A sometime-St. Thomas jazz musician is livening up our shores once again with his trumpet and flugelhorn.
Duke Jones lived in the territory for about five years before Hurricane Hugo, and he says the islands have left a sentimental mark on him.
Currently appearing at the Bakkeroe's Club in Marriott's Frenchman's Reef with the Jazmyn Duo, he has fond memories of the old Gladys' Cafe in a courtyard off Main Street, where he played regularly with local vibraphonist Mario de Chabert.
"How the island has changed, " he muses, remembering other gigs at the late Barnacle Bill's in Sub Base, too.
He originally came to St. Thomas with his then-wife, Michelle Schultebrandt, whom he met in New York.
Settling in for a month on St. Thomas is a nice change of pace, Jones says, for someone who is "traveling 11 months a year now. It used to be you'd play for two months, then four. Not now."
The most interesting travel by far, he says, has been his recent trips to Johannesburg, South Africa, where he played with internationally acclaimed trumpeter Hugh Masekela.
"It's a really big country," Jones said of South Africa. "You look, and then you look some more. There's just no end."
His plans are to return to that vast land on an annual basis to perform with Masekela.
Jones, a youthful 47, got his start in White Plains, New York. No one else in his family was musical, he says — "They were all engineers, into electronics."
But playing in the high school band decided him on where he was going to go. The band, which went by the name Atlantic Stars, went professional right after high school. You may remember its popular hit "Always." His career has also embraced work with a spectrum of other groups, from Kid Creole and the Coconuts to The Temptations.
Jones can be heard live and in person nightly through the end of August except Monday at Bakkeroe's from 9 p.m. until around 1 a.m. Come November, he'll have a CD out, "Duke Jones and Friends."