Last Post - New Format

All good things must come to an end and I can't thank Blogger enough. What a cool platform to launch and read about ideas. I started blogging out of a need to vent about the state of the music industry and politics and hundreds of posts and thousands of hits later, I'm feeling the need to move on to a format which expresses my worldview beyond the occasional wordy rant. That new media will be a recently launched Tumblr page and while much of the subject matter will stay the same, the posts will be shorter and more colorful with many more pictures and Mp3's. Instead of showing you what's up with one band on facebook, one on twitter, one on... I'll instead try to post pictures, videos and Mp3's from our growing number of musical projects (Ape Tit, Trevor C Jones, The Sessh, Frogs Gone Fishin') and even give some visual help, quotes and links when I'm talking about more obscure topics like politics or religion.

But most of all, thank you. Thank you for listening to and in this case reading about what I have to say as an artist. Which I've found out is a lot. I think conscious artistry is a gift in 2012. Lots of people keep their pulse on society or art or politics but ALL of it affects us. Our artistic place as Americans is in danger. The only thing that can help is more artists, doing what they love to do, but also making money at what they love to do. Again, we live in 2012 not 1968. Perceptions of art and what artists are worth have changed, and not with inflation let me divulge. So whether it's music on your computer, a blog, a song, a painting, a sculpture, small drawings in your checkbook or one of the most accessible forms of art and my personal favorite, poems, keep creating. It will keep you sane.

Especially if the Broncos don't do better this year.


-Trevor C Jones
10/25/12

Banks

We've always known that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Machiavelli, Hitler and George Bush II are good examples, for different reasons.

So why do we give the financial industry the same types of unregulated power we used to grant to kings and lords?

In a kingdom, peasants payed a fee to the king, not a tax, but rent to use the land for business. In banking, you pay banking fees for the right to keep your money in a safe institution.

It's easy to see how the first situation seems mob-like and unfair, if I'm contributing to a kingdom's success, why should I pay additional fees?

But with banks, conceiving of our money as property might help us see that it's the same thing.

A bank is allowed to use your money to lend out to other consumers or businesses. They make money on the deal but take a far-bigger percentage than you see in interest. Also, the aforementioned fees can be used to invest in things like stocks and bonds, money which is used to strengthen the kingdom. Strength gained on the back of your hard work, of which you share no benefit.

The deregulation of banks made this worse.

One thing that has always existed at banks is the greed and non-compassion associated with turning a customer's money into more money, while shutting them out of the benefits. The lack of humanity in dishing out lucrative housing loans to those who couldn't pay them resulted in a full blown crisis in 2008.

But the bankers continue receiving bonuses that make a doctor or lawyer's salary look dismal, not to mention a working mother of two who is by necessity, forced to bank at her local branch. When I worked in special education it would break my heart to see teachers paying for school supplies out of there own pockets.

Have you ever tried to get on a lease without a bank, or put gas in your tank at midnight when there is no attendant?

We need banks. We don't need to choose the ones who put us on with shiny blue storefronts and "low fees". We need to find a way to inject some compassion into our capitalism.

Or we're all done for. You. Me. The environment. All of it will suffer because we have given the power of billions of dollars to a handful of individuals. You think history would have taught us differently.

Solo Show

I've been in bands for about ten years now. I joined my first, One Too Short (named after my best friend, our vertically challenged drummer) shortly after learning how to make any noise on the guitar at all sometime around the 7th grade. I always had a penchant for performance, putting on plays and show in my parents living room, but this was a whole new, loud, sexually charged world of rock and roll that I've been enjoying ever since. Playing at Red Rocks and touring across this amazing country of ours have been the highlights of a career which I hope is just beginning.

More than a desire to perform, I've always had a desire to be successful. Inherited from my amazing father who worked all day into the night and was unbelievably committed to raising my punk-ass, I don't care if I'm selling rock candy or records, I want to be the best. It's a common trait and what makes us all tick, but music wasn't really set up to be a competitive venture. Sure bands and labels and agencies compete and that's healthy and pushes us forward, but as an inter-personal strategy, your best bet is to be cordial and non-annoying because no one likes a jerk but everyone remembers one...

