Biography
Jar-E draws on his skills as a multi-instrumentalist—upright bass, trumpet, piano, and guitar—to merge jazz, reggae, worldbeat, and pop/rock into a single hybrid sound. While enrolled at Warren Wilson College in Asheville, NC, he joined forces with a quintet that combined hip-hop and jazz with rock ingredients, an approach that later shaped the direction of his own recordings. The ensemble’s growing local following raised Jar-E’s profile in the Asheville music community and, several years afterward, helped him obtain a recording contract for his subsequent project, the Jar-E Quartet. After completing a three-song demo, Jar-E left the group and spent six months traveling through Europe while assembling his debut album, Heartache. Back in the United States he turned his attention to a second project, the sample-heavy War Songs and the Muse, issued in 2007. Once that album appeared, he again set out, this time visiting Greece, Cuba, and Britain in search of fresh material before ultimately settling in Mexico to begin work on Chicas Malas. Recorded inside a converted barn alongside longtime producer Keith Saunders, the album replaced the experimental textures of War Songs with the direct, unvarnished character of Jar-E’s stage performances.
Albums
