Jacob Shulman

A versatile, creative saxophonist and clarinetist, Jacob Shulman approaches modern jazz with a philosophical slant while also pursuing his interests in opera and computer music. He premiered his opera Role Playing Game in Boston in 2019 before moving to New York. Shulman's debut album Connectedness was released in 2021 on Kevin Sun's Endectomorph label. An interconnected double album followed in March 2024, released simultaneously as two separate records: High Fermament and Ferment Below. Jacob Shulman was born in 1994 in Los Angeles and attended the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts. He relocated to New Jersey, where he enrolled at Princeton University in 2012. During his studies, he released his first EP Until Autumn (2014) while also working on an opera, and he earned the Isidore and Helen Sacks Memorial Prize. After graduating with a Bachelor of Arts summa cum laude in 2016, he moved to Boston where he pursued his Master of Music in Music Composition at the New England Conservatory. Shulman graduated in 2018 and presented his first opera Role Playing Game in February 2019 at Somerville's The Armory. The ambitious 90-minute piece told the story of a young Armenian man whose interest in an online gaming community leads to an examination of his identity, and Shulman managed to crowdfund over $5000 for production and recording. He then moved to New York, where he worked as a mathematics and computer programming teacher while pursuing his musical interests – among other things, he produced and played on pianist Hayoung Lyou's debut album Metamorphosis (2020). In November 2021, Shulman released his first album Connectedness through Kevin Sun's Endectomorph label, a quartet session featuring Lyou, bassist Simón Willson and drummer Avery Logan. At the end of the year, he also issued a digital collection of his chiptune compositions called Gesammelte Gameboy-Werke 2016-2021 ("Collected Gameboy Works 2016-2021"). Shulman continued to collaborate with other musicians, appearing on the Walking Cliché Sextet's album Micro-Nap in 2022 and on Willson's album Good Company in 2023. He also released a concert recording called Around Town, June 18, 2022, which combines two separate live performances captured on the same day with two different groups. In March 2024, Shulman presented his second studio album, which was divided into two separate releases which revolve around concepts such as choice and rituals of performance: High Fermament and Ferment Below, both recorded with Lyou, bassist Walter Stinson and drummer Kayvon Gordon.
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