The game is about sustainability now, not who can be the biggest rock-star-jerk in the quickest amount of time. So in the name of sustainability and the Wu-Tang, I'm diversifying my bonds! If I think about my musical portfolio, Frogs Gone Fishin' is my bedrock, the project which has allowed me to establish a TON of network connections around the state and country. Diversification began when I was asked to join The Sessh and it's been nothing short of a blast learning my musical partner Cristian's music and chanking along as Roy raps and lays it down on the drums behind us. Before he joined Frogs, Jeff Jani was in the Big Motif when we started Ape Tit's current formation, Jeff on drums and production, myself on keys and guitar. I have Jeff to thank for much of my current production knowledge, he's a Jedi not only on the drums but in and around Ableton Live, the software we use for tracking and performance. We are certainly headed toward a synthesis of live performance and pre-production (DJ's for lack of a more encompassing term), and my need to do well in the music business, plus a requisite love of the studio (it's been my world, late at night when not touring) has culminated in the music I'm producing and performing now, completely on my own.

There's something intrinsically motivating when success or failure rests entirely on one pair of shoulders. Every snare hit, guitar loop or mixing trick I employ is my decision and a result of what I've absorbed from myriad sources: others producers, band mates and most importantly, my own ears over the years.

What's exciting about starting a new project these days is that the period most bands go through, of struggling to network, are largely over for me, at least in-state. I'll be releasing music at release parties in Breckenridge (320 south 7/18) and Vail (Samana 7/19) and opening for well-known Motet side project, JUNO WHAT, at Phibstock (7/27). The period that will never be over is the endless quest to not only share my music, but getting you to show up and shake your butt like you mean it.

Let's dance so hard our ancestors feel it.

New Solo Project

I'm excited to announce that in addition to Ape Tit, Sessh, and Frogs Gone Fishin' shows I will be playing some solo dates this summer including album release parties at Cervantes Ballroom in Denver on June 20th and Samana Lounge in Vail on July 19th.

Please LIKE my Facebook Page HERE

and

Download the album for FREE HERE

The music I'm making with Ableton Live is different in that I'm free to record drums, bass, guitars, keyboards, vocals and any number of sounds and samples, right from home or on the road, on my own time. You might be surprised by the lack of guitar work if you're familiar with Frogs or my other projects, but keys and rhythm have always been a fascination of mine, guitar a way to melt faces and lead a band. PLEASE ENJOY AND COME OUT TO THE SHOWS!!!

What New Orleans Feels Like

It's hard for many people to imagine what New Orleans, NOLA as we affectionately call it, is like without ever having been here. I thought that while we are down here for Jazz Fest, playing late-night shows and eating food, I would break it down into not 5, but 6 sense perceptions of what NOLA is like for the uninitiated.

SMELL:

Bottom line, NOLA smells. Good and bad. In fact the contrast is what makes the place so dynamic to walk around. In only a few minutes one might smell alternating heavenly and loathsome wafts of fish, trash, garlic, gardenia flowers, fresh swamp water, salty sea air, sugar, coffee, more garlic and more gardenias. The food and flowers smells utterly delicious, the trash and water stagnant and repulsive.

TASTE:

Choosing from the above, one hopes to end up with only a good smelling item in the mouth at any given time and their is no shortage of morsels and meals around town. In my mind, no other place in America has the range of culinary options, minus the trendy vegan-type non-food we have in certain regions, ahem, Colorado... You can get just about anything put in your pork sausage, alligator was my choice the first day we rolled into town. My favorite is the way New Orleanians work with fruit. An old mid-city fav is blueberry-lemonade and just this morning I had a peach-strawberry muffin. Abita Purple Haze is one of the only reputable fruit-beers in the nation, appeasing even the staunchest Bud-drinkers. After Katrina, an influx of workers from Mexico has led to one fine burrito crafted on Claiborne Ave. and there is no shortage of Italian or Sushi joints either. Still, some chicory in the coffee and a cup of gumbo is just about the most New Orleans you can get in two cups.

TOUCH:

It's humid. Beyond conventional means of odor and moisture control, learning to exist in a bath of one's own perspiration is par for the course. The ground is also highly uneven (read: POTHOLES) due to the location of the city on a constantly shifting subterranean swamp. NOLA is a place of rich materials: aged wood and wrought-iron, stained glass and thick costume velvet.

