Jonas is the sort of musician who hears an orchestra where most people hear an empty room. Give him a piano, a row of keyboards and a few blinking synthesizers, and he will happily build an entire musical universe before lunch.
Raised in Seattle on a steady diet of The Beatles, Elton John, Billy Joel, Stevie Wonder, Steely Dan and Jeff Lynne, Jonas began playing piano as a child. He soon became fascinated not only by melody, but by everything happening behind it. Why settle for one keyboard part when a song clearly needs strings, brass, organ, synthesizer and, in very serious circumstances, cowbell?
After studying piano, composition and orchestral arranging, Jonas worked with touring artists and contributed arrangements to theatre, television and recording projects. One conductor famously described him as “a one-man orchestra with unusually good hair,” an accolade Jonas has done absolutely nothing to discourage.
In The McCartney Years, Jonas is responsible for many of the sounds audiences feel before they consciously notice them. His auxiliary keyboards bring the sweeping strings, bold brass, swirling synthesizers and delicate orchestral colours that make Paul McCartney’s arrangements so ambitious and unmistakable. He also adds vocals to the band’s layered harmonies and serves as its officially designated cowbell authority, a position of enormous responsibility and surprisingly little oversight.
Offstage, Jonas collects vintage keyboards, experiments with obsolete recording equipment and approaches coffee with the seriousness of a laboratory scientist.
Onstage, he is calm amid the chaos, often managing several musical parts at once while making it look suspiciously easy. His work gives The McCartney Years its scale, texture and cinematic sweep, proving that sometimes the person quietly standing behind several keyboards is actually moving the entire orchestra.