Preacherman

Armed with a modified organ and a wooden puppet as a scrappy sidekick, a spaced-out funk prophet named Preacherman was just another outlet for the cosmic creativity of Oakland musician Tim Jones. After self-releasing an album in 1979, Jones spent much of the next few decades quietly working on music, growing more confident in his songwriting and eventually recording songs that he'd release on home-made CD-Rs. The music comprised strange, spiritual one-man band grooves that sometimes broke down into conversations with "T.J. Hustler," the gravelly-voiced persona of the puppet Jones sometimes performed with live. It wouldn't be until 2018 that the best of these raw home recordings were collected and released by <a href="spotify:search:label%3A%22Luaka+Bop%22">Luaka Bop</a> as the sprawling Universal Philosophy: Preacherman Plays T.J. Hustlers Greatest Hits.

Self-taught electrician, engineer, multi-instrumentalist, and songwriter Tim Jones built an insular world of unconventional sound and thought throughout the '70s, '80s, and '90s. Performing in the Bay Area, he took on many different names for his one-man projects, realizing his off-kilter mystical synth funk tunes on a self-released LP called Age of Individualism, which he put out in 1979 under the moniker T.J. Hustler. He would later re-assign the T.J. Hustler persona to a wooden puppet that he would perform with in a sort of psychedelic ventriloquist act, having long conversations about metaphysical concepts with the puppet as steady drum machine rhythms clattered along. Working throughout the '80s as a technician for IBM, Jones sometimes performed as Preacherman, other times going under names like MIDI Man or the Ironing Board Man. He continued performing and recording music (as well as collecting his philosophies in a self-published book) as the years went on, distributing his sounds on homemade CD-R releases. Jones' homespun funk vamps and universal concepts were eventually discovered by <a href="spotify:search:label%3A%22Luaka+Bop%22">Luaka Bop</a>, which worked with the artist in the late 2010s to reissue a compilation of his best material. ~ Fred Thomas, Rovi