We recently connected with Jehad Choate and have shared our conversation below.

Jehad, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Can you talk to us about a project that’s meant a lot to you?

I have worked on the feature ‘Half Dead Fred’ (White Ninja Productions) which won a lot of awards in the festival circuit, and is now available to watch on Amazon Prime (US. and UK.), Tubi, and Apple TV+.

I am also in the middle of a few other projects that I am absolutely excited to be working on:

‘The Book of K.A.R.M.A.’ (2nd Childhood Productions): https://www.2ndchildhoodproductionsllc.com

‘Bare Skin’ (Opening Image Productions): https://micomontes.com

Pancake man (White Ninja Productions). https://www.facebook.com/groups/621268619691404/

Also, three shorts I have had the pleasure of working on were shown at the Marina Del Ray film festival in June: ‘Browsing History’, ‘The Drug-Deal’, and ‘The Store’ (2nd Childhood Productions). Our director Tanya O’Quinn won best director narrative short film short film.

Also, my latest piece, “Suite of a Thousand Faces” is available to stream and download on all major streaming platforms and my personal website. This piece is a musical adventure through the hero’s journey with one twist: the hero realizes he is part of a grand cycle and does what ever he can to break it. This is represented in stylistic changes between traditional Eurocentric concepts clashing with Afrocentric concepts, and then perfectly merging them together in the final act.

Jehad, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

Let’s start with the easy part: yes, my name is Jehad. No, I’m not a holy war. My name is the arabic word for struggle, and I don’t know if my parents dabbled in self-made prophesies, but I’ve not only known but come to embrace the struggle in my profession as a Composer. I got into this career by recognizing at an early age that I could identify tones, and like a mad alchemist, combine them and alter them to squeeze out new life in various degrees of emotions. I have been writing music since the 6th grade, and haven’t stopped as I enter into my late thirties. Since I’ve done a handful of these interviews before, I feel it’s necessary to note that everything I’ve ever accomplished or set to accomplish (sonically) has been from a place of unrequited love. The hero never gets the girl, or is bestowed with a major honor by the kingdom. He just keeps slaying dragons until it happens, or he is burned out by the adventure.
I was born in the small yet big village of Orlando, Florida to a humble middle class family of Caribbean immigrants. What can I say about being Floridian that hasn’t been run through proverbial muck in all my favorite comedy shows? The rumors are true. The weather is humid and quite unbearable to some. We all learned early to run in zigzags to escape an Alligator on land. Yes, we had a guy eat someone’s face while high on bath salts, and there is a little bit of Florida man in us all. But, I’ll be damned if we don’t have some of the most ambitious and creative people in the whole country. I didn’t learn discipline, business, or even my craft in my hometown. I learned to be a force to be reckoned with. I learned to give value to every word and thought I put towards my expressions. I learned style and pacing, the way one learns how to perform perfectly acceptable foreplay: through many a trials and errors. I learned to be passionate where it counts, and always carry a sense of humor. And I credit my unique approach to music to my friends and family I grew up with, and the experiences we’ve shared together in this very special melting pot of cultures and personalities I call home.
It’s because of these humble origins, I specialize in capturing the essence of a style or scene, and fusing popular listening tropes with special grooves and instrumentation beyond western conventions. I still believe one can cry and dance at the same time. I have never backed down from a writing assignment, and always embrace the idea that I can compose anything. Even if I haven’t heard of it, I will get it done with quick turn around. With empathy and a strong sense of story, I help my clients fill any holes when I retell their story musically. What would be a non descriptive pause in silence, now has the potential to drive tension to the scene, or punctuate the moment with release. I also use my extensive knowledge and experience in orchestration to compose non-musical sounds, designed to make a scene more cinematic. I’ll slap a microphone on anything, speed up or slow down the clip, change the pitch, or add plugins, and create new sounds to accent an action or legitimize an atmosphere. I am most proud of my relentless creativity that I draw from the many stories that come from my adventures in youth. Even though I’ve been based out of Southern California for the last five years, I have never lost what makes me, me in this crazy beautiful career of composition and sound design.

