Trevor Bystrom
Trevor’s love of music and conservationist spirit was fostered from a young age. He was born and raised on historic Anna Maria Island by a musical family. He grew up attending music festivals all around Florida. By 16 he had written many originals and began performing around local venues. At age 18, he started working on his first album, "Fly Away." During that year, Morgan Greig joined on percussion and didgeridoo. The album was released and sold over 150 copies the first night. A few years later, Trevor and Morgan joined up with Kristie Armas on the bass to form The Tribal Trio. With this acoustic act Trevor released his second album, "Live and Direct.” It sold the entire order of 1,000 albums. After two years with this trio, Trevor's songwriting visions led him to pursue a more dynamic project with a full size band.
In the summer of 2016 Trevor Bystrom attended the 5 week summer program at Berklee College of Music. Here he joined the World Music ensemble, which started to lay down the bricks for Trevor’s path to Caribbean and Afro influenced music. The ensemble was a group of 12 students covering songs by Nneka and Richard Bona. This was one of Trevor’s most challenging weeks in his music career.
The next summer, Trevor opened up Studio 6a, a recording studio on Anna Maria Island. He started producing a few artists, as well as working on his self produced 10 song album, “Water”. This album was influenced by Paul Simon, Rusted Root, Xavier Rudd and a few others. It was during this album Trevor met his drummer James Hershey. Once completed, “Water” received the BOMB award for best album in Manatee County. He took this album on the road, with successful tours in the Northeast including The Frosty Mug tour and Heart’s in the Caribbean tour.
In 2019 Trevor started recording his new album, a big project stretching the boundaries of Trevor past music. He called on Pedro Arevalo, a berkley grad and international touring musician, to help produce the album with him. This album brings out more latin, reggae, and calypso side. During a search for a percussionist, James Hershey found Benny Maldonado, a next level Latin Grammy nominated percussionist based out of Tampa. He took on this band like it was one of his own along with his wife Judit Maldonado who joined as vocalist and auxiliary percussionist.
During the tough year of 2020, one of Trevor's passion projects blossomed. An artist he was collaboration on a single with together decided, with the current lock downs and loss of shows, to record a 6 song EP. For the next year Trevor and Peter worked endlessly to created this album remotely from their own studios over 8,000 miles apart. They successfully finished the EP "Mawanga & Bystrom" and set its release to be September 1st and dropping its first single "Some Day" on July 7th.
At the same time this project came to light, Trevor's band was building. Juna Serita joins as its core bass player and Zooey Seraphine joins with violin and sound scaping. The band now 7 members released its 1st of the 5 live in studio music videos.
Trevor's is working to release the rest of "Live in Studio" videos, EP "Mawanga & Bystrom" in September, a full album with his band in 2022, along with countless video projects, and building his brand Blind Rooster.