About Jump Cut Music

In 1968, my dad moved our family to Guam so he could direct the development of a Learning Resources Center for the Department of Education.  We had spent the previous year, the “summer of love” in State College, Pennsylvania.  I was 14 years old and had been in my first band in State College.  It was a crazy time at Penn State University with Vietnam War protests, drugs and Rock & Roll music

Jump Cut Music is my independent way of sharing my music with the world. I’m Daniel Smith, a long-time singer-songwriter from Bozeman, Montana.  I got my start playing rock & roll around military bases on Guam in the early 70s. While still on Guam I occasionally played music with a kid named Bobby Wilson, a classically trained violinist turned pop artist. He was from a little mountain town in Montana called Bozeman. When I finally left the island in 1974, my destination was Bozeman and I’ve never left.  In my early Montana days, I made my living playing bars around the northwest U.S. and Canada. In 1975 I became a fixture at Big Sky Ski Resort and mostly played in a dark little bar called the Caboose.  It was there that I wrote most of the songs on the Daniel Live at Big Sky album.

In the early 80s I took a hiatus of sorts from music and went back to school to eventually receive my Masters in Earth Science. The lure of science and adventure in the Rocky Mountains inspired some new songs and a new band, Stone Poetry. We released Stone Poetry’s album Into the Great Unknown in 2004.