That silly ass, but somehow appropriate name I am stuck with story…
20+ years ago, when I would hand out some of my first solo tapes/CDs to people, I noticed I got a less desirable reaction to my music when people thought it was just me doing everything. Maybe it felt invasive to listen to one guys artistic output? Not sure, but the reactions were definitely different. So, in a sort of social experiment, I began inventing band members for my CD covers, all based on twists on my first name “Jason”.
J-bone played bass, Jason on vocals and guitars, Pepe (long story) on wind instruments, and Jazzyspoon on synths/drum machines/turntables/mixdown.
The reactions were noticeable enough to continue doing it for a long while, though those projects went under a lot of different names. For those that knew me well, it was a comfortable transition for Jazzyspoon to start doing solo work.
When I moved to Denver in 2001, I wanted a moniker that wouldn’t let people (and/or myself) take the music so seriously. “JA(zzy)S(po)ON” seemed ridiculous enough to let me explore multiple genres and I found it safely “googleable” and light in tone. 18 years later I still have it as my electronic music moniker, despite multiple people writing to me over the years to request that I change my moniker to something more menacing and misspelled like ‘Vort3x’ or ‘Symm^tech’ or something like that so that they can look cooler for liking it/writing it on their geometry notebook cover. I’m either too dumb and stubborn to change it or I actually have come to grips that it still keeps me approachable and open to experimentation. I might even like it.
My solo project that predates Jazzyspoon was and still is called “From Noise to Water” and it sounded too serious/pretentious for me to use as an electronic musician moniker and is a google search engine nightmare. So, I keep that name for my sloppy, less produced acoustic stuff. In fact, my actual “self release” label is called “from Noise to Water Productions”.
rant over.
