Ryan Jacobs

I grew up in Kansas City. In fifth grade, I was cast as Winthrop in The Music Man at Blue Valley High School. I got the theater bug as soon as I walked into the rehearsal room. I thought it was so cool how much everyone cared and I particularly fell in love with Meredith Wilson's score. I really attribute that show to being the starting point of everything I do as an artist today.

My mom is a piano teacher, so I've played piano since I was four years old. And as long as I've played piano, I've written music. I don't really remember ever sitting down at the piano and consciously trying to "write music", though. To risk sounding cheesy, it always just kind of came out of me whenever I sat down at the piano or sang to myself. It wasn't until around middle school that I consciously thought about composing. I learned about Jason Robert Brown around that time. In sixth grade, I watched The Last Five Years movie and became completely obsessed. I spent the entire next year learning "Moving Too Fast" (down a whole step, because I didn't know how far my voice was going to drop) to play at my middle school talent show. The time I spent with that song taught me so much about piano writing and confirmed that I wanted to write musicals for the rest of my life.

My musical vocabulary is typically rooted in jazz, and I love all things funky. I've been informed by artists like Quincy Jones, Stevie Wonder, Kirk Franklin, and especially Pat Metheney and Lyle Mays. My music is also equally rooted in orchestral music. I fell in love with this kind of music when I started playing french horn in the school's concert band. That being said, I have an equal love for composers like Copland, Caroline Shaw, Gershwin, Grainger, and Ravel.

I’ve found that my answer to this question changes a lot. Often, the best part is being able to make music with other people. Other times, it's the feeling of being able to express things that other kinds of communication can't capture. Or it's when a bass player comes up with a line so filthy that you throw up. It really depends.