When he was in his early 30s, Jacobs moved back to New York, continuing the same kind of piecemeal existence he’d maintained in Berkeley. He worked at record stores and did temp work between gigs. He wrote music for The Living Theatre (an experimental theater company in the East Village); toured nationally with Maurice Sendak’s theater company, The Night Kitchen; scored documentaries for HBO and PBS; and played with Third Eye Blind on a 1998 episode of Saturday Night Live. He also performed in the off-Broadway show Woody Guthrie’s American Song.
In 1999, everything started to change. Concerned about financial stability and struggling with chronic tendinitis—which made it difficult to play gigs involving multiple instruments or hours-long performances—he accepted what he thought was a temporary substitute teaching job at the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music. It turned into a fruitful eight-year journey.
Shortly after his arrival, the conservatory entered into a partnership with WNYE—then a station operated by New York City’s Board of Education. Jacobs landed his first on-air job producing a weekly educational radio show for children called Sounds Like.
The station also hired him to host a live music and interview segment on Friday mornings. Soon, his were two of the station’s highest-rated shows, earning favorable mentions in The New York Times, like this one:
“Early in the first installment of his new radio show, James David Jacobs visits a friend who plays music on stones and pans. Mr. Jacobs’s goal is to teach how the raw sounds of nature become the cooked sounds of music.
“ ‘O.K., kids, you can try this at home, too,’ Mr. Jacobs says. ‘Just take all the pots and mixing bowls out of your cupboard right now and bang on them, and I am sure your parents will think this is wonderful.’ ”
His radio career was born.
Six years later, WNYE changed its format, prompting Jacobs to take a temporary job as the overnight host on WNYC-New York Public Radio. In 2010 he moved to Boston for a full-time position as a radio host and producer at the local NPR station, WGBH.
He arrived at Classical WETA 90.9 in Arlington in 2014, though he would spend the next four years commuting between Virginia and New York’s outer boroughs, where he taught music to teenagers in underserved communities.
“It was so wonderful to see [these kids] relating to classical music the same way I did as a child,” he remembers, “a demonstration of what one’s soul can produce no matter what is happening around you. As I was frequently the only white person in the room during these classes, it also served as a reminder that classical music belongs to everyone. It’s not white music.”
Ask Jacobs to riff on famous composers and he instantly becomes animated.
Stravinsky “translated the chaos and dislocation of modern life into music in a way that gave us a language to reconcile the present with the past,” he says, “the barbaric and the sophisticated, the traditional with the ever-present now.”
He also loves Bach and Mozart, but for very different reasons. While he finds refuge in the former’s spiritual architecture, he considers the latter more relatable: “Unlike Bach, Mozart seemed to think that humanity is divine exactly the way it is, warts and all.”
A composer himself, Jacobs describes it as a form of problem solving. “I like having a limitation dictated by a situation,” he explains. “I have frequently written music for dance, theater and film, and for each assignment there was an externally imposed idea from which the music flowed.”
In creating his music, he says he uses the cello the same way an artist uses a brush or a writer uses words—drawing and expanding on a specific point of reference.
He once scored a documentary about an AIDS clinic (The Healers of 400 Parnassus, which aired on PBS as part of its POV series) by coming up with two four-note motifs that correspond to the four letters in AIDS and HEAL.
“As it turned out, they were the same four notes in a different order,” he says. “I adapted the motif to the various situations depicted in the film, watching scenes over and over again to discover the rhythm, tempo and dynamics and adjusting the music accordingly.”