Jon Smith is a native New Yorker. He began his career as a receptionist, tape duper, and disc cutter at Dick Charles Recording, in Times Square, before moving to The Hit Factory Studios in 1978. Starting at The Hit Factory as a gopher, he quickly became an assistant engineer working with acts like Art Garfunkel, B.B. King, Hall & Oates, The Village People, Tim Curry, Blondie, The Rolling Stones, Stevie Nicks, Bob Seger, Boz Scaggs and many others.
In 1980, after working on the Rolling Stones album, Emotional Rescue (and asking, "Can it get any better than working with The Stones?"), Jon had the honor of working with John Lennon and Yoko Ono on what turned out to be John's final record released while he was alive, Double Fantasy.
What can be said about spending over three months in a room with John Lennon and Yoko Ono? For a Beatles lover it was the experience of a lifetime. Jon went on to work on two solo albums with Yoko Ono and the John and Yoko album Milk and Honey. He also spent a year at Yoko's apartment in the Dakota going through John's entire collection of audio tapes cataloguing and digitizing them. This would become The Lost Lennon Tapes show broadcast on Westwood One Radio Network between 1988 and 1992.
After leaving The Hit Factory he went on to work with Kenny G, Leonard Cohen, Judy Collins, The Plasmatics, Dixie Carter, Marlo Thomas, and Harry Belafonte, among others.
Starting in 1987, Jon took a turn into recording jingles, first as chief engineer at HEA Productions, then at HB&B Productions and finally as a freelance engineer. During these years he recorded and mixed hundreds of jingles for pretty much every company in the universe. Burger King, McDonald's, The Army, AT&T, Jello, Cheerios, Miller High Life, Honey Bunches of Oats, Coors, Budweiser, Colgate, Xerox, Ford, Chevrolet, etc, etc, etc! The list goes on.
In 1994, in addition to his jingle work, Jon began mixing the music for a new cartoon show called, The Tick for Fox. Doug Katsaros wrote all the music and he played almost everything to boot! He scored each episode with individual, brilliant music. Jon mixed every episode. It was a glorious series of sessions that lasted three years.
In the years since The Tick, Jon became involved in more and more cartoons. Starting in 2000, he mixed all the music for seasons two through four of Courage the Cowardly Dog. Courage was the brainchild of John R. Dilworth, a genius artist and animator and the show had a dark, surreal sense of humor. The amazing Jody Gray scored the show and each episode was a work of art. I've included a clip from his operetta based on The Ride of the Valkyries on this site, but also go to youtube to hear Jody's theme for the episode titled, The Tower of Zalost. This led to a long, fruitful relationship with both Jody Gray and John Dilworth that continues to this day.
In 2012, Jon teamed up with Jody Gray for another animated show called Space Racers. Space Racers is the story of a group of "kid" space ships that are enrolled in the Space Academy. They have adventures in the universe and learn about space and science. Space Racers has so far run for two seasons.
In between Space Racers seasons, Jon worked on another animated series called Peg + Cat. Peg + Cat is a multiple Emmy award winning PBS show about a little girl and her friend (and pet) Cat. The show is a wonder of musical genres. Each episode is a musical. Peg + Cat has had two seasons, so far. Everybody is keeping their fingers crossed for a third.
In addition to all the animated series there have been a number of one offs and smaller cartoon projects.
CV available upon request.