Passing Strange | Jon Spurney

Classmate Jon Spurney has been working on Passing Strange, an interesting piece of musical theater that is the subject of a Spike Lee documentary coming out in a few weeks.

 

Jon is an accomplished musician who played keyboards on David Byrne’s latest album, Looking Backward, and played guitar and sang on John Cale’s recent release Hobo Sapiens. He has performed with artists as diverse as Jewel, Natalie Merchant, Stew and Amy Rigby, and has made numerous television appearances including NBC’s Tonight Show with Jay Leno and CBS This Morning. He performed in Sarah McClachlan’s Lilith Fair Festival in 1999, and most recently appeared at the HBO Comedy Fest in Aspen with TastiSkank.

Jon performed on stage in the off-Broadway hit Hedwig and the Angry Inch with 80’s pop icon Ally Sheedy, which ran for two years at New York’s Jane Street Theater from 1999-2000, as well as in Greenburg and Goldwasser’s rock musical People are Wrong! at the Vineyard Theater in 2005. He served as musical director for the off-Broadway hit Planet Banana at the Ars Nova and as bandleader for The Soundtracks Live shows at the UCB Theater featuring cast members of Saturday Night Live. He participated in the Sundance Theater Lab in 2005 with Passing Strange, and participated in further workshops of the show in New York and at Stanford University.

Jon most recently composed and performed music for the new sketch comedy show Short Circuitz. He also composed and performed incidental music for The Colbert Report and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on Comedy Central. He has composed jingles for television commercials for over 19 years and was awarded a Bronze Lion at the Cannes film festival for his commercial scoring work. He provides live piano accompaniment for silent films at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art, The American Museum of the Moving Image, and for the Film Studies Department of Yale University.

If you would like to read more about Jon and his work, including a very interesting interview he gave (that includes a question about Jon waking up with Clarence Thomas in a Las Vegas hotel room), you should check out the link below.

Passing Strange | Jon Spurney