Classical for Washington Spotlight on…

Evening On-Air Host James Jacobs

WETA Classical evening host James Jacobs blames his love of classical music on Stanley Kubrick. “My older brother Ben saw 2001: A Space Odyssey when it came out — he was twelve, I was six,” Jacobs said. “He loved the music and purchased what he thought was the original soundtrack but was actually a complete performance of Richard Strauss’s tone poem Also Sprach Zarathustra. This led to his taking a deep dive into classical music via recordings from the local library, and I would sit and listen to them with him.”

Jacobs was hooked. He read every book about classical music he could find and listened to every record he could get his hands on. He even borrowed his brother’s walkie talkies and started broadcasting classical music radio programs when he was nine. Fortunately, his family moved to a school district that provided instruments and free music instruction, so he began playing the cello two weeks after his tenth birthday.

As he grew older, he found himself turning to classical music for solace. “Part of the reason my brother and I bonded so much is that our father died a few months before Ben attended that fateful screening of 2001, and that was just one in a series of tragedies and setbacks my family endured. I turned to classical music as a plane of existence that provided order and beauty with which reality could not compete but could meekly aspire.”

He found Beethoven’s story particularly compelling and relatable.

“Everything about his life was so broken, and he was all too aware of his own fallibilities and inability to sustain relationships, but on the plane of music he was triumphant and demonstrated the kind of person he could have been if not for all the damage. I remember as a kid repeatedly listening to the slow movement of Beethoven’s String Quartet op. 132, which he wrote as a kind of offering to the cosmos in gratitude for recovering from an illness. Other works I was obsessed with in my youth were Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, the clarinet quintets of Mozart and Brahms, and Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring.”

As he grew up, Jacobs’ musical interests expanded to incorporate artists such as John Coltrane, Bob Dylan and the Bulgarian Women’s Chorus. Even though he loved the cello, he soon branched off into conducting, composing, improvisation, rock, and klezmer music. He eventually decided that his true gift didn’t lie in creating music, but in being an educator and ambassador for it.

Jacobs was on the faculty of the Brooklyn Conservatory for eight years starting in 1999, during which he helped to co-produce a music education radio show for kids. That was the first step in a public media career that would bring him to WNYE and WNYC in New York, to WGBH in Boston, and finally to WETA in 2014. Along his journey in music, he’s been conducted by Gustav Leonhardt and Mstislav Rostropovich, written scores for documentaries produced by HBO and PBS, appeared on A Prairie Home Companion, and taught hundreds of students who inspire him.

Today, among his many interests, Jacobs works in sound design, and his projects include collaborating with a theater collective based in Kolkata, India. He recently worked as a coach and conductor with a teen opera company in Massachusetts, and he hopes to continue those endeavors. He’s also a prolific writer, with pieces published in The Washington Post and Moment Magazine as well as WETA’s online blog Classical Score