On the Rise
Aron!

The connotation of jazz over the last few decades – at least in conventional music industry circles – has been that it’s “not a young person’s thing,” the kind of genre meant for reruns from a pantheon of greats and less for innovation and expansion.

But a new generation of jazz come-ups are breathing new life into the scene. At the forefront of this movement has been Laufey and Berlioz, both of whom have scored viral hits and throngs of packed tour dates with their modern takes on jazz music. And now, a new talent, Aron!, is gearing up to take his place in this movement, too.

Raised in Charlotte, North Carolina, Aron! is one of the latest signings to UMG’s iconic Verve Records imprint, the label that developed history-defining greats such as Oscar Peterson, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday and several current powerhouses, including Jon Batiste, Arooj Aftab, and Cynthia Erivo.

“It’s freaky! I try not to think about it too much,” Aron! – born Aron Stornaiuolo – tells me when I ask about how he feels about his new home at Verve. When we chat, he’s sitting in his childhood bedroom. He’s soft spoken and unassuming, but it’s immediately clear that despite his tendency to downplay, Stornaiuolo is one of those special musical talents who can master not just the art but the science of the craft. “Like, Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong did all that for me?! Now it’s my turn?! That’s crazy.”

As a kid, Stornaiuolo was immersed in music. He attended a Pearl Jam concert, he tells me, while he was still in utero. “After that, I was my own person,” he jokes. “It took me a long time to gain consciousness, but I do have this one memory from early on when I was visiting my grandma – who was in a home – and she was watching The Sound of Music. I was like, Whoa, this is so cool.”

But growing up, Stornaiuolo was surrounded more by rock and grunge than he was by jazz and classical. He listened to Led Zepplin, Alice In Chains, and Stone Temple Pilots around the house – artists he tells me he still loves, even if he doesn’t always choose to emulate their sound exactly. But when he finally found jazz, it was magic. It was almost like a teenage rebellion in reverse – trading his rock upbringing for the delicacies and complexities of the jazz world.

“Something about jazz was just, like … I think I liked the colours,” he tells me. “I don’t have that thing where I can see colours when I listen to things, but I just mean that I used to be so fascinated by certain chords and songs. There was one in ‘When I Was Your Man’ by Bruno Mars that I heard and knew I wanted to hear more like that.”

His first introduction to the genre came from a chance encounter. He showed up at a music store in his hometown and walked in on a country jam session. The song playing was America’s “Horse With No Name.” At the centre of the action was an 80-year-old teacher. The twelve-year-old Stornaiuolo was enamoured, and he asked the teacher immediately if he could sign up for lessons – and so Stornaiuolo’s musical education began.

“One of the life lessons that the guitar teacher – Stan – taught me was that whatever you do, you have to be the best at it. So, in my head, I thought, Oh, I need to choose something to be the best at,” Stornaiuolo remembers. At first, he thought it might be soccer. Eventually, he switched to psychology, but that was too hard. He even tried making watches, which proved to be the hardest of all. What he settled on was the thing he’d always loved – guitar playing and music.

Since age ten, Stornaiuolo had been songwriting and even releasing under his own name. “There’s some young Aron out there, just me writing some silly songs and putting them on YouTube,” he says with a smirk. By high school, he knew music would be his full time career. To pursue it, he applied to a selection of America’s best music programs and got into one with a scholarship at University of Miami, where he just graduated from earlier this summer.

“The college thing helps you see where you are, what your peers are doing, and kind of lets you figure out if you want to try to chase that or not,” Stornaiuolo says of his experience at school. “When you’re surrounded in the practice rooms by a bunch of crazy awesome piano players and guitarists and singers who can belt their heads off, to me, it was like I kind of missed the boat on that. But what I did try and do was the songwriting thing. That was my way.”

With his college friends, he started a band called Sunny Side Up! The group practiced weekly and Stornaiuolo was both the songwriter and singer. “There, it was like, I had to bring in songs because that was my job,” he explained. It got him practicing churning out material, and he kept up his writing for his solo project, aron!, on the side.

Then, just over a year ago, things started to hit. The solo material he was posting on Instagram blew up, and he started getting a deluge of phone calls from labels and teams. “I think I was just so excited that all these people on Instagram liked jazz songs that I was like, let me just write a bunch of them,” he explains. In a week, he wrote the songs that make up his debut EP, cozy you (and other nice songs). The tracks were all recorded in a two-day window, when he got into the studio with his friends – also his Sunny Side Up! Bandmates – to lay down the tracks before he was set to jet off to a study abroad program in Brighton.

“We did, like, maybe a rehearsal or two and then just got everybody in the studio. I had the sheet music and all the arrangements done, so we just kind of read through them and I’d ask to change this or that,” he tells me.

The end product was an earnest, warm, and sophisticated sample platter. Pulling from 40s-era nostalgia and romance, Stornaiuolo created a musical world that feels at once far beyond his years and yet also perfectly fit for the moment. If jazz really is becoming cool again, Aron! will be one of the people we have to thank, even if only tangentially.

“I don’t think my goal should be to put jazz on the map,” Stornaiuolo says of being a new ambassador for the genre. While he appreciates the charge, he insists that he’s only here to make the music he likes. “I don’t think that’s my thing – there are plenty of artists who are doing very well with keeping jazz a live. But I think what I’m going for is really just the opportunity to continue to flesh out my full vision.”