Jake Chapman
Jazz Vibraphonist & Mallet Percussionist

Sandeep Kulkarni (00:01.858) Today's guest is Jake Chapman, an LA-based vibraphonist, pianist, and mallet percussionist, blending jazz, hip-hop, R&B, and more.

Suraaj Parab (00:13.1) Welcome, Jake, to The Artist's Conversation, the Sanctuary of Frozen Souls Podcast.

Jake (00:16.156) Thank you so much. It's great to be here.

Sandeep Kulkarni (00:21.652) Absolutely, we'd love to have you. I'm going to jump right into it, Jake. When did you first realize mallet instruments weren't just a section in the band, but your voice and the thing that you wanted to be known for?

Jake (00:42.474) What a great question. That's been an ongoing process. I discovered mallet percussion in middle school. I had been playing in sixth grade in the concert bands—percussion, snare drum, some mallet percussion, timpani, and bass drum. But I also did an after-school percussion ensemble, which opened me up to the world of vibraphones and marimbas.

When it came time to audition for jazz band at the end of sixth grade, I had already been playing piano for about six years. That was my first instrument. I auditioned on piano, but the jazz band director at my middle school asked me if I wanted to try vibes because there were three other pianists who auditioned as well. So I said sure; I was down.

I definitely took a liking to it from the beginning. It was a fun instrument. I wouldn't say that from the beginning I knew it was my voice, but having played mallet percussion for about 20 years now—especially vibraphone—I've definitely built a large part of my life, creativity, and musicality around it. I do think that I've come into this idea that I have a voice on the vibraphone, and I use it to get something across that is deeply personal. I try not to think too much about things like, What do I want to be known for? The best stuff happens when I focus on what is exciting me in the moment, rather than worrying about what is going to be shared. When I'm focused on the here and now, making music as present as possible, that's truly when the best results come.

Sandeep Kulkarni (03:03.599) That's awesome. So after sixth grade, those three other pianists showed up, but you were already exploring all these other percussive areas. Where did the path for the vibraphone start after high school, and how did that progress?

Jake (03:26.812) I'll quickly comment on high school just because I was introduced to it in middle school and started jazz band in seventh grade. In high school, I continued playing vibes and piano. I took some vibraphone lessons and a few jazz piano lessons as well, but after a bit of time, I was more or less keeping my piano chops up and progressing forward on my own.

In middle school, I actually would have considered guitar my main instrument—the instrument I was most excited about. That continued into ninth grade and maybe into tenth grade. But definitely by the summer after tenth grade, my focus had shifted pretty completely to jazz, so I wasn't playing guitar much anymore. Vibraphone had definitely taken center stage by this point, as well as piano. By the second half of high school, I knew jazz was something I wanted to pursue absolutely.

That led me to thinking, Okay, I want to go to New York. I applied to Columbia University. I went to a pretty academically rigorous high school in LA called Harvard-Westlake, which put me in an environment where academics and prestige were heavily emphasized. On the one hand, I wanted to be in New York for jazz, but I also cared about getting a solid college experience and a great education. I wasn't as interested in going straight to music school because I wanted a broader, more traditional college experience. At the end of high school, I wasn't totally sure how my life would unfold, so I ended up going to Columbia. I didn't know what I was going to study going in, but I ended up majoring in music and minoring in computer science.

There were some fantastic musicians there that I was able to play with. I was also able to do the Columbia-Juilliard exchange, which let me do a jazz ensemble and take lessons at Juilliard at the same time. It was an awesome experience to get a taste of the conservatory environment without being completely boxed into it for four years. During my last year at Columbia, I ended up writing music and lyrics for the Varsity Show, which is the annual musical dating back to the late 19th century. I had done some acting in college and high school, but this was my first time being on the writing side of a musical, and I really took to it. My jazz background was a great primer to be able to write forms and write lyrics that fell on melodies correctly with the right scansion, emphasis, and rhymes.

I took such a liking to it that I imagined my life going forward in that direction. The reason I ended up staying in New York City after graduating from Columbia is because I wanted to pursue musical theater writing. I ended up doing a two-year program at BMI called the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop for composers and lyricists. That kept me busy as a writer. But after two years of doing that, playing keys in a band, and doing part-time test prep tutoring as my day job, I really missed playing and being on the instrumental scene. I hadn't fully cracked into that scene in New York City.

