Chasing a dream. That's what musician Jon Scholl has spent nearly half his life doing and now he's starting to reap the benefits with his band, Streamline. I sat down recently with the 25-year-old and talked with him about his passion for music and what he loves best about his southern Italian heritage. Jon's great grandparents were from Basilicata and Calabria.

How long have you been playing music?
Since the fourth grade so about 16 years now, and 9 of those years have been with Mike Hogan in the many different formations of this band we've had over the years (This is final and real Streamline though I assure you)

What inspired you to start?
Got a radioshack 2 octave toy keyboard for christmas and after learning Silent Night decided I wanted to be a master of all christmas music. Then I gave that up and settled for being in a rock band.

Tell me about Streamline, how you started and your journey to where you are today. Well Mike and I started playing together in our first band (Dis-Harmony) back when we were both in High School. Mike was only 13 and I was 16 so the journey has been a long one and we've been doing this together from basically the beginning of both our musical careers, so we've really developed a sense for how to play and write together. Around the time I was graduating from College we decided it was time to make a change with players because we knew if we wanted to take this seriously we would need to find people who were into this for the same reasons and with the same passion, so we begun our long quest to find those people which lasted a little less than three years. In those three years the band saw 3 different drummers, 2 different guitar players and 1 bass player before we got to the formation we have today. I met John Viavattine the bass player at a music store in Pittsford, NY that we both worked at in 2004-5. I'd heard he was good but when we got together to play "good" was an understatement. We played a few shows together and then he decided to join for good and has been with us ever since. The three of us then decided to take a break from the east coast and spend a summer on the west coast just writing and developing, which turned out to be the best thing we ever did. While we were there we finagled a meeting with an A&R at Sony Records who ended up really liking the music and wanted to hear more. In order to show him some more music we ended up in a studio in Santa Monica I had interned at 2 summers before to lay down some tracks for him. While we were there we met Brian Ireland, our now current drummer. I had met him briefly while interning at the studio when his other band Something Corporate was recording there. We talked and he agreed to play on our tracks. We became friends and kept in contact over the next year, a year that saw a lot of buzz created through the song we recorded with Brian (All I Need). The song was the number one played song on Myspace for the better part of a week and remained in the top 10 for weeks to come, getting more plays then bands like Fall Out Boy, Panic at the Disco, etc. There was no full band to back up the buzz though, and things ended up simmering down again come that winter, which was when we decided maybe we should head back to the west coast where we had our original success. We moved back in July of 2006, and soon after Brian decided to join our band permanently. We met Brad Ourso, guitar player, a few months later and the rest is history. We finished our 7 song EP and packed everything into a 15 passenger van and trailer and headed back out on the road to start spreading the word. Hopefully that's where we'll be staying for months to come. We're hoping to really build a fanbase the way it should be done, genuinely through touring and creating great relationships with our fans, not through ruthless record label promotion which is the downfall we think a lot of bands get thrown into when they let a record label get involved to quickly. Hopefully we can see this vision start to come to fruition over the next year or so and have a lot of fun in the process- we truly have finally found the 5 guys who belong in this band together.


Who are your influences?
Some of my biggest influences are bands that I grew up listening to like the Smashing Pumpkins, Tool, Our Lady Peace, all that good mid-nineties rock, but I played a lot of Jazz/Blues throughout High School and College as well, so a lot of that creeps into my playing and writing. Wierdly enough one of my other biggest influences is an electronica artist/producer named BT, you might not expect that from me but I've done a lot of study into synthesis and I went to school for recording so I can relate to a lot of what he does, his work has been really important to me.

What do you appreciate the most about your Italian heritage?
That'd be the food. That's a pretty trite answer but memories of going to parties with relatives and just eating for hours on end are some of my favorite. And my grandfather, 100 years old and still eating big italian dinners and dancing 3 times a week- that's just plain amazing.

To learn more about Streamline and to listen to their music, go to-
Myspace.com/streamlineny.