Tech expert and musician Jerry Jensen passed away 2024 July 31 in California, where he had lived since 1975, from complications due to kidney failure. He was 74.
Jerry was the middle son of Norman and Laura Jensen, and grew up in the Ravenna Park neighborhood of Seattle. He played French horn in the Seattle Youth Symphony and kept playing throughout his life. His father was a band director at Ballard High School and later a producer/director at a new KCTS television station. His mother was a piano teacher, so Jerry was also proficient at the piano. After graduating from Roosevelt High School in 1967, Jerry went to Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh for two years studying Electrical Engineering, then returned home to Seattle and completed his education at the University of Washington, Seattle, studying horn with Chris Leuba and graduating with a custom degree from the UW School of Music in "Electronic Art" under the supervision of Glenn White. In Seattle he would work for Kearney Barton’s Audio Recording Inc., at the UW Ethnomusicology Archives, and as the first sound technician for the then-new UW Meany Theater. He was active in the Seattle electronic music scene at New Dimensions in Music, a division of And/Or, a non-profit Seattle arts organization. He also made the custom mixing console at Seattle recording studio Have-a-nice-day on Capitol Hill.
Expert in electronics, computers, and music, he moved to Los Angeles in 1975 to work at the offices of Meany’s acoustician, Paul Veneklasen, but within months was drawn to Capitol Studios in Hollywood, working many years as their head of studio electronic design and studio maintenance. He left Capitol in 1980 to work for Deane Jensen of Jensen Transformers (no relation, but confusing), where he worked on Comtran, a circuit analysis program based on S.P.I.C.E.
In 1991, he moved to the San Francisco bay area to work as the do-it-all tech person for a Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur, where there were several estates and the infrastructure of a small tech city to take care of, including a theater, recording facility, and an all-inclusive networked control system that included the estate’s lighting and irrigation systems.
He enjoyed a good road trip, making regular journeys up the coast, and playing music with friends. Jerry endured several health problems through the years, including diabetes, a near- fatal infection, loss of sight in one eye from diabetes, and lung cancer. He was still contemplating retiring and moving back to Washington state from the Bay Area, when kidney failure struck.
Jerry was a Life Member of the Audio Engineering Society and a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers. He is survived by his older brother Bill, of Sequim WA, and younger brother Dick of Sarasota FL, and several nieces and nephews.
He requested no service.