Jesse Cotton Stone

BIO:
I began my path in music and the age of 7 on harmonica, moving on to piano at age 9, and found my voice in the guitar at age 11. Sold my Matchbox Car collection to buy my first electric guitar from a pawnshop for $75 when I was 12. Couldn't understand the jargon I was getting from instructors and began learning by ear from old blues recordings. My parents took me to blues clubs in Kansas City where fell in love with soul food and old-skool bluesmen who would tell it how it is.
I met the late Junior Wells at age 13 and jammed with his band at a small club date. A year later I jammed at the Chicago House of Blues with them at his memorial concert. Bless his soul. At age 14 I started tryin' to put a band together and floated hundreds of different incarnations of the Jesse Cotton Stone Blues Band.
At age 16 I had a slew of profound experiences on psychedelic substances and North Indian Classical Music which lead me to a vision of my true path in music (No discredit to Blues as my rooted foundation). I began listening to and writing music from a different perspective.
After five years of playin' way too many cover tunes and not enough of my own material I went to Seattle to try my hand at the west coast songwriting scene. I ended up doing alot of poetry reads and acoustic open mics at coffee shops and living on the street and friends' couches while busking for food money.
I eventually ditched Seattle with some gypsies and set off on the open road where we lived in a tiny subaru with three humans and a medium sized dog. We traveled and played music and smoked pot and had a real good, free time to express ourselves as cosmic Bards.
I ended up back home in Colorado Springs after working in the San Diego skateboard industry for a couple months. A bunch of fellas I had played with earlier on where putting together a blues fusion band. Five of us lived in an attic with one bedroom for several months. Eventually everyone, except for the drummer and I had gone crazy before it was over. Get this! The Singer swollowed a couple bottles of sleeping pills, got caught and tried to deny it 'til joining the army and going to war in Iraq. The bassist won $50,000 on a scratch ticket, promised to start a production company, then wouldn't come to rehearsal because he was doing coke with a hooker. The other guitar player refused to leave his crackhead girlfriend and ended up stealing some of our gear and leaving town.
So, the drummer and I went to college where I studied music theory, piano, guitar, voice, harmony, ear training, yoga and tai chi while we started project experimenting with live, psychedelic drum&Bass incorporated with progressive metallic fusion. We called it Sonorous Penetrations.
After extensive writing and recording processes we called for a break. I traveled to the Big Island of Hawaii. I lived in different areas working the land in exchange for rent and foraging food (and EBT). I drank coconut water, naked on the beaches with gorgeous goddess ladies and played guitar all day and wrote beautiful songs and meditated in the jungle and ate sprouts for awhile and had the idea to go to Cali and study with the Greatest Maestro of North Indian Classical music in the world: Ali Akbar Khan.
I ended up in the richest neighborhood in America with no shoes on. (By the way, it's not a good idea to show up to the greatest Indian music school ever with dirty-ass, bare feet.)I learned some of the greatest lessons of my life sitting in class, trying to keep up with technique exercises and sitting at the feet of an old Indian man who was fixated on popcorn.
I called up my drummer friend and he came out and we ended up on the street, recycling beer cans we stole from bars for lunch money. Eventually got a house with a bass player and regrouped Sonorous Penetrations into a hardcore/acid band! We played some gigs and disbanded again. The drummer left town out of discouragement and came back a few months later and then we had a falling out over ethical differences.
So, now I'm revising material from over the years and working on a record of my own stuff which I recorded last year in Chiangmai,Thailand while studying Massage therapy. Can't tell you the end results yet, though. I gotta hand to ya if you made it this far!
One of my current projects in the works is a Performance Art Collective consisting of video production artists, visual artists, poets, hula hoop and fire dancers, a tribal percussion ensemble, DJs, VJs, full electric band, sound healers and permaculture visionaries which will put on multi-sensory medicine ceremonies intended for the facilitation of participants and open minded audience members to undergo an introspective process of their own self-healing. If you'd like anymore info or to be a part of this vision please let me know by contacting me.
So, that's all I want to share about myself right now and I appreciate you taking the time to explore this summary of my musical path, thus so far.
Demon Angel
the Phantom
Cumbus Remix