Raising a Band: A Conversation with Tru Phonic’s Jake Salter [Interview]
It takes a village to raise a band. No one knows this better than Jake Salter, singer, songwriter, guitarist, and multi-instrumental bandleader of the up-and-coming funk fusion ensemble Tru Phonic. Buoyed by a dedicated and enthusiastic fanbase who travel hundreds of miles to see the band and show their support, the hard-working sextet has spent the better part of a decade stitching together a distinctive tapestry of funk, rock, soul, hip hop, and blues. Now in the midst of writing and recording their third full-length studio album along with an accompanying video for their new single “Things Are Looking Up,” Florida-based Tru Phonic continues to craft an original sound that has made it one of the most exhilarating live acts on the jam and festival circuit today.
Founded in 2017 by Salter, Tru Phonic’s current lineup is made up if a collection of stellar central Florida musicians including tenor saxophonist Daniel Garcia, keyboardist and sax player Reese Montgomery, alto/baritone saxophonist Ryan “Shorty” Crabbs, bassist John Hulland and a rotating cast of veteran percussionists on drums including Alex Petrosky, Patrick Williams, and Curtis Lyons, Jr. Embracing diverse influences ranging from classic reggae and funk to the golden era of hip hop, to notable funk/fusion outfits like Lettuce and pioneering rock bands like The Band, Tru Phonic cut their teeth as a cover band in small clubs, beach bars, backyard barbecues and dives around central Florida and towns along the state’s eastern coast.
Hungry to introduce fans to their true selves, Tru Phonic slowly sliding in original material into ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s cover tunes. They soon discovered their super power was their ability to read a crowd, slipping effortlessly from cover tunes to their original music while building a reputation as a high-energy party band who could just as easily take it down a notch with smooth grooves and chill melodies. With fans jumping on board, the band released their debut album, Tru Phonic, in 2018 followed, by a Live at Rds, released in 2019. Jambiguous, their second full-length studio album, was written during the tumult and isolation of the pandemic and released in 2021.
While still playing venues in Florida, Tru Phonic has branched out to include stops around the Southeast including Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. Their reputation for high-energy shows has also propelled them as far afield as Colorado and Missouri. They’ve also pulled off memorable festival performances at Suwannee Hulaween, Farm to Grass, Whippersnap Music & Arts Festival, No Resolutions, Fort20 Fest, and more.
MusicFestNews recently caught up with Salter, whose busy schedule includes parenting (along with his fiancée) an active five-year-old and a newborn, to talk about his band’s evolution as well as his own journey as a musician and songwriter and the milestones that shaped him. The following interview was edited for brevity and clarity.
MFN: Hi, Jake. Thanks so much for taking the time out of your busy schedule to talk with us. If I may, I’d like to start from the beginning. Could you tell us about your upbringing?
JS: I was born in Springfield, Missouri. I spent most of my time near the Ozarks. My family had a farm, and I was always outside spending time on the family farm and outdoors.
MFN: I understand you lost your mom when you were quite young – just nine years old. That’s heartbreaking.
JS: Yes. Thank you. But I definitely wouldn’t have lived in Florida if it wasn’t for that. She was sick for a long time. In a weird way, it’s something my wife and I have in common. We both lost our mothers at a younger age, and losing mine led me to living in Florida.
My dad and his family were living in Florida before I was born, and he always wanted to get back to Florida. But he had to stay in Missouri for a while while my mom was sick.
MFN: Your family had an interesting connection to Cocoa Beach where NASA is based and where you live to this day. Can you tell us about that?
JS: I’m blessed to have a great family. My grandfather, who just passed away, was one of the original engineers for NASA. He worked for Wernher von Braun in Huntsville, and then they moved him at the time to the brand new NASA Kennedy Space Center (in Cocoa Beach). My grandfather, Larry Salter, worked under von Braun on multiple Apollo space projects. I got to see some of the early space documents signed by von Braun, the famous German space scientist brought over by NASA.
I’m blessed to have a family connection like this for sure. It’s cool to still be living near the Space Center in Brevard County (FL). I went to Cocoa Beach High School, where I met the people that would form our high school garage bands.
MFN: So, did you pick up an interest in music before that?
JS: Yeah. In Missouri, I had an uncle who was a collector of really fine guitars and Fender products and (Fender) Tweed amps. He had these rooms, and when you’re a kid, you walk in, and it look like all these shiny toys. And then one day, you realize that they’re really hard to learn.
My cousins and I would have little pretend band shows in front of our fireplace, and music was always around because of them. But I didn’t really get serious about it until high school or middle school. I was always the kid who played guitar, though. For sure.
From the influence of my uncle and cousins, I just kinda wanted to be like them and do what they were doing. I found my own bands that I liked. We were always big on taking long road trips and sharing CDs and stuff. My uncle being a collector of sixties’ and seventies’ music, he was into The Eagles and Clapton and R&B-based music.
So, I was listening to these things and also growing up in the hip hop era at the same time. I was getting this weird combination of old and new music. I think it shows in Tru Phonic’s music today. I think why we get confused for reggae sometimes is that a lot of our songs are based on basically a hip hop drum beat but adding on top some blues guitar, rock and roll, and funk with horns. And that probably comes from that childhood mix up of music I had.
