For its latest animated series, “Disney Jr.’s Ariel,” inspired by “The Little Mermaid” story, animated and live-action films, producers enlisted Anthony M. “Tone” Jones, a 2000 graduate of Shaler Area High School, to help create one-to-two songs per episode.
“Disney’s Jr.’s Ariel” (9 a.m.
Thursday, Disney Junior; eight episodes available Friday on Disney+) follows young princess Ariel (voice of Mykal-Michelle Harris) on her underwater adventures with family and friends, including King Triton (Taye Diggs), Flounder (Gracen Newton) and a before-she-was-bad Ursula (Amber Riley), interweaving stories with Caribbean-inspired music, food, fashion, culture and folklore. Jones, a veteran composer, lyricist and producer, collaborated with Sofia Quinn and Olivia Waithe, who Jones said is from the Caribbean. “When this came up, I had to pick two additional songwriters to work with and it was great that Olivia, having lived in Barbados, she knows that genre inside and out,” Jones, 42, said.
“On this I do all the music, the instruments and producing and the girls do the heavy lifting on the writing.” Jones played saxophone in high school, studied computer science and web design at the University of Pittsburgh and later the Art Institute of Pittsburgh. Around the time he got his bachelor’s degree in multimedia web design from the Art Institute, Jones sent a demo of his music to a producer in Los Angeles and then moved to L.
A. where one of his first jobs was .
