Music and Composing

Music has been a big part of my life for as long as I can remember. I grew up banging on every object within reach, so I guess that's why my parents got me a drumset as my first instrument. Later at the age of six, I started classical piano lessons, but never really learned to read sheet music. After a little over 5 years, I quit. It was a little while after this that I started learning on my own and first recording and composing music. My first "pieces" were crude to say the least, but very much inspired by my first musical influences: The Beatles and Pink Floyd and a graphical video I was shown in class of the Rite of Spring by Stravinsky. Pretty soon after those bands, more Progressive Rock bands entered my listening; Emerson, Lake and Palmer, King Crimson, Yes. From learning some of these band's complex tunes, I started to grasp music theory concept on my own slowly over time.

In 2020 during the COVID Pandemic, I released my first serious project, "Tales of the Forest" on Bandcamp, a culmination of all of my years of emulating my musical heroes. It was under the name "Banach-Tarski Paradox" because I liked that mathematical paradox (as you might see in the math section of this website) and it was the name of an all-improvisatory band I was in at the time. Around the same time, I started my Jake's Prog Picks website (linked up above) where I've tried to catalog "epic" Prog songs over 15 minutes long in my free time. Since then over the course of 4 more albums, my composing has gained influences from whatever new music piques my interest. Music listening is an important part of my inspiration process, so I'm always trying to listen to a diverse array of music like progressive rock, jazz, classical, and rnb/funk as well as traditional musics of India and Brazil.

I finallly got around to becoming more fluent in sheet music, this time as a means of writing down my compositions. In 2024, to build my fluency, I began my "Circadian Songs" project, inspired by Hermeto Pascoal (one of my big music and life inspirations) and his Calendário do Som. In this project, I set myself the challenge of composing at least one new song every day. Each one of these songs, like Hermeto's are then "set free" in the world, where I will waive any copyright and provide the sheet music here for free (I'm uploading them in 50 song batches as PDFs): Circadian Songs

I was lucky to play in my high school Redwood's well-run music program for all 4 years. During that time, I gained more skills as a jazz pianist and drummer with a better sense of musicianship and collaboration compared to many of my individual projects previously. I've also had the opportunity to arrange my compositions to be played for live bands several times and also performed several solo piano improvisatory pieces. I've recorded many of those performances and some covers of songs on piano and other instruments at home and put them on my YouTube channel Jake Gotlieb Music. Now at Pomona College, I've been honing my skills as a singer as well as other instruments like ukulele, bass, guitar, tabla and violin (when I can motivate myself). I'm a keyboardist in a funk band, Willem Dafunk'd with some of my friends as well as participating in and helping set up and promote open jazz jam sessions for students.

Playing music is a healing force for me and it's something that I'm going to try to do professionally for a couple of years once I graduate. It's a big music scene in the world with lots of music legends barely making a living, but regardless, at the moment it's what my calling is.