MFN: You’re also educated in the production and technical side of entertainment and music. Is that right?
JS: Yeah. I have a couple of degrees. I’ve got a bachelors in radio and TV for UCF (University of Central Florida). And then I’ve got a couple of degrees in broadcast production and field production from what is now Eastern Florida State but it used to be Brevard Community College. UCF was a great experience. But at that little Brevard Community College, I really learned a lot and spent extra hours there. We started a band TV series where we would bring in local bands. I was able to bring a kind of audio prowess to them that made them able to do new things. They taught me a lot of stuff that was excellent. That was a lot of fun.
I’ve been playing gigs since I was like 14 or 15. So, just by doing the gigs, you learned a little bit about sound already. But then, going into the TV and radio thing, it teaches you about a lot more about mic placement and how sometimes a room can just be hard to get good sound in. It taught me a lot about different aspects of sound for sure.
MFN: You founded Tru Phonic back in 2017, but it took time to find your style of music. Tell us about that.
JS: I like to say we started in 2018 because that’s when we finally got some music recorded and established what our sound was. In 2017, I think we were still doing a lot of songs that didn’t make sense for us to do.
After high school and even the end of high school, I’ve always been hired as a kind of guitar player for other bands – reggae bands and classic rock. So when I started Tru Phonic in 2017, I originally thought we were going to be like a really good wedding band and then quickly didn’t want to do that. And then I thought we could try and do a hip hop charts band and try and recreate all these top hip hop songs with a live band. So, 2018 was like finally figuring out what Tru Phonic was going to be and what I wanted to do.
MFN: The band has gone through a few lineup changes while at the same time, you’ve found your voice as a writer and bandleader. How has the band changed over the years?
JS: Our bass player (John Hulland) is the only remaining core member, although we do jam and play occasional gigs with all the original core members. Like I said, I was playing a lot of cover bands and reggae bands before I started Tru Phonic. So basically, I was starting to write music myself. I was playing these gigs and figuring out which one of these musicians fits the style that I wanted to go with – the funk, rock, hip hop, blues kind of thing.
So I found Corbin Nappi, who played classic rock with me. He was our first drummer, but then that quickly became Alex Petrosky, who is still with us today. That’s who you hear on most of our albums and singles as well as Corbin, who now works in engineering at the NASA space center.
MFN: That’s a big job!
JS: Yeah. That was always his plan. A lot of us started playing gigs, working in college or high school or having our day job. So there comes a point where you decide whether music is gonna be your main thing, or you’re gonna keep with what you were doing in the first place. And that especially showed its face when we got serious and started trying to tour and really make this a real thing, really go for it, you know.
The other founding member was Jorge Ramos. Coincidentally, he is a tenor sax player, and after hearing him play is pretty much when I realized I wanted to have sax in the band. We were doing Pink Floyd tribute shows, like classic albums live. And I was thinking I know I want horns. But when I heard him play, he’s such a good player, it changed my mind on what instrument I wanted in the band.
So we quickly went to Daniel Garcia on tenor saxophone from Kissimmee, Florida. He’s now a Brevard resident. We got him to move over here, but he’s been with us a long time. He’s a founding member in our eyes.
We’ve also had Shorty Crabbs. He’s been a friend of mine through college and has a great ear. We got him for a New Orleans tribute show one time and just decided to keep him in the band the whole time after that. He plays the alto and the bari saxes.
Reese Montgomery is our newest member. But he’s really added a whole new element to this band. He does play all ranges of sax, but he’s also our keyboard player. He and I both kind of play keyboards, but he’s on keyboards, I’d say, more than 50% of the time.
He started in kind of a jazz-big band orchestra. So he really helps us with chord voicing and adding really cool elements. Some of this new music is some of my favorite stuff and plays a big part because of Reese Montgomery and his ideas in the practice room in the writing room.
As a songwriter, I don’t always wanna write in a vacuum. Maybe it’s musical insecurity. I wanna have my idea 80% done or maybe even 100% done and then bring it to them in the room and have them tell me how I should change it or what we should add. I want everybody to have their involvement in the writing. And he (Reese) and the band have really shown, something different – an X factor for us that we didn’t have before.
MFN: Every band has a vision. What was yours? As far as the people who you found along the way – did they already share that vision or was that something that you all developed along the way?
JS: I have been drawing myself as a rock star since I was eight. They asked us what we wanted to do, and I said I wanted to be a rock star and also maybe the quarterback for the Falcons. I’ve always known what I wanted to do. I’ve always known I wanted to tour and play music and write music. And mainly, have my music and what I have to say heard by the world. That’s always been something I dreamt of.
I have the vision, but I’m going to bring that vision into the room with my friends – the people next to me and maybe see what ideas they have for that vision and make sure I work in these things into collective songwriting. We try to make it a collective vision as much as we can.
MFN: Obviously these guys that you’ve incorporated into this vision share this with you and appreciate the sound that is a huge part of this plan. This sound is a huge part of who you are and will be as a band.
