Topaz Jones

He comes onto the stage. He wears slack pants the rustic green color of fallen leaves. They stop at his ankles and pale yellow socks show briefly. He walks the stage in calm strides and shiny black loafers. His tee shirt is an old St. Louis Newspaper cover, bearing the words one of a kind. He is tall and lean, with dreads falling down his back (he keeps several locks to the side). His left ear is pierced and rings adorn his hands. 

“Many of y’all might not know me,” he smiles, ironically confident. Some people clap in recognition. He introduces himself: 1). his name is Topaz Jones 2). he’s currently living in Brooklyn… 3). but he’s originally from Montclair, New Jersey… “Anybody here from Jersey?” he asks, and a bunch of people start to clap, loving such a coincidence. He smiles again and pretty quickly, his DJ starts one of his tracks “Howlin’ to the Moon,” and Topaz moves his body to fall in line with the beat.

His performance was so uninhibited and fun. At one point, he paused to set the hypothetical scene for his song “Winona,” indulging in all the hypothetical details. He tested the audience’s knowledge on old soul artists, wanting to see “what y’all know about this.” When he finished his set, the whole room was clapping.

Topaz has always been an artist, an entrepreneur. He is from a family of musicians and says music was the first thing he learned to care about. When he was in elementary school, he and his cousin sang over demo songs from Yamaha keyboard to and recorded them on cassette tapes to sell to their relatives on the holidays. When he reached middle school, he upgraded to a MacBook and had immediate access to more beats to freestyle on. He uploaded these tracks to Myspace, which he assures have since been deleted. When he got to high school, he met a producer and they cooked up beats in his basement. Topaz began to generate his own sound. 

Topaz has grown as a musician in a rapidly growing technological era, which has changed the ease in which music is produced. He appreciates his more manual music foundation and accredits his laborious understanding of music making to his father, whom “to this day doesn’t use any computers,” just his old MPCS and floppy disks when he composes. 

Topaz has also emerged in the industry at a unique point in time. He finds that upcoming artists are especially demanded to develop and maintain a virtual presence to really exist right now. “I kinda hate social media, yea I hate that sh*t,” he says but a lot of the success of his music career is dependent on these platforms of self-promotion, self-branding. A necessary evil. He envies artists of past generations that could create mystery and could honor privacy in their lives. He says he can’t wait to get to the days when he can be more removed from social media, but he doesn’t know when that’ll come. 

Throughout his artistic journey, Topaz has been on the cusp of many cultural changes and he is still picking up “everything they don’t tell you: where you been always puts you where you got to be. Trust that.”

Topaz Jones, one of a kind.