I was born in San Francisco in 1950 and began singing and composing as a child. My father, Hap Jones, was an early motorcycle pioneer and national racing champion, and my mother, Rose, loved playing piano and creating art. My only sister was Polly the parrot. My first musical influences were the popular songs of my parents' era, film scores and classical, later, the abundance of music in the 1960’s; soul, folk, rock, jazz, African, Brazilian, Celtic and gamelan.

In my teen years I divided my time between still photography, film-making and music, with some of my film work periodically broadcast on local television. I began recording in the early 1960’s and produced hundreds of hours of my own music, first on piano and percussion, then guitar and flute. San Francisco being ground zero for so much music of the time, I saw most of the major rock bands of the era, also the Beatles, the Stones, Hendrix and many of the blues and jazz greats as well. I formed and was part of various local bands performing and creating different genres of original music.

At the end of the 1970’s I created Sweet Tommy, a five piece folk, rock, punk, party band that became one of the top San Francisco club bands of 1980. We played with groups like the Dead Kennedys, the Mutants and Flipper, and had a huge following, eventually becoming the last in-house band at The Palms, where the Tubes and several other major bands made their debut. A mutual friend exposed Sweet Tommy to Iggy Pop and we became one of Iggy’s favorite bands. Our show included many instruments and props; an exploding robot, a foam dinosaur and a full size cardboard car that Tommy drove with his arm over Margie the Mannequin. Our band's line-up included the prolific singer/song writer, Tommy Cullinen, our bass players/singers, Ezra Palmer-Person and later Ruben Sequenza, drummer Barry Mickinley, Dan Christy adding his writing, arranging, singing and incredible guitar work, and me, writing singing, playing a stack of keyboards, accordion and creating props. We produced an eight song, double EP album and created a thousand custom hand painted covers, all different. Some of these covers can be viewed under Photos/Sweet Tommy. The full album is under Music/Sweet Tommy. We performed 160 original tunes in over 350 gigs in and around San Francisco in 1979 and 1980. It was a blast. Early in 1979, I created a 16 mm science fiction film with the band called The UFO Abduction. It was was often shown before performances and can be seen on this website under music/Sweet Tommy/UFO Abduction.

In late 1979 I scored a short animated film called A Bird’s Eye View which won an academy award.

Over the years, as my work was becoming more orchestral, I realized that I needed to expand my musical knowledge, thus in 2003 I became a student at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM) studying first with Alexis Alrich and then with David Conte, one of the last American students of legendary composition teacher Nadia Boulanger. I was a member of the SFCM chorus between 2006 and 2014, and during my time at the Conservatory, I worked with Conrad Susa, composers Alex Lu, Louis Cruz, Eric Choate, and pianist, Keisuke Nakagoshi. My music has been performed by my own bands and chamber groups, the San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, the Zofo Duet and by students and teachers from around the San Francisco Bay Area.

I’ve produced many recordings and worked in radio and film. Woodward’s Gardens, found in the Music tab, features two guitars, piano, flute, oboe, harp, and cello, and is a celebration of San Francisco’s first big amusement park, gardens, museum and zoo.

Dancing on the Brink of the World is a fourteen movement piece for orchestra, period instruments and chorus, celebrating the history of San Francisco, from 1600 to the present. The movements were an ongoing part of the repertoire of the San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra for several concert seasons. The first complete performance was in March of 2013 at the San Francisco Conservatory of music.

I'm currently recording an album of Americana songs. Also in the works is an album of solo piano pieces and another of guitar duets. I live in San Francisco with my wife, composer and writer, Catherine Valentine and the ghosts of our two dogs, Bentley and Isabelle, and Phoebe the rat.