SEE:

New Orleans is an international city. Europeans, Japanese, West Africans and transplants from the Caribbean all mingle in a place that certainly looks more diverse than most of the rest of the region. The flora and fauna are diverse enough to match the human population, as well. Huge oak tree branches canopy the streets, growing amongst patches of tropical flowers. The clouds move overhead at a quick pace next to the gulf, and sunsets are a fiery purple affair.

HEAR:

Sounds in New Orleans work much the same way the smell does, wafting into your ears, carried on humid swamp currents and inland ocean breeze. The city is alive with cats, dogs, cars, men and women shouting in greeting and conflict, not to mention music. While there certainly are several types of "New Orleans Music", the brass band variety being the least replicated anywhere, you can hear music from regional Louisiana, the South, New York, L.A., the Caribbean, South America and Africa en masse on Frenchman Street and Uptown. New Orleans is the main refuge, as it has always been, for musics of the African Diaspora and the highly percussive result is a musician and listeners dream, alike.

FEEL:

There is something which appeals to a sixth sense in NOLA, an energy which peels off buildings onto the sidewalk, up from cracks in the swamp just inches below the pavement. It is the soul of the Civil War and slavery and untold horror and joy played out over and over again, a production few other American cities have known in their metropolitan theaters. The force is so great, a hurricane couldn't wash it away.

And when I walk down a darkened alley, only candlelight flickering from gas lamps above shuttered French Quarter doors though a thick fog... I can feel it.

NEW ALBUM DOWNLOAD

http://trevorjonesmusic.bandcamp.com/

FREE DOWNLOAD OF THE NEW SOLO ALBUM

The Daily Routine

The Daily Routine

A sneak peak from my new album, coming out on 4.20

Religiousness

disclaimer: don't read this if your feelings get hurt easily or you think your religion is superior to other religions and get all huffy and puffy about it...

Looking below, I haven't blogged since January. I'm not sorry this time, I just counted and played 63 shows since Jan 9, my last post, or a little more than two shows every three days, if you're a geek like that. It's been a fantastic winter playing with Frogs, The Sessh and Ape Tit and now that the weather is warming up on this Easter weekend, I'm starting to think about summer festivals and our yearly tour to New Orleans, leaving later this month. I had a wonderful Easter brunch with my parents, on the rare occasion I get to take time to visit with them in person. During my busy schedule I always make sure to do one thing, and that is meditate. Whether for 5 seconds or 30 minutes, I try to spend some time every focusing on nothing but breathing. It's part of being a Buddhist, and if you try it you'll find that oftentimes you're not really breathing, and specifically, not breathing out as fully as you can. It's like we spend part of our lives in partial hyperventilation. Try checking your breathing next time you're driving home from work.

Buddhism is a philosophy, not a religion. I was raised as an Episcopalian, a word I had to spell check just now, and after serving as an acolyte (alter-boy) I became skeptical in my teens. Now I'm a firm agnostic, and have trouble accepting any of the scientific impossibilities involved with Christianity. We know the human body is irrecoverable once lifeless, and furthermore, accounts of Jesus weren't written until 60-200 hundred years after his death. Could you write an account of Abe Lincoln's life in 2012, without use of computers or even a good number of people who could read and write walking around? I think the view that only followers of Jesus, or Allah or Gumby for that matter, get into heaven accounts for some of the worst historical events ever recorded. If you're enemies are all going to hell, who cares how they die?

But there is another movement which concerns me, as much as narrow-minded Christians, extremist Muslims or unwavering, militaristic Zionists. It's atheists who have a strong, yet completely non-human view of god which is equally as destructive as any of the above listed groups. They are doing the exact thing they sometimes preach against, the active conversion of others to their viewpoint. People need to decide what they think on their own, a billboard stating "God Doesn't Exist, Stop Worrying About It" doesn't help anyone. Just like I don't think anyone has it truly figured out, I don't think atheists are correct in their assessment. Yes, the burden of proof should fall on someone claiming something DOES exist. If I came to you and explained that purple aliens, or Zeus or Satan DOES exist, I better back it up. But to aggressively claim you have proof that something unprovable doesn't exists is complete BS, as well.

Atheists miss the point. To say that something unobservable is real, or not real, is an egotistical move. What are you, a god scientist? Is there still oil under the surface of the ocean, thanks BP, in the Gulf of Mexico? Was Osama in Pakistan? You don't know jack, Jack, and to think that life is anything but the case would be to really bum out Plato who said:

"The only thing I know is that I don't know jack".

