Meet Ocean Prime’s musically inclined GM, Harry Jones

Harry Jones, general manager at Ocean Prime in Boston, has a thing for singing and it’s music to our ears.

“For me, it’s always been about the vocals,” Jones told the Track. “Singing is just something that I’ve always loved because your voice is an instrument at the end of the day.”

As a kid, the Pembroke native said he quickly found his voice and would catch himself humming along to “goofy things you hear on TV” like theme songs and jingles. And as Jones grew older, he took what first started as a silly habit soon and made it a more serious pursuit.

“In high school, I got more into the choir and I had private voice lessons every Saturday morning,” Jones said. “I got really deep deep into it, doing voice competitions. I did a few musicals in high school, but I definitely leaned more towards the choir.”

“A cappella has always been a passion of mine,” he added. “The fact that you can make a guitar chord with four vocal parts and then sing over to essentially make an entire song with just your voice — that is amazing. The possibilities are really endless.”

His choral interests drew him to Berklee College of Music, which he attended for three years. It was while working towards a dual major in vocal performance and music business at the Back Bay school that he ended up changing his tune when it came to his career and ultimately found his place in the hospitality industry.

“I was working in restaurants through college,” Jones said. “The industry really lets you make your own schedule and there were so many people who could pick up shifts, so I could work as a bartender but still keep doing my music.”

Working in the restaurant scene served up an added bonus for Jones, when he came across a couple of coworkers who were instrumentally inclined. He and his former colleagues Marc Edwards and James Perez started meeting up to play music off the clock, forming the group Junkyard Jones & The Trash Can Band.

“The guys I play with right now, I actually met them at a restaurant where we all worked together,” Jones said. “I was a bartender, my drummer was a server and my bass player was a cook. We all worked together and were like, “‘Hey, I play music!’ … ‘Hey I play music! Let’s jam sometime, man!’ And I’ve been playing with them for close to 12 years.”

“We do just cover songs, a lot of oldies up into the 90s one-hit-wonders,” he added of their bar room repertoire. “That’s our sweet spot. We like to play almost every style just to appeal to the crowd because you don’t know who’s sitting down at the bar.”

While busier work schedules may keep Jones and his bandmates from playing as many gigs as years prior, he said he still manages to keep his voice warm whenever they hang out. And he also stays performance-ready thanks to his full-time job in the Seaport.

“The best part of my music background is that I learned how to have stage presence, and I’m on stage when I’m in the dining room here,” Jones said of his Ocean Prime occupation.

“I’ve learned over the years how to have posture, how to present yourself and how to talk to people and it reflects perfectly into what I do today. I wouldn’t have had it any other way.”

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/2IpTShi