In the spring of 2018, I decided to turn on the jets for playing vibes and try to get myself out there. Since I didn't have established gigs, I started busking. I was living in Washington Heights, and I would pack up my vibraphone onto a Rock-N-Roller hand truck, wheel it up and down the hills, take the A train down to Washington Square Park, and just play for hours—solo, duo, or with whoever was there.

Later on in the summer and fall, I ended up playing a lot of duos with my friend Jasper Dutz, who's a great woodwind player. We did a lot of busking, especially in Washington Square Park and later in the subways, though we definitely preferred playing outside. It was great to just get out there and perform, because you never know who you're going to meet. It led to meeting great musicians and capturing videos. That's actually when I started doing Instagram as well; my very first Instagram videos are busking videos. You have to scroll all the way down to find them! I found it incredibly rewarding to play outside because there is no barrier between the performer and the audience. An audience forms spontaneously, not because they bought a ticket to see you, but because they happened to be passing by and wanted to stay and listen.

By late 2019, I started shifting my home base back to LA. In December of 2019, my family—my dad, mom, sister, and I, who have a family band called the Vaughn Chaps—got hired to do a 19-city concert hall tour across China for five weeks. It was an amazing experience to do a tour of that scale with my family, and it was a wonderful way to close out the decade. By early 2020, I was mostly back in LA with plans to travel to New York regularly every two or three months for a bi-coastal gigging experience. Then COVID hit, which made me fully commit to LA. During lockdown, my content creation accelerated, and I really turned toward building my YouTube and TikTok. Since 2021, I've been fully active on the LA scene doing gigs, recording sessions, and releasing my own original music. Where I'm at right now is wanting to level up everything I'm doing and give more emphasis to the recording, writing, and band-leading side of myself. I want to embrace the artist mentality completely rather than just remaining a sideman. I want to steer something in a direction that is more personal and intentional.

Suraaj Parab (16:02.156) That's really great. You have performed in so many places as a bandleader, sideman, and session player. As a neoclassical composer, the most prominent place where I usually see mallet instruments is within an orchestra. You went completely beyond those traditional borders and took mallets into the band and jazz scene. How difficult was it to fit this instrument into those non-traditional environments?

Jake (16:55.9) You're correct that the xylophone, marimba, and glockenspiel are instruments commonly seen in orchestras, and you'll find the vibraphone in contemporary concert music as well. However, the history of the vibraphone is still primarily rooted in jazz. If you consider the most famous vibraphonists in history—like Lionel Hampton, who really put it on the map, or Milt Jackson, Bobby Hutcherson, and Gary Burton—they are all jazz players.

Roy Ayers, whose early career was as a straight-ahead jazz musician, crossed over into the popular music world with soul, R&B, and funk, making the vibraphone well-known in those circles. You'd actually be hard-pressed to name many strictly classical vibraphone specialists, whereas there are many classical marimba players.

When it comes to fitting the vibraphone into more non-traditional music, I don't see jazz as non-traditional for this instrument because of that strong precedent. However, what I pride myself on doing is bringing the vibraphone into genres and styles where you truly don't normally see it, such as folk, hip-hop, R&B, soul, and video game music. I aspire to make the instrument sing. It can be an unforgiving instrument at times because it's metal bars being struck with mallets, but it can also be incredibly beautiful.

As an improviser, I don't put any walls around what I'm going to do; everything is fair game. I also enjoy taking the approach of a classical musician at times, focusing intensely on technique, precision, counterpoint, and nuance. As long as it serves the music and allows my authentic voice to come through the instrument, I love exploring it.

Sandeep Kulkarni (21:33.038) That's amazing. Moving across jazz, R&B, hip-hop, funk, psychedelic rock, and even meditation music, what stays constant in your playing no matter the genre?

Jake (22:03.708) Coming from jazz, a rich harmonic palette is always present in whatever situation I'm in. I'm always thinking about what voicings are at my disposal and what color notes I can add to introduce a nice level of flavor and harmonic spice.

There is also a constant emphasis on groove and playing rhythmically. For me, it's about precision: how I'm striking the instrument, the dynamics I'm using, and how I let notes ring or not ring through the use of dead strokes, muted notes, grace notes, and accents. Since college, I've been fascinated by how to maximize the axes of expression at my disposal—exploring loud and soft, dense harmony and simple harmony, fast and slow. When you put all those things together, it makes the vibraphone feel much more three-dimensional.

