"There's a George Bernard Shaw quote I like particularly well," says Thomas. "'The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, make them.'"

One of the many circumstances Thomas made for himself was the production of his first solo album several years ago. Another is playing guitar on his first Gospel album this fall (He'll be working with Dale Ramsey who's best known for his work with artists Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross, The Temptations, Earth Wind & Fire).

But to date, the culmination of Thomas's skills and talent comes together and focuses like the proverbial laser beam on what he is calling The Jaz Mobi Project.

The Project, from beginning to end, took place in his recording studio. There were countless late nights alone, just he and his guitar and the electronics and the bits and bytes, the ones and zeros.

In the end, the disc captures an adventure, a journey of sorts, a journey quite unlike any other. It's a musical journey, to be sure. But it is more. It is life. It is drama. It is theater. It is Thomas - pure Thomas.

One does not so much listen to the Jaz Mobi Project as experience it. It's a work that, like so much of his work, defies categorization. It's a work in which Thomas uses music to paint mind pictures. One simply cannot listen to it without seeing large sweeping vistas, canyons, hills, valleys and layer upon layer of swirling mosaics of color and abstract forms and shapes.

Like all adventures and journeys the music is unpredictable. It's full of surprises, detours.

There's a bigness, a suspense, to Thomas's work. His is the stuff of which movie and television soundtracks are made of. Each track stands alone. Each one is different from the rest and comes to you in a way that is like unwrapping a gift. What glues the tracks together is their imaginativeness and their unusual construction.

It's projects like this that is like protein to Thomas, who is not sure at all how he wound up in Stow.

"It was pure chance," he says. "We had been looking to make a change from the city life. I didn't know that Stow existed. If it hadn't been for a very sharp realtor we never would have found this place. We saw it for the first time when there was three feet of snow, and we knew right away that we wanted to live here."