Welcome!

My name is Little j and I am a Gnostic bard specializing in song writing and singing. I play music from cosmic pop to weird children's rock, Jason Mraz to Shel Silverstein. My music timelessly opens hearts and expands minds. Listen to Little j for your ride to infinity and beyond!

Music, Healing Bicycle Touring, The World!


Music, Healing, Bicycle Touring, The World!

Music has played a primary role in my life for the past 13 years. During the past 5 years, I have enjoyed writing , recording, performing, producing, promoting, selling, advertising, organizing, collaborating, and arranging music of all kinds. 5 albums hold the bulk of my discography. These records allow for a gateway into the darkest reaches and the highest heights of a human imagination; they offer healing opportunities for anyone moved to emotional and physical response. These 5 albums walk every listener through the developmental stages of an up-and-coming musical star. These records represent the beginning of my lifelong journey of self-discovery, education and communication with my world.



Citizen Kane, widely considered the greatest movie ever to come out of Hollywood, portrays a newspaper mogul and his life remembered. I grew up in a family of journalists. The smell of ink and the sound of the press feel very familiar to my senses. The name James Kane felt like an appropriate expression of an initial effort to express myself in a recorded format. The title Dieing Day hints at the late hours of the day, the last day of life and painting the day with all variety of colors.

This album sounds very ethereal and wild. Not for the timid, it carries a lot of emotional weight. Recording music, for me, is a way to simultaneously release and capture my inner angels and demons. I feel that anyone listening to my records gets a vicarious experience of my (sometimes horrific) soul-searching. These early years represent the darkest of those soul searching times.

This album features the track SAS (Still A Star), recorded in my Montana bedroom on a graduation present from my family. My Mac Titanium laptop recorded this and every song on Dieing Day. SAS kicked off the recording sessions for this record and inspired me to develop my guitar and vocal songs into more elaborate recordings.

Enormously excited for the successful completion and artistic decoration of this album, I personally handed out copies to every one of my friends and mailed copies to friends and family worldwide. I burned each disc, printed each label and cover, and created the art for the entire project.



My nicknames as a child included Bubba and Jimmy. As I recovered from my second bout with Chicken Pox, I thought it appropriate to reflect how the cycles of my life were manifesting in other areas as well. H stands for Heaven, Hell, Heroes, Heroines and every H in the English language.

Immediately after completing my distribution of Dieing Day, I moved out of my house, went on a road trip. After this magical road trip, I returned to Eugene, Oregon and wound up living in my car and on friends' couches. I bottomed out in ways I'd rather discuss in personal conversation. As I recovered myself, moved into a new apartment and gathered my sanity, an album began to take shape.

One lonely night in my new apartment helped me discover the healing power of releasing and capturing inner demons using recorded music. I composed and recorded for several weeks before putting the finishing touches on this record with the final song, Now! “Now I stand me up to see / the world of light and I breathe. / As I rise wide awake / Love I give for love's sake!”

I composed this poem in a more positive and aware state and it helped me pull myself out of my hole and into my whole each morning. Upon awakening, I would blink into awareness the Now poster above my sleeping space. Eventually, I'd mumble the words to myself until I felt them; hum the tune until I cheered up; and then, stand up, dance around and sing Now! the song that would finish this album, H.



Playing around with my stage name took it's final stages for this, my 3rd album. Jota Ka, in Spanish, represents the letters J and K, my first and last initials. This also brought to a conclusion the initial record by James Kane. Ka also has significant meanings in Egyptian and Hawaiian.

The title of the record reflects my newfound stability and survival of my descent into hell and successful return as a renewed individual. Feeling more aware, alive and happy, I recorded the first four tracks of this record in response to the four tracks on H.

This album features many of my friends, whom I came to understand and value more through my trial by fire. After recording the first four tracks alone, I realized I needed to bring in my favorite musician friends to finish this record off. We played our favorite songs and made fantastic recordings with that same Mac Titanium that recorded the first 2 records. We played with attention!

P e r f o r m i n g   t h e   J o u r n e y

These records put me in a variety of costumes on many stages throughout Oregon, California, Washington, Wyoming, Utah,  and Montana to perform my music. James Kane performed in a black cowboy hat and black sunglasses and he looked very serious. Bubba Jimmy dressed like an albino, caveman, rastafarian and played drums while throat singing at the Oregon Country Fair. Jota Ka performed in each of these costumes, laughing at and celebrating the transformation of an individual through costume, song and dance.