Outside of jazz, people often treat the vibraphone as a texture that just plays a simple melody or a ringing chord. I love doing that, but I also love playing it as if I were a guitar player or a piano player. A fitting way to describe my style is playing like a pianist on the vibraphone. Having played piano for over 25 years, the idea of treating mallets like fingers, developing mallet independence, using wide block-chord voicings, and executing moving inner voices comes naturally to me. I think of myself as a bit of a tinkerer, explorer, and inventor on the vibes.

Suraaj Parab (26:44.077) When I listen to your music on YouTube, your sound is virtuosic yet remains highly accessible at the same time. When you are writing or arranging, how do you decide what serves the song versus what serves the instrument?

Jake (27:22.416) I don't think I consciously split it up like that. If I'm writing at the vibraphone, I naturally write around its physical layouts. But if I'm writing away from the instrument, it usually comes down to melody and chords. Coming from jazz, a lot of the writing consists of lead sheets that any instrument can play—they either take the melody, play the chords, or fit into the rhythm section.

A couple of years ago, when I was doing a lot of multi-track percussion ensemble groove beat recordings, I developed a pretty spontaneous writing process. I wouldn't necessarily write the music out first; I would put down a single layer, add something on top of it, and let the demo emerge organically from there. Because I am an improviser at my core, a lot of my craft is built around being able to execute things in real time, using my ear and knowledge of harmony to build ideas on the fly.

Back in 2018, I wrote a series of short, one-minute etudes called "Chappy's Grooves" to highlight specific four-mallet vibraphone techniques or rhythms I came across. When a piece of music flows out naturally, the melody, harmony, and rhythm arrive all at once. It reminds me of musical theater writing—the best songs happened when the melody and the lyrics came at the exact same time. There's a natural, catchy logic to it when it's realized in the present moment.

Sandeep Kulkarni (31:20.342) You mentioned your degree in music from Columbia and your minor in computer science. Has that structured, analytical systems-brain changed how you practice music or build your career?

Jake (32:02.45) I wouldn't say it changed my career trajectory, but growing up, math was always my favorite subject. I've always been drawn to reasoning, logic, and the analytical side of music—theory, ear training, and breaking down how a song is put together. That analytical mindset is exactly what drew me to study computer science. I took a programming class, enjoyed it, took a few more, and was on my way to a major before I decided to scale it back to a minor to balance it with writing the Varsity Show. I thoroughly enjoyed the programming logic, but my post-college career has really been about following my gut and allowing myself to explore.

The traditional jazz path can occasionally feel limiting for me, which is why I've allowed myself to stray from it to expand outward—fusing jazz improvisation with funk, R&B, soul, and electronic music. It didn't happen by design; I just got thrown into unique situations and made the most of them by going with the flow.

However, I've realized recently that if you only go with the flow and never take deliberate initiative to steer the ship, you won't reach the specific milestones you envision for yourself six months or a year down the line. It's a delicate dance between following your intuition when opportunities arrive and taking active control of your direction without becoming overly attached to any single outcome. I'm learning to put more structured effort into planning and shaping goals around what I want, rather than just reacting to what is thrown at me.

Suraaj Parab (37:11.128) I found it incredibly moving to read about your work leading clinics and performances for deaf musicians, alongside your masterclasses around the world. What did those experiences teach you about what music is beyond literal sound waves?

Jake (37:46.751) Music is the ultimate universal connector. Every culture on Earth has a musical tradition. Jazz, in particular, has become a completely global language. Musicians from opposite sides of the globe who share no common spoken language can sit down together, call a jazz standard, and instantly converse at a deep level.

About a year and a half ago, I worked with some incredible deaf musicians in Portland. They write music and craft stunning audio-visual structures to accompany it, utilizing specialized haptic vests that translate musical frequencies into physical vibrations against the body. It was a beautiful experience bridging the gap between the hearing and non-hearing worlds.

I love traveling to experience local musical traditions up close. A month ago, I went to Costa Rica specifically to immerse myself in their marimba music, as the marimba is their national instrument. I attended a folkloric festival in Santa Cruz, and there was an entire street completely lined with live marimba bands. I had never seen so many mallet percussion groups in one place. Because their harmonic forms are accessible, I was invited by one group to jump in and jam on a song during a major concert in front of a thousand people. I ended up playing the entire show with them for over an hour. It was a wonderful, organic cultural exchange.