JS: Absolutely. That is another reason why I mentioned that I think we really started as a band of 2018 because that’s when the vision was more clear, and sonically we knew what we were going for. I think having everybody’s different influences only contributes to the songs and the nature of the songs bouncing between genres – whatever is right for the song. We don’t wanna ever lock into one kind of thing.
We all come from different backgrounds of music – Daniel’s background on the sax and John on the bass. Actually, John grew up in the Northeast during this explosion of the jam band scene where bands like moe., Phish, and Bela Fleck were all coming from. So John has also been a blessing to the band to really teach me a lot about jam band music and show me why I wanted to be a part of that as well.
MFN: Earlier you explained Tru Phonic’s sound and vibe. Your first studio album, it had kind of a reggae beach vibe to it and smooth groove. But there’s more to it than that.
JS: Yeah. And that’s funny. It might be like the Florida influence or something. Technically we get that all the time about the first album, and maybe it has something to do with those hip hop beats and the clean guitar on a lot of spots. The chorus of “Soo Good” is our only recorded reggae rhythm, but, you know, the album just has a reggae touch on it, I guess.
And another thing about the first album is that was when we were really coming together as a band. I actually had to re-record some of those songs as I added Jorge to the band and John Hulland. I started that album in the studio by myself playing bass, keyboards, singing, playing some drums. And then as I made the band, I spent some money re-recording some parts so they could be on the album so that it could be a band sound. Fast forward to today, we would actually like to re-record some of those someday just because they’ve changed so much live. Elements have been added that I would have loved to record on the album.
MFN: Your next studio album, Jambiguous kicked it up a couple of notches. You venture into funk territory and jam with the horns more prominent. It’s a big rich sound.
JS: Thank you. That is much more defining of what our sound is now. Yes. I can say that when people are at the merch table, and they’re asking the difference between the albums, I literally say that this one is kicking it up – stepping on the gas.
I really am so proud of that album. We had the drummer from Three Dog Night, Pat Bautz, as our engineer, and he was very drum-minded. He’s a drum guy who grew up in L.A., getting coffee for studios, and then made his way into the big gig with Three Dog Night in the ’90s. He’s a classic studio recording cat, you know, and it was cool.
We recorded those first two albums in Brevard. It was cool having our new thing happening in the music and working in the studio with a seventies’ kind of cat who knew how to do things in the real old school way.
Jambiguous really came together during COVID. In a way, COVID was a good thing for us, honestly. You know, we lost lives, and it was not a good thing. It divided the country. “Too Late” on that album is kind of my song about the bad part of COVID – the kind of divide it created with people behind their computers online. You know that line in the song: “You can’t just hide behind your screen” and “have a discussion not a debate…” I really felt that at the time.
The good thing about COVID for us was I don’t think we would have ever gotten that much time just to play the songs over and over again while writing them in my little garage studio. And compared to the first album, Jambiguous really sounds much more like how we sound live. Those songs were hashed out over and over again in the practice room, and that’s what we’re doing with this next album. We’re taking it a step further by not only hashing it out in the practice room, but we’re going to play them at a lot of shows and tour with them and see what magic happens at the shows. That way, when we go to record them, it’s close to walking in the room, and that’s what we want it to sound like.
MFN: Besides the new album, what else is on the horizon for Tru Phonic?
JS: We already have some of the songs for this third album, and we’re taking that time to develop them and make changes to them. We’re really relishing the time of playing these songs and getting them how we want.
A couple of the things we really want to add are a couple more music videos, and those take a long time. We have some great songs for that, one of those being “No One Sees” from the Jambiguous album. The song means a lot to our fans. It’s about dealing with the struggles that no one else knows. You know, it’s only you that knows the struggles you’re going through. It’s something a lot of our fans relate to and we would love to make a music video for that. For our new single “Things Are Looking Up,” we will have a video for that. The videos help us further portray the ideas that we are able to relate to our fans with.
I think when we release the next album, we’ll do a listening party instead of a normal typical show. We’ll just have a party with the fans. We want to give them different experiences and give back to the people that support us so much.
We also have a lot of cool shows planned for this year and 2025. A big one is we will be one of the headlining acts at the Sunshine Hootenanny (Music & Arts) Festival this year (November 21-23).
Tru Phonic is no longer scraping the bottom or anything, but I definitely am still playing second fiddle to the seafood at places on the beach during the weekdays to pay my mortgage. I still do it often. I play in Port Canaveral all the time – every Tuesday. And I will do Jimmy Buffett if you ask nicely
To keep up with Tru Phonic, including new music and video releases and upcoming shows, click on the links below.
Tru Phonic
Website
YouTube
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[…] TruPhonic is another stellar funk and soul band from Central Florida. They have been expanding their loyal fan base, touring around the Southeast. They play a mix of originals and excellent covers (for example Average White Band and Lettuce). I first caught them at Hulaween 2023 and more recently in my area of Atlanta (see video). Our friends at MusicFestNews.com recently interviewed Jake Salter, the leader, guitarist and lead vocalist and you can check that out here (TruPhonic Interview). […]