These projects also taught me to carry my performances and recordings into the digital world. MySpace still holds relics of each of these past incarnations. Thanks to exploration and experience, my digital and physical promotional skills blossomed marvelously through these formative years.

Currently, I perform only a few of these songs from my early catalog. Many were just for the time, a ladder to help me climb out of my hole. Others expressed ideas and beliefs I no longer hold. I still listen to each of these records occasionally to reinvigorate myself for my exciting and transformational life.

We Vibe! By Ondamos

Ondamos, in Spanish, means 'We Vibe'. Throughout my musical life I have performed in many rock bands. This rock band felt more cosmically correct than any before it's time. We each respected each other and found ourselves equals with something to learn from each other at every turn.

Formed with the intention of composing music for a local independent film, we practiced and performed tirelessly. Nearly every day we worked on promoting our music online and around town. We also recorded every session of every song we ever wrote. The result was a substantial catalog and growing fan base in less than 6 months.

After completing several thousand recordings, we selected the top 25 and posted them online. Our music made it into the award-winning film and we separated soon after the film's release. We fulfilled our purpose with our soundtrack and continue gaining fans every day.

Ondamos does not continue as a band but each member of Ondamos still has the name of James.



In a follow-through swing, I returned to College to study Arabic while working as a bicycle messenger to prepare for a bicycle music tour. For an Arabic assignment, I chose a name and composed a song introducing myself in Arabic. Ziryab (which means blackbird) added the 5th string to the Oud, helping in the development of the guitar. He is a musical folk hero of the Middle East, similar to Paul Bunyan in American culture.

The letter Z in Arabic resembles the lowercase j. Noting the similarities, I began to sign everything with a lowercase j or Arabic Z. When I began my career as a DJ, my co-host referred to me as 'Little' j in order to distinguish the quality of my letter and the name stuck.

'Little j' or 'j' represents the cross cultural ideas I embedded in a song performed for an International Night celebration at the University of Oregon. A song called OK captured the essence of what I believe all cultures can agree upon. I wrote the song as a series of agreements in English, Spanish and Arabic; a song to evoke acceptance of every culture through our common human activities.

The album produced as Little j, I called Song. The theme song, EY, states, “Everyone's got a song stuck in their heads”! This, to me, represents the awareness of infinite circular thought in myself and the humans of the world. I followed up this eternal folk song with many songs I had written while playing with Ondamos and many I had worked on since before Dieing Day. This album felt like an escape from and a completion of the phase of name-changing and self-exploring. It replaced that energy with it's active form: constant Self-discovery and Self-awareness. This album felt like a record of my current (5 years) self awareness and discovery of my true purpose, Music: healing, unifying and self-affirming music.

The character of 'j' and the name 'Little j' will adorn all my future works. Through the process of self-discovery and plain old human growth expressed in a musical journey, I have found my stable ground. From my world mountain, I will sing songs and make beautiful musical sounds for me and for we!

B i c y c l e   M u s i c   T o u r i n g

Recently, I returned from The Pleasant Revolution Northwest Bicycle Music Festival tour. 20 artists rode XtraCycles (a bike with an extension/attachment which helps to easily haul up to 400 pounds of gear) 500 miles from Portland, Oregon to Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada!  In Eugene, Portland, Seattle, Vancouver and Salem, we hosted Bicycle Music Festivals. At these BMF's, 6 touring acts and around 20 local acts performed at various locations around the cities, traveled to by bicycle. Bicycles also powered the PA (which we hauled as well)! Dozens of people showed up on their bicycles and we performed for hundreds of cyclists and thousands of spectators across the entire Northwest tour.

I decided to launch a bicycle music tour of my own nearly 3 years ago when my Dad asked what I planned to do after college. I worked several jobs over the two years following that initial idea. I worked as a bicycle messenger for the Center for Appropriate Transport, I worked for the University of Oregon as their Bicycle Coordinator and also at Lane Community College in advertising before launching. After 2 years of planning, preparing and saving, I found myself able to embark on my own tour. Weeks into that tour, a surprise e-mail invited me to join up with The Pleasant Revolution to produce Bicycle Music Festival's across the Northwest with other musicians as crazy as myself.

Bicycle music touring as a way of musical performance, promotion, touring and production just feels right. The idea has excited me for nearly 5 years now and at this stage, I believe it will carry me onward for another 5 years, hopefully another 50! Tour planning is in the works for The Pleasant Revolution. I am also working with Nikko (my life and music partner) to plan a bicycle music tour of every small town and village in the world.



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