A few months before that, I was in Bali experiencing Balinese gamelan up close, which completely blew my mind. I took two lessons from master players—one on the gangsa, learning their rapid interlocking patterns and dampening techniques, and another on the gendèr, which is played with two disc-shaped mallets held loosely in each hand.

Coming from a mallet percussion background gave me a slight head start, but the sheer complexity of their music humbled me deeply. I would love to travel to Southern Mexico, Guatemala, and absolutely India to play with local musicians. My parents took a three-week trip to India a year ago and had a wonderful time.

When I was in Costa Rica, I also played a couple of jazz gigs in San Jose at a club called Amón Solar; the basement stage is called El Sótano. It had that classic, packed, claustrophobic jazz dungeon atmosphere, which is truly the best energy for live improvisation.

While at the University of Costa Rica, I led a masterclass. For the first hour, I did solo demonstrations on vibes and marimba. For the second hour, I arranged all 15 attendees in a large circle behind marimbas, vibraphones, and a xylophone, and I conducted a giant, spontaneous, fully improvised mallet percussion ensemble. We built it up one player at a time. For the final round, I wheeled a timpani into the center of the circle to drive the rhythm, and we performed a structured improvisation based on my composition, "An Angel Will Be With You Shortly". I'm actually editing that footage right now to post on my socials. It was incredibly fulfilling.

Sandeep Kulkarni (48:37.742) Your single, "An Angel Will Be With You Shortly", has absolutely exploded worldwide in terms of streams and views. Looking back, what do you think people connected to so deeply within that piece, and what do you want your broader body of work to represent down the line?

Jake (49:20.616) That track was a massive surprise to me. Two years ago, it was the first thing I created when I formally committed to being in my studio every single day to record. Up until that point, I had put recording on a pedestal, telling myself I wasn't ready or that I needed to completely write everything out first. I was delaying my own output. Most modern musicians treat the studio as their default setting, whereas my default had been playing live gigs as a sideman. I decided to take the high stakes off recording and just make music freely.

I crafted that 43-second clip in a few hours. The next day I re-recorded it, layered a concert glockenspiel melody on top, tracked a video, and posted it. I had no idea it would completely explode. It deeply resonated with the spiritual, meditation, yoga, and new age communities, while simultaneously crossing over into the lo-fi hip-hop beat world. It was an interesting marriage of chill, meditative textures with a distinct rhythmic groove.

I was using unique mallet instruments in unexpected ways. For percussion, I didn't have a drum set in my studio, so I inverted a vocal shield microphone reflection filter, placed a mic right underneath it, and struck it to create a deep kick-drum effect. I paired that with vibraphone, glockenspiel, and boomwhackers.

Just because a video gets millions of views on Instagram doesn't automatically mean people will stream it on Spotify. When the clip went viral, I hadn't even written a full song; it was just a short loop. Because of the demand, I spent a month fleshing it out into a complete single. When I released it, the video pulled millions of views again and translated into massive streams, supported heavily by Spotify's editorial algorithms.

That milestone instantly woke up the recording artist side of me. I had previously expressed myself through live gigs and short social media content clips, but this brought my identity as a composer and recording artist into sharp focus.

The title, "An Angel Will Be With You Shortly", actually came directly from the comments section. There were over 20,000 comments on that viral post. One camp of people said it sounded like beautiful heavenly music, and the other camp joked that it sounded like high-end corporate hold music. Someone left a brilliant comment synthesizing the two: "Thank you for calling heaven. Please hold. An angel will be with you shortly." I thought it was the perfect title.

I've come to realize that a strong sense of spirituality and pure presence is central to my music-making. When improvisation is at its best, you are channeling pure presence, whether solo or with a group. That's why I have no interest in playing inside a rigid musical theater pit orchestra where you have to play the exact same sheet music note-for-note every night. I would gladly do a stadium tour with a massive pop artist just for the novel experience, but playing a fixed, unyielding part night after night gets old quickly. My heart belongs to improvisational music built around genuine feeling.

Looking forward 10 or 20 years, I want my body of work to represent my full voice as an original writer and composer. I don't want to leave anything on the table. In jazz, you can build an entire career reinterpreting historical standards, and I love doing that, but I want to release music that is uniquely mine. I want to continue developing a modern solo voice for the concert glockenspiel outside of the classical realm. I want to push the envelope with electro-acoustic vibraphone and marimba texturing.

