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Houston Davis Jones

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Hometown	west palm beach, FL
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Band Members	Houston Davis Jones - Vocals/guitar/mandolin/banjo/... » more
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About the Artist

19 year old composer, songwriter and fretted instrumentalist Houston Davis Jones is a musician without borders. He is equally comfortable in the recording studio working on his self produced albums or in the dance studio working with choreographer Jeff...

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April 2009 Acoustic

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Houston Davis Jones by The Glorious Hum
It's exciting to be able to get fully behind a debut album, in this case Houston Davis Jones' Songs for Existence. The must have a soft spot for his guitar, to make it sound so sweet. Sometimes he tries to do old-school slow, swinging song, and it's not quite what he excells at...but he makes up for any imperfections with perfect moment after perfect moment, "Variations on an Interlude" for example. "Different Hair, Different Shoes" is a good-natured song about change, and one of my favorites on the album. Jones describes his interest in "return song to it's beautiful origins as an offshoot of classical composition," which he succeeds beautifully in during "Waltz for December. As for sound-a-likes, I'm pretty sure he'd fit in equally in a playlist of Gerald Garcia and Jack Johnson at his sweetest. Sometimes he channels Elliot Smith at least dour, Simon and Garfunkel in Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme, a bit too much of Jens Lekman, or just enough of Sea Wolf.

[Local] singer takes classical approach by Palm Beach Post
One of the first things you notice about young area singer/songwriter Houston Davis Jones is how far beyond his years he appears. A self-assured recent graduate of the G-Star School of the Arts in West Palm Beach, the 19-year-old Jones of West Palm Beach plays guitar and sings in an understated style that evokes comparisons from old-school Donovan to modern Beck. But ask him about his songwriting influences, and you won't hear those names, or anything remotely close. You might, however, get math and history lessons. All musical scales, harmonies and rhythms are based on mathematics," Jones says, "so as Sun Ra says, we're one giant orchestra, and we're all playing a part. I actually like early 20th century classical composers like Debussy and Ravel, especially for their variations and form. Classical music is great to study for form. I think the best music isn't bound by genres, but honestly, I haven't purposely listened to any music other than classical for the past two years. When you listen to rock or folk, you end up brainwashed, and you write for those genres." Classical influences appear on Jones' debut CD, Songs for Existence, such as on the ballad Antarctica. But there's also pop, both whimsical (85% of Songs are Love Songs) and acidic (I Miss My Home); folk-ish pieces like The Floors Won't Scrub Themselves, and elements of reggae and big band jazz on Precessional Movement. Musicians like saxophonist Diego Contreras, bassist/pianist Tomek Wierzbicki and viola player Trevor Falk add to Jones' demi-orchestral works. Jones has already been accepted to the North Carolina School of the Arts, and is trying to decide whether to study classical composition and film scoring there or at the California Institute of the Arts. He's scored films by student directors at Dreyfoos and been commissioned for a ballet by the school's dance department. The work will premiere in the spring of 2009.

Talent from area produced bumper crop of music in by Palm Beach Post
Best acoustic-based CD Houston Davis Jones, Songs for Existence (independent). Acoustic-based is one of several descriptions for this recent G-Star graduate's debut CD. Jones (myspace/houstondavisjones>) is joined by classical string players on such pieces as Antarctica; adds horns to the jazzy Precessional Movement; and goes the post-Beatles psychedelia route on I Miss My Home. The singer, guitarist and songwriter will preview tunes from his forthcoming follow-up, Projected Living, at 7 p.m. Saturday at the multi-band holiday party thrown by one of the other performers.

Songs For Existence by Houston Davis Jones by AntarcticArt.Net
Houston Davis is a West Palm Beach, Florida-based singer/songwriter, sounding at times remarkably like the 1970s-era British folk artist Nick Drake. According to Houston’s myspace.com commentary, “Music is deeply rooted in mathematics. All concepts of harmony, melody and rhythm are represented by ratios and patterns. Mathematics is the language of the universe. No matter what societal language you may speak, a mathematical law will ring true in any country or known part of space. Music is the auditory manifestation of the language of mathematics, and is a powerful communicative device that can convey many different ideas and emotions to individuals of any background. The world is a beautiful, terrifying, and complex place, but when framed inside of a piece of music, reality becomes a little easier to handle.” His debut album contains the track Antarctica/The End of a Great Cycle. Lyrics are: “ I can see no shelter, I can’t see no place to hide from the storm, Shoreline slowly rising, Dry land getting hard to find, There were these clues, Warnings written on the wall for us to find, Left behind by a people time forgot, What did they know? How could they see what we were blind to, with all our research and technology? Now the time’s come to dance in this great ballet, to play our part in this play, the cosmic orchestra is nearing the coda. Let’s pray.” We asked Houston Davis about the Antarctic theme of the lyrics and he explained: “There are three layers of meaning in the song: Level one is just about global warming and the melting of the polar ice caps. Level two treats many of the lyrics metaphorically in reference to human emotions. The third and primary reason is more complicated... there is a book called Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock, which is about the forgotten knowledge of the Egyptians and South American civilizations such as the Olmecs and Mayans. One of the bodies of evidence used to support the presence of advanced technology in these cultures is a set of maps from the 1500s (including the Turkish Admiral Piri Re’is map) that accurately chart Antarctica and its surrounding waters, despite the fact that Antarctica was not known of until 1773 and unexplored and unmapped until the mid 1800s. The cartographers of these 16th century maps claim to have merely transcribed the maps from even earlier copies, which were supposedly recovered from the Egyptian libraries from Greeks. Accurate cartography wasn’t developed until well after the rise of western European culture and wasn’t even perfected until around the time of Columbus and the invention of the chronograph. The book suggests that due to these maps’ existence, we can assume that ancient cultures were mathematically savvy and able to achieve things that took our own culture thousands of years to accomplish. Of course the subject is very controversial and like much of history, is hotly debatable and indefinite. I do not necessarily believe that the maps are truly evidence of ancient technology but I do find the subject fascinating. The rest of the book talks about ancient mythology, the Noah flood, sunken cities, etc., and all those silly New Age things. It then proposes that the ancients are attempting to warn us of impending disaster, which they then relate to 2012 and all that. I hope that helped you out, though I can understand if it just obfuscated the song title’s theme even more.” www.houstondavisjones.com

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