Thanks Rob,
That allows me to transform the cube visually yes - but the other piece to the puzzle which I did not mention was that I would be using jit.proxy to find the position of the cube. You will see that by using "getposition" the transformation of the cube is still unchanged. Ultimately the goal is to find the difference in position between the cube and the spheres in the scene for 3D sound spatialization.
Maybe I just need to calculate the cartesian coordinates and send them to the jit.anim.path - was just hoping for a simpler GL rotation.