Jacob Koller / The Mad Arranger (Jacob Koller)

I started playing piano when I was 4 because my older brother played and I wanted to do whatever he did. I won a bunch of classical competitions but didn’t really get into music until I joined my high school jazz band. More than the actual genre of jazz, it was the freedom of improvisation that I couldn’t get enough of. I studied jazz and classical piano at Arizona State University and took a bunch of lessons with some amazing pianists like Fred Hersch, Kenny Werner and Uri Caine. I worked as a full time gigging jazz musician for a long time but I don’t think I found my true calling until moving to Japan. A month after I moved here I lucked into my first job arranging 15 songs for a solo piano album. The CD sold really...