Jerome, Arizona | Live Bands

I recently got the kind of invitation a photographer dreams about: a private set in Jerome, played for a handful of guests. Small room, real lights, no barrier, no distance — just a few dozen feet between me and the music, and two bands taking turns in it. I photographed both of them live that night.

The Fey Kick Things Off

Before Prima Materia took the room, The Fey opened the night.

The Fey are Winter on vocals and guitar, Karl Jones on lead guitar, and Steve Warren on bass guitar.

Photographing a band before the set starts is its own thing. Gear still getting sorted, someone tuning, someone laughing at a joke nobody else heard. Nobody’s performing yet, which is usually when the camera gets something real.

Once The Fey started, that ease stayed with them. Different sound, different presence, same room — and by the time they were done, the crowd was already there. Two bands, one small space in Jerome, and I had the best seat in it.

Watching Prima Materia Play

What hit me first when Prima Materia stepped up wasn’t a song. It was the way they looked at each other — and how the lighting carved each of them out of the dark.

Four very different people, four very different musical histories, and somehow all of it folded together into something that sounded like it had always existed. That’s not a thing you can stage. You only get it by shooting a band live.

Tria Prima Becomes Prima Materia

The band started in 2020 as a trio called Tria Prima, rehearsing in a little room inside Donovan’s house. That’s the whole origin story, really — friendship, curiosity, and a bunch of people who just wanted to make something together.

Tria Prima eventually grew into Prima Materia. New name, next chapter — but the same foundation underneath it.

These days they rehearse at the Old Jerome High School, and if you’ve spent any time in Jerome you know exactly why that fits. The building is full of artists, musicians, and people making things, which is a pretty accurate description of the Verde Valley itself.

Franco

Franco grew up in Clearwater, Florida, in a house where his dad played drums. That was the spark. He started piano at six, stuck with it on and off through his teens, and then around seventeen traded it in for guitar — which stayed his main instrument for about five years.

Jerome brought him back to the piano. That return is what led him to help form Tria Prima, and he’s been part of the story ever since. Playing both instruments gives him a range the band leans on more than you’d notice at first listen — and under the lights, hunched over the keys, he’s completely elsewhere.

Donovan

Donovan grew up in Southern Arizona, studying music theory and playing in school jazz bands. Weekends meant pubs in Bisbee and gigs in downtown Phoenix — the classroom was only ever half of it.

He’s played in bands across genres you wouldn’t expect to share a shelf: hardcore punk on one end, psychedelic pop on the other. That range shows up in how easily he moves around a song. Donovan plays guitar and drums, and he’s one of the three original founders from 2020 — the band’s first rehearsals happened in a room in his house.

Away from music he works full-time as a paramedic, and he teaches guitar and drums to students around the Verde Valley. Watching him play, you can tell both jobs come from the same instinct.

Tommy

Tommy Hussey met Franco and Donovan when all three were separately booked to play concerts at the same Jerome Music Festival in 2025, and met Shiny through them not long after. Born in Yuma, Arizona and raised in the small town of Columbus, Wisconsin, he’s been based in Sedona for the past five years. He found the guitar at thirteen through a childhood friend, and immediately set about playing the music inside his head — pulling songs off the radio, the TV, anywhere by ear.

He played hundreds of open mics and blues jams around the nation before turning professional a few years ago, and has since played over 150 solo and band gigs all across Arizona. In between, he spent the Covid years traveling nomadically around the lower 48 in a conversion van, busking and working odd jobs wherever the road stopped. His playing is steeped in the blues — everyone from Robert Johnson to Jeff Beck — alongside the 60s and 70s psychedelic rock, jazz, country, and indie rock he grew up on. Tommy is synesthetic: he sees the music with a third eye and treats the guitar as a paintbrush, adding strokes of color wherever the composition calls out to be accented with melodic lines.

These days he frequently hosts open mic nights in the Verde Valley and owns and operates a Sedona-based tour company, and when he’s off stage you’ll find him exploring nature with Spike, his pitbull mix. As he puts it, he has always dreamed of forming a band as eclectic and psychedelic as Prima Materia.

Cheyenne “Shiny” Goodman

Cheyenne Goodman — everyone calls her Shiny — sings for Prima Materia, and she’s Jerome to the bone.

Ask her about the town and she’ll tell you it isn’t like anywhere else. Friendships turn into family here. The community runs on creativity and on people actually showing up for each other, and music sits right in the middle of it, pulling generations and backgrounds into the same room.

Her voice does something similar. Warm, joyful, emotionally open — the kind of singing people feel in their chest before they finish processing it. And the nickname fits: she carries a light around with her, in person, in her photographs, and in every performance. Put her under actual stage lights and it stops being a metaphor.

Shooting Them Live

My goal that night wasn’t to document a band’s public image. It was to catch the people behind it.

Live music gives you something a posed session never will. You get the glance across the stage before a solo, Donovan grinning at a missed cue, Franco losing himself in the keys, Shiny mid-phrase with her whole face in it. Nobody’s performing for the camera, which is exactly when the camera gets something real. The lighting did half the work — one moment silhouettes, the next the whole band lit up and laughing.

They made it easy. The set was loose, funny, and completely unguarded, and that came through in every frame — individuality in each face, unity in the way they moved together. When I look back at those photographs, I see the same things the audience heard that night: creativity, connection, and four people who genuinely love making music as a group.

Why This Place Makes Bands Like This

Nights like this one belong to the creative thread running through Jerome, Cottonwood, Sedona, and the rest of the Verde Valley — a region where artists and musicians push each other forward and build real relationships around the work.

Prima Materia went from a spare room to a studio in a hundred-year-old schoolhouse without ever drifting away from the community that raised them. Each member brings a different history. Together, they’ve built something that doesn’t sound like anybody else.

Getting invited into that room was a privilege. Photographing it made the night stick, because I didn’t just capture how they looked — I captured how it felt to be there. That goes for The Fey too. Two bands, one evening of lights and music, and a stack of photographs I’m glad to have.

There’s something electric about capturing a band’s energy before they step on stage—especially when the backdrop is as storied as the old Jerome High School in Arizona. I had the chance to photograph Prima Materia just hours before their show, and the weathered brick and desert light of this former mining-town landmark gave the session a gritty, timeless feel that matched their sound perfectly. Jerome, once known as the “Wickedest Town in the West,” has become a hidden gem for photographers and music lovers alike, with its crumbling architecture and panoramic Verde Valley views offering an atmosphere you simply can’t stage. For fans of live music photography and Arizona’s haunted history, this pre-show shoot with Prima Materia was a perfect collision of underground rock culture and desert ghost-town aesthetic—proof that the best band photos happen when you let the location tell its own story.