Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts, and more big names endorse "Jacob Reed And Me"
The Musician
S1 Ep. 7 May 14, 2026

The Musician

Jacob always wanted to be a Jazz musician, but quit music as a teen. To rekindle his dream, he tracks down jazz drummer Jacob Reed to rediscover the path not taken. But one Jacob Reed in music turns out to be just the beginning.

Download 1:21:30

A few summers ago, I was with some friends under a sea of stars, giving a eulogy…for a piano.

I’d taken piano lessons as a kid, and throughout middle school and high school, I dreamed of being a jazz musician, but I kind of dropped off. When I bought this piano, it was the first time I’d had one available to me since I was in high school. But I didn’t buy it to play it. I bought it to burn it.  

The burning piano was for a music video I directed for a friend, the incredible singer-songwriter Philip Labes.

When we started planning this, we all agreed it felt sacrilegious to burn a musical instrument. We did our best to find a piano beyond repair, and we made sure to let anyone we were getting it from know what we planned to do. 

When our free (plus $100 for delivery) piano showed up, the wood was warped, it was missing a few keys, but it still played beautifully.

We’d had the piano in our backyard for a month before the shoot, and rather than let it sit there on musical death row, I played it every morning with my coffee, with my kids, with musically inclined friends — pulling whatever muscle memory was left from childhood lessons.

Growing up, my grandpa used to drive me to piano lessons at the nearby college. On the way, we’d stop to listen to the SDSU jazz ensembles practice through open auditorium doors. My dream was to someday be on San Diego’s Jazz 88, playing with a cool ensemble while a smooth-voiced emcee announced me: “…and Jacob Reed on keys.”

Flash forward thirty years. I wasn’t playing piano. I was burning one. But something about that month reignited something. I started wondering if I could still have my shot. And I found a Jacob Reed who was literally living that dream.

Jacob Reed #253 — Columbus Jacob — is a jazz drummer and composer from Ohio with master’s degrees in music composition and music theory. His thesis was a mathematical re-visualization of a Bach fugue, rendered as a DNA-like spiral animation where nodes lit up as notes were played. His band is called the Jake Reed Trio.

There are three people in the Jake Reed Trio, but only one of them is named Jacob Reed. If there’s a trio… shouldn’t they all be named Jacob Reed? I decided to start a real Jake Reed Trio—made entirely of Jacob Reeds.

First, I found another Jacob Reed musician even closer to home. Like Columbus Jacob, he was also a jazz musician… and a drummer… and studied in Ohio. Pasadena Jacob is a jazz drummer who’d played with the LA Philharmonic, the Baltimore Symphony, and Katy Perry, among others. He’d been a grad student at USC’s music school at almost exactly the same time I had a work-study job there — we may have passed each other in the hallways. He’s also an insanely good drummer:

He was immediately on board with the band idea, and immediately pointed out the problems: we needed a bassist, I hadn’t touched a piano in fifteen years, and someone had to sing.

Putting together the rest of the band meant combing through the spreadsheet. There was a young Frank Sinatra-style crooner whose mother handled his inquiries. There was Twangmeister Jake Reed, the UK country gospel singer from an earlier episode, who had since passed away. An organist who replied to my email with a firm, “No thanks!” And finally, Jacob Reed, the heavy metal guitarist, whose girlfriend said: “You have to do this.” Here’s Baltimore JR shredding:

But, before any of this could actually happen, I needed to relearn how to play. My cousin Marcus co-founded a company called Line Six — I’d worn their free T-shirt to the gym in college without really knowing what it was. When I called looking to borrow a keyboard, I learned he’d designed some of the most widely used synthesizers of the last forty years. He loaned me a weighted 88-key keyboard and accidentally gave me a music education in the process: the history of modular synthesis, how harmonics and waveforms work, why the human ear’s ability to process a full orchestra simultaneously is, as he put it, very crazy.

{{IMAGE/CLIP: Marcus’s studio — the wall of keyboards he designed}}

I went home and started practicing. Specifically: Linus and Lucy, the Peanuts theme by Vince Guaraldi. It had personal significance. In fourth grade, at my new school’s talent show, I’d chosen it over the classical pieces I’d actually prepared, got nervous, blanked completely, and had to start over in front of the whole school. It’s one of my clearest memories of playing piano, which probably explains a lot about why I eventually stopped.