Lately, I've also been focused on incorporating my own singing into my music. During my musical theater writing years, I spent hours composing vocal songs at the piano; I have notebooks full of unfinished songs that I need to finally complete and release.

It's a challenge because electro-acoustic vibes, avant-garde jazz, free improvisation, and vocal songwriting could each be a distinct career path, but I want to execute them all. I just need to become more disciplined at focusing on one project at a time—getting one EP done before moving to the next. I love collaboration, and I want to track more collaborative singles and albums with international musicians.

Sandeep Kulkarni (01:05:14.912) Well, you have two dedicated musicians sitting right here! Suraaj is a composer and I am a vocalist, so if you ever want to track some hybrid ideas in LA, let's collaborate.

Jake (01:05:22.81) That would be amazing! Honestly, the main bottleneck I run into is time. A massive amount of my weekly time and creative energy gets completely consumed by video editing. Last year, when I was filming and multi-cam editing my weekly live residency performances at a local climbing gym, I was easily spending over 20 hours a week behind a computer screen editing video. That's a demanding part-time job in itself.

I need to be smarter with my time to ensure my primary energy goes straight into writing and practicing music. Spending days editing video steals my creative flow and fractures the concentration required to stay inside a musical frequency. In our modern media landscape, independent artists are forced to handle absolutely everything themselves. I dream of the day where I operate out of a state-of-the-art studio surrounded by a dedicated audio engineer and a professional videographer who captures, edits, and manages all my content, leaving me entirely free to just manifest creative concepts. I hold endless ideas sketched out in my phone, but executing them is difficult when you have to run the entire operation yourself.

It takes an adjustment to explicitly build a team around yourself and bet completely on your own output. My standard approach has always been to just show up, play my absolute best as a sideman, and let things happen naturally. That approach has served me incredibly well—it made me a full-time musician and built my online audience. But stepping up to make yourself the focal point of a major recording operation is a mindset I'm still adjusting to.

Sandeep Kulkarni (01:10:13.02) I was smiling throughout that last part because it perfectly mirrors what Suraaj and I navigate daily. We handle our own tracking and video editing for our respective projects, and it takes an immense amount of time. We tried outsourcing our video editing in the past, but it can be incredibly difficult to find the right people who align with your aesthetic.

Jake (01:10:45.19) Exactly. Other than a few one-off projects, I've been highly reluctant to outsource my post-production because I am incredibly particular about the details, and I already possess advanced video editing skills myself. To hand it off, I need to find a professional who is noticeably better than me and commands elite gear.

Sandeep Kulkarni (01:11:21.858) If you already know how to edit to a high standard, it's frustrating to spend money hiring someone who delivers a cut you could have done better yourself. I remember a music video project where an external editor took six entire months to deliver a final cut. I was beside myself; I could have self-produced and released three videos in that exact same timeframe!

Jake (01:11:44.03) I hear you. There is true creative agony in having completed tracks or videos that you are desperate to share with the world, but the rollout gets completely hung up because you placed the control into someone else's hands. When you lose control of the timeline, you are entirely at the mercy of their schedule, motivation, and talent. That's why I hold an innate urge to do everything on my own. I have my core circle of local musicians that I track with regularly, but I am continuously on the lookout for specialized production partners where the workflow just clicks perfectly for a project.

I have a deep eagerness to work hard, produce a massive amount of music, and perform constantly, but it only executes successfully when I feel completely aligned internally. If an idea stays purely in my head and doesn't register in my body and soul, it remains just an abstract concept. I am working on the discipline of showing up to create even when that initial creative spark isn't automatically present. Following my gut post-college has always steered me well.

Sandeep Kulkarni (01:15:03.182) When the timing is right and you connect with the correct people, it just clicks. We wish you absolute success, Jake. This was an incredible conversation. Thank you for your profound honesty regarding your career path, your continuous curiosity, and the deep intention you bring to mallet percussion. It was an honor speaking with you.

To our listeners, thank you for sharing this space with us. Go follow Jake Chapman across all social media platforms and stream his exceptional discography—it is a completely unique sonic experience. If this dialogue resonated with you, share it with a fellow music lover, and join our international community of creators on Discord via the links in the description below. We will see you all next time on The Artist Conversation. Thank you, Jake!

Jake (01:16:15.551) Thank you so much. It was my absolute pleasure.