When a son tells his parents he’s leaving a prestigious medical school (where he is excelling) to go into the music business, the news is not usually received with joyous abandon.
Still, “my parents were more surprised when I wanted to go (to medical school) than when I wanted to quit; they had always seen me as a music person,” said Scott Jacoby, 53, who graduated from Rye High School, attended Skidmore, and then enrolled at the Einstein Medical College before leaving to become a music producer.
His risk seems to have paid off.
Today Jacoby, who lives in Bedford, is a Grammy Award-winning music producer, songwriter, sound engineer, mixer, recording artist, entrepreneur, and educator. He has worked with the likes of Coldplay, John Legend, Sia, SZA, Vampire Weekend, Janelle Monae, and Jason Mraz.
This year, he contributed to Cory Henry’s album, “Church,” which won a Grammy in February for best roots gospel album.
He also is founder and president of Eusonia, a recording studio, independent record label, and audio recording equipment company. Eusonia’s first release in 2008, Maiysha’s “This Much Is True,” received a Grammy nomination in 2009 (but lost to Janelle Monae).
He is currently collaborating with three-time Grammy-nominated singer Ryan Shaw and keyboardist Ray Angry (from The Roots and The Jimmy Fallon Band) on an album called “Off Broadway.” The album, due out in May, covers Broadway songs from the last 75 years.
A Musical Journey through Rye Schools
Jacoby calls himself the “anti-specialist,” because he plays many roles and is open to all musical genres: jazz, opera, classical, pop, soul, R&B, film soundtracks, house music — and whatever else is floating around.
His musical path opened in fourth grade at Osborn Elementary School when students were encouraged to take up an instrument. Jacoby practically levitated in his seat.
“I ran all the way home to tell my parents I was going to learn the drums,” he recalled. “Most parents would shy away from that, but mine said OK, cool.” When they told him it would be good for him to learn a harmonic instrument as well, he also started taking piano lessons. He never looked back, continuing through middle and high school, always expanding his interests and tastes.
He joined school bands, and particularly loved the Rye High School Jazz Band.
I was the one who suggested to the music teacher that we have our jazz band do the halftime shows instead of the marching band,” he said. “I don’t know if it continues to this day, but that was a completely revolutionary thought at that time. It was very well received to hear a different halftime show from the band.” (The Rye High Pep Band indeed continues that tradition.)
Jacoby is grateful for his fourth-grade teacher, Gerry Havlin, who recognized his talent and encouraged him to continue piano. Havlin also got him involved in school plays, chorus, and musicals.
Todd Beaney, who taught Jacoby at Rye High School, remembers his former student as “clearly very talented, a multi-instrumentalist with strong musical instincts as well as strong leadership and people skills. He was unusually self-motivated and was often assembling various groups of students to play with, as well as consistently participating in both the band and the jazz band.”
Beaney provided two examples: Jacoby successfully took on the daunting task of music directing the student-led musical revue his senior year, performing in it as well as leading the pit band; and led a student rock ensemble in a performance at an extracurricular fund-raising concert for a charitable cause.
“He was always upbeat and easy to work with, and all these qualities have developed into even greater assets as his professional career has unfolded,” said Beaney, who retired from Rye High in 2020.
The Fork in the Road
Jacoby entered Skidmore College to study psychology.
“I never even considered that I would do music as a career,” he said. “It was just my ‘fun thing to do.’ My philosophy at the time was, ‘Why take the thing that you enjoy the most and potentially ruin it by trying to make it my business?’”
That philosophy led him to medical school, where in his second year, he found himself thinking, “Wait, what? Is this what I really want?”
“I had a shift in my philosophy,” he said. “I began to think that life is short and making a career out of something doesn’t have to ruin your liking it. There are a lot of examples of people who absolutely love the work and excel at it.”
And just like that, Jacoby was 27 and starting over in a difficult and quixotic field. The going was hard at first. Squirreled away in a tiny apartment in the East Village, he found a part-time day job at a nonprofit doing international development work to fund his dream.
“I worked hard,” he said. “After a few years, I did eventually get the attention of record labels, and I did get a manager, and I did make recordings, and I did do shows, but I still wasn’t sure what I was doing, or where I wanted to go.”
The lightbulb went off when a fellow Rye musician, Emily Lazar, herself a Grammy winner, listened to an album he had created. She was amazed that he wrote, sang, played every instrument, mixed, engineered, arranged and produced the whole thing. “That’s about 10 different careers!” she told him. “What do you want to do the most? You can be whatever you want to be.”
That brought Jacoby up short. “I realized that what I liked most was writing, mixing, and producing music,” he said. “And that’s the path I followed.”
He decided to launch Eusonia and since then has racked up many awards.
Today, Jacoby and his wife, musician Michelle Schroeder, who he says is “by far the more gifted of the two of us,” live in Bedford. They met when she was pursuing a “neo-classical meets folk/indie-pop” career, though she now works in tech. They have three young daughters. He hasn’t slowed a beat, and has many new projects in the works.
“I think at the end of the day, it’s all been a great choice for me, because I’m really very happy in what I do,” he said. “I’ve been successful across a wide swath of genres and roles. I’m a lot happier as a result. Creatively, it gives me full expression.”
And advice for up-and-coming musicians?
“Don’t give up your day job, so long as it allows for the time that you need to do your thing,” Jacoby said. “Nothing good is going to happen in your career if you’re just focused on the money part. I think the great stuff happens when you are focused on the art.”