But don't we feel something more, as human beings, than simply our flesh and bone desires and day-to-day monotony? Next time you're drowning your morning-after hangover with a latte, staring at the foam patterns, getting all philosophical about why exactly we do this alcohol-driven evolutionary dance of work and sex called life week-in and week-out, ask yourself if you're not really inquiring about the existence of something more. I would also argue that the self-confirmation of that "more" is what keeps us alive, what keeps us from going lemming-status out the airplane or bus door on some days. We have to relish that with art and music, food and sex, love and compassion and find that "more" and instead of thinking this a hedonistic exercise, enjoy what this life has to offer, instead of conjecturing what the afterlife might hold for us. Find the beauty herein and overlook the ugliness, find the godliness inside. Then, instead of telling others about it, show them, walk humbly and help others. Jesus, Buddha and Allah, "the compassionate and merciful" one according to the Qur'an all taught this.

It's us humans who keep putting our egos in the way.

http://www.mormon.org
http://www.televisiontunes.com/South_Park_-_Hippitus_Hoppitus.html

Why Football Matters

I read about this guy who didn't like football last week. He claims it's a brutal game which harks back to our gladiatorial times. I fully agree with his point but think it might serve him well to reassess whether that's such a bad thing. Has he been to Spain? They still fight bulls there. All they did was exchange the Roman lion for an animal which can't readily eat a human with its mouth.

I grew up playing football. My parents are both UT alumni and football was always on in the house. Come fall each year, it was time to go get weighed, fitted for pads and commit hours of each week and weekend to the game. I grew early and started out as a lineman, pushing around other early bloomers in cleats and ill-fitting football pants with the tail-bone pad sticking out above the ass in the back. Later on in high school my height dictated that I should be a receiver and defensive back. I was particularly awful at the latter, letting wideouts from North Denver burn me on out-routes I had no business covering.

But the experience taught me discipline and that we aren't made of glass, plus a little contact doesn't hurt anybody but in fact makes you stronger. One could disagree when the concussion-prone NFL is in question, more on that in a minute. Other than getting hit "over the middle", a term used to describe devastatingly unforeseen bodily damage on passing routes, by burly linebackers, the most uncomfortable feeling I can remember was on sunny yet cold days after it had snowed and iced over the night before. Getting tackled hurts. Getting tackled into the icy puddles that would form on the less than manicured soccer-cum-football fields in south Denver hurt your feelings. Your bones. The cold muddy slush covering your body under your pads for the next hours only added insult to injury. But it wasn't injury. And old coach of mine used to ask if your issue was "an owie or an injury", an important distinction for anyone who's thinking about being a cry baby at any point. "No blood, No foul", is how people insensitive to dangling limbs or internal bleeding might phrase it.

More-over than making ya' tougher, football serves a severely important social function, just like gladiator games did, but in a much shinier, glossier context where the ad space sold is as much an impetus as any to keep the hits coming.

Society isn't all candy canes and gummy bears. People have beef, social strife caused by you name it: class inequality, racial tension or just downright ignorance. People also need avenues to blow off that stress, social blow-off valves that prevent any serious violence on a broad scale. Putting your love, hate, angst or passion into a team with the name of a beast like the Lions or Bears or mythical creature like a Titan or Giant is far better than putting it into a name like the Crips or Bloods or any number of less malignant, but still corruptive groups that society gets involved with. That energy is well spent on intensely passionate, but politically pointless teams, an opiate for the masses. Soccer and Cricket serve much of the same function, worldwide.

When I lived in New Orleans for college the Saints weren't a particularly spectacular team. They actually earned the name the "Aint's" by the some of the cities more cynical, long-time residents. After Katrina, an enormous speed bump in everybody's life at the time, the team's future in NOLA was questionable as moving the franchise became a topic of discussion. When they won the Super Bowl a couple years later, people freaked. It was so symbolic to see the team that plays inside the Superdome, a veritable battle shelter during Katrina, win the big one. It symbolized a complete return to a city that care constantly forgets.

So yes, football is rough and it's great anytime the league changes a rule to prevent concussions and the like. But people are rough. People have the need to see aggression acted out one way or another, it's evolution and an impulse we've learned to put into healthy outlets, but as the sanctimonious John Elway has famously been quoted as saying recently... "Let 'em play!"