Trevor Jones grew up in the exact petri dish where British progressive rock germinated. At Simon Langton school in Canterbury he sat alongside Robert Wyatt, Mike Ratledge, and Kevin Ayers — the founding figures of what became the Canterbury Scene. He absorbed the same musical air, the same restless appetite for psychedelic experimentation, but his path diverged almost immediately: a family move to Tasmania at 20 sent him sideways into Australian pop, forming bands with his brother John and scoring actual hit singles while his Canterbury contemporaries were building Soft Machine back home. By 1971 the Jones brothers were back in the UK, and the folk-rock outfit Anno Domini produced On This New Day with two Irish musicians, David Mercer and Kerry Scott. It is a record that lives in the curio cabinet of early-70s British folk-rock — earnest, competent, and almost entirely forgotten. What came next was different. Jonesy, the band Trevor formed after Anno Domini, released three albums between 1972 and 1973 — No Alternative, Keeping Up, and Growing — and the last of those earned genuine critical respect. In the crowded, competitive prog landscape of 1973, that was not nothing. After Jonesy dissolved, Jones moved sideways rather than up. Session work for the Moody Blues and Ten Years After. Production for Willie Rushton. A peculiar 1980 collaboration with NME cartoonist Tony Benyon on the Lone Groover EP. An LP with the psychedelic space-rock band Here & Now in 1983 called Fantasy Shift. These projects suggest a man constitutionally unable to stay in one lane, more interested in the work than in building a career brand — which may explain why the larger fame never arrived, and probably why he didn't lose sleep over it. The BBC years in the late 1980s brought stability: record production including classical recordings with the BBC Concert Orchestra, work that required real range. But it was the daily Eastbourne commute that quietly redirected his life. In 1994, Jones took a teaching post at the Eastbourne College of Arts and Technology, and in 1996 built a music performance and production department from scratch. By the time he retired in 2012, he'd developed modules up to degree level and become the college's music course co-ordinator. The department was, by the account of his friend and colleague who wrote this obituary, widely copied by other UK institutions — which is the kind of legacy most musicians never think to want and rarely achieve. The 'Gypsy' nickname, earned by dark complexion and a curtain ring worn as a gold earloop, captures something real about him: he moved through music's worlds with a traveller's ease, never quite belonging to any single one of them. Tasmania, Canterbury, London, Eastbourne. Prog rock, folk, session work, space rock, classical production, music education. The career reads as incoherent on a CV and coherent as a life. He is survived by his wife Dagmar, whom he married in 1981, and their two sons Damian and Toby.