Speaking of which — I called my parents to find out. My mom had always believed music education built problem-solving and creativity. She’d found Dr. Mitzi Kolar, a professor at SDSU who’d created a keyboard curriculum for Yamaha that, at its peak, reached more than six million children a week worldwide. I started in her group class and eventually got taken on for private lessons — something she apparently didn’t offer to everyone.

I tracked Dr. Kolar down and she corrected my memory of her as a strict taskmaster who wouldn’t let me play jazz: she said we absolutely did jazz pieces together, and that the scales I remembered hating were exactly what a jazz musician needs to improvise. I’d been frustrated by the thing that would have gotten me where I wanted to go. She also told me I was one of the young promising ones, and that she came to my bar mitzvah. My mom said my brand as a kid was being curious, wanting to know how things worked — that music was just another form of building. My current brand is the same, except now I build spreadsheets full of Jacob Reeds.

Our first band meeting — four Jacob Reeds on a video call, two of them drummers — was chaotic in a way that felt immediately right. Amazingly, we all had the same sense of humor. Also, the three Jacob Reeds in their forties have all had a toe fungus on their right big toe. Baltimore Jacob, who is in his twenties, asked if this is what happens when you get older. Yes. Yes, it is.

We decided on two songs: Linus and Lucy as our jazz standard, and an original I’d write with Columbus Jacob composing the music — a song about sharing a name with hundreds of strangers and whether that actually changes what makes you unique. Columbus Jacob also teaches high school choir, so he gave me a singing lesson over voice memos. His assessment: sufficient for a comedy audience, but probably not working as a professional singer any time soon.

Then, we got them all to LA (this was a big to-do, but not very interesting to read about in a blog post), and the night before the show, we all went to the Blue Note Jazz Club to see multiple Grammy winner Robert Glasper play piano. Watching someone do things on a keyboard I didn’t know were possible, sitting with the other Jacobs, felt like exactly the right way to spend the eve of our performance.

Our one and only rehearsal was the afternoon of the show. My hands were aching from over-practicing; I kept blanking on the B section of Linus and Lucy, and I was acutely aware that three professional musicians had flown across the country for my idea. But the professional musician Jacob Reeds had my back, and we got ready for the show.

The show was at Dynasty Typewriter, one of the best comedy venues in Los Angeles, and my name was on the marquee — on purpose this time.

The comedy portion went well. But everything was building toward the Jake Reed Quartet. When I sat down at the piano and started Linus and Lucy, the other three Jacobs came in behind me and I felt goosebumps. Then the solo came and I blanked completely. I remembered what Baltimore Jacob had said. I kept going, improvised through it, and the audience didn’t seem to notice.

Then came the original. Columbus Jacob played piano so I could focus on singing. The other Jacobs joined in on the chorus. The audience was with us. By the end, I was actually having fun.

When it was over, I introduced each Jacob Reed. Two drummers. One guitarist. One pianist. All of us named Jacob Reed.

Before the show, Columbus Jacob had mentioned something called stretto — a compositional device where a fugue’s main theme enters before the previous one has finished, building toward controlled chaos. He pointed out that maintaining a database of every possible interaction between notes was similarly mad to maintaining a database of all the Jacob Reeds.

When I started looking for Jacob Reed the musician, I thought music had gone missing from my life. What I found instead was that what music gave me — curiosity, pattern-recognition, building things from parts — never actually left. It just took other forms. Maybe this whole podcast is its own kind of fugue. A central theme, the same name, recurring and varied, interweaving with other voices. And if the melody doesn’t come out the way you planned, you play through the flubs and keep going.

The full 90-minute live show and an extended interview with Marcus are available on Patreon. Jacob Reed and Me releases new episodes every Wednesday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and everywhere else.

Extra special thanks to The Baked Potato and The Blue Note for hosting us. Two of the world’s best jazz venues, both totally different, both in Los Angeles.

And for more music from the Jacob Reeds who can actually play:

Jake Reed Drum Samples Packs

Shades of Ellington – Laura Camara & The Jake Reed Trio

Weed ‘em and Reap – Frog Legs