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While attending Salisbury School, a college preparatory school in Connecticut, he sang in the Glee Club and played keyboards with The Four HepCats, a band comprised of him and a few classmates. He also sang and toured locally with the Triple Quartet, a smaller, select few of the larger, Glee Club, but he still didn’t feel he was making any progress as a musician. It wasn’t until he arrived at Tulane University during his freshman year that he realized how important music was to him. The students had been pre-selected to live in dorms with students of similar interests, thus, some floors were named the Architecture floor, or the Engineering floor, etc. His wing was aptly named the ‘Creative Arts’ floor, where no one student shared the same academic field of interest. Oddly enough, the one thing that all of the students did share was the fact that every single one played an instrument. His roommate was a Dutchman who studied the bassoon; almost everyone else, however, played the guitar. He immediately began borrowing guitars from everyone on his floor that owned one. The only problem was that EVERYONE was right handed and he was not. So he taught himself how to play guitar from the right-handed perspective, which made things twice as challenging.

Although his time in New Orleans was short lived, he found enough time to learn how to play the bass guitar along the way as well. Upon returning to New York City, he became a self-taught drummer almost overnight, and quickly joined New York City’s underground music scene. While showcasing his multi-instrumental and vocal skills up and down the east coast with various groups, he began to take a strong interest in production and audio engineering, which would later lead to him building his own recording studio.

Throughout the nineties, he toured and recorded many CDs for various groups in and around the NYC area, ranging from film scores and jingles to barbershop quartets, jazz ensembles and alternative rock projects, but for the past ten years or so he has focused mainly on hip hop production and audio engineering, while steadily continuing to compose his own music as well. In 2001, he released a four-song demo of original works that he performed at various clubs, which, for a period of time, seemed to bring him even closer to his dreams of garnering major label interest, until he finally realized that it was in the recording studio, not the stage, that he felt not only most comfortable, but most in tune with his musical muse…

To this day, regardless of genre, Jason Johnson continues to strive musically, whether it’s in the form of composing, engineering, or teaching, he always depends on the gift with which God has so graciously blessed him: his ear. It is this gift that leads him down unbeaten musical paths. It is with this gift that he composes entire works in his head, already knowing what the final draft would, AND should, sound like. It is also with this gift that he can dissect any song on the radio and tell you the chord progression, time signature, and root key, all while the song is still playing!

So it is with these ears that he attempts to write a new future for music; a future where people aren’t afraid to push boundaries; where the status quo not only doesn’t matter, but doesn’t exist. A future where people not only will hear his music, but they will also LISTEN to it… <
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