to physical therapy.
“Seriously, I do nothing else. Getting one degree more bend, half a degree more stretch.”
Still, doctors are optimistic about his recovery.
“The doctors and physios are very optimistic that I'll get everything back, or nearly everything.
“I hate that ‘nearly’ so much, but they’ve all watched the ‘Passionflower’ video and they’re still totally confident. So, I'm being positive, most of the time.”
And he’s cautiously looking ahead.
“I'm working towards a goal of being back playing for my Acoustic Bootcamp in the summer. And then for my tour of Great Britain and Northern Ireland in Autumn. It was going to be a mammoth 30-date mega tour, but we’ve decided to keep it short.”
American audiences may also get a chance to see him this year at Andy McKee’s Musicarium, hosted by Andy McKee, July 22–26 in Moab, Utah.
