Jan Schelhaas

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jan Russell Schelhaas (born March 11th 1948 in Liverpool) is a British musician, mostly known as the keyboard player from the bands Caravan and Camel.

Jan started his career playing bass for several progrock bands in the Canterbury area before he finally started the softrock band "National Head Bang" in 1970 and turned to playing keyboard. They released the album "Albert One" i 1971, but without any success. Next stop for Schelhaas was Gary Moore's band and the recording of the album "Grinding Stone" from 1973. After the recording, he left Moore to do solo projects.

July, 1975 he was asked to play keyboard in the band Caravan after Dave Sinclair left them. Jan Schelhaas toured the world around with the band and recorded three albums: "Blind Dog At St. Dunstan's" (1976), "Better By Far (1977) and "Cool Water", which wasn't released until 1994. The summer of 1978, Caravan had a break and Schelhaas accepted an offer of joining Camel to their world tour after their album Breathless. At that time, the band had also included Richard Sinclair and Dave Sinclair as he already had played with in Caravan.

Schelhaas worked with Camel until 1981, where he helped recording "I Can See Your House From Here" from 1979 and the album "Nude" from 1981.