In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?

I think a thriving creative ecosystem starts with everyone (artists and non-artists alike) supporting each other in a local and cultural level. With the internet, everything seems so… global. Which it is… in the sense that when you put something out there the world of computer networks has a chance of observing it. But, realistically the world doesn’t stand up at attention to anything refreshing and new, and chances are your compositions might be heard by accident thanks to an algorithm that hasn’t quite figured out where you stand if you haven’t created some traction or piggy-back on others’ successes. But, if we acknowledge our musicians and artists at a local level. The energy and support for them will translate to bigger markets, while appreciating the value of the community that catered to them. It seems with the rise of social media, the internet has blurred the lines of territory and origin when it comes to new music. Which would be great if it weren’t for the avenues that an artist has to follow down in order to get recognized are still highly saturated with colonists of bigger brands, backed by the money of companies that have lost interest in even listening to new music.
When I was a teenager growing up in Orlando, Florida, the big local bands of that time were: The Supervillains, Junkierush, Gargamel, Milka, and One Drop. There’s a good chance you might not know all or any of these bands, but they were the reason to go out on a weekend night and dance around like a fool with your friends when I was growing up. These guys were accessible because they came from or lived in your town. They busted their asses for pennies to the dollar and never once faltered in their energy and prowess whether they played at the Hardrock Cafe or a hole in the wall, downtown, on a school night. We bought their CD’s, and proudly wore their t-shirts, because even if the songs were about liquor and weed, they were still us. We listened to the bigger bands also, but there was also an affinity for our bands, that many of us would model our own music after them in hopes that the drummer or bassist would be too high one night and we could sit in. That is a feeling you just never got from the bigger bands. Of course this is how I grew up, and I know some other millennial that existed in O-town at that time would argue their own “Myspace top five”. But, it still doesn’t detract how deeply seeded these bands were for locals. They weren’t songs you would put on in the background while you cleaned your apartment. These were songs that would stop a conversation in the middle of a long drive in favor of an out-of-tune sing along. You don’t really see this anymore. As annoying as a mosh pit could be to an audience member just wanting to see the band, I am saddened that venues have stopped them virtually everywhere. They’ve welded seats to take the place of the general admission sections that could allow you to at least dance. When you can’t physically interpret what you hear, you miss out on the experience. And that’s the thing, if we can’t combine our art with experiences, we miss out on the opportunity of having another avenue towards being a part of people’s lives. It’s like fine-dining: you can get a steak anywhere, but we go to nice restaurants for the experience. Other wise we wouldn’t bother with appetizers, wine pairings, waiters, and the bill. Now that steak has meaning because it is tethered to an experience that brought you to other people, whether it be a date or just a talkative waiter. You get to experience their pacing. You get to expand your palette with fresh bread and wine from someone else’s cellar. And it all means something, as opposed to just another moment of nourishment. You could stream a song, or you could see it live where the lighting is just right to expose the artist while supporting the mood of the music. You get to dance with a stranger, or even push them into a cyclone of other sweaty stomping individuals with their arms flailing. The bass could hit you in the chest and knock the wind out of you only in time for you to suck in air laced with weed and cigarettes and exhale with a scream of approval between coughs. The band will play different versions of the music because the music is at its rawest, and its not being played after months of painstaking review and editing. When you leave the show, ears partially ringing, damp with sweat, kind of drunk and kind of high… you have stories that will last a lifetime. Now, grant it… you create experiences without going to shows too. Sometimes that perfect love song comes on your shuffled playlist that consoles you after a break-up. But, who says we can’t have both? Variety in experience will always be the spice of life. And I wouldn’t be as verbose about the concert experience if I didn’t have many wonderful experiences in the crowd as well on stage.

I could talk for days of how the songwriting world has changed on a local level, but I am a composer and the situation is and has been much more dire, especially for contemporary composers of color.

Orchestral music like any genre is not a monolith. Yet, the atmosphere its concerts attract are pretty standard: Other composers, music scholars, cinephiles (depending on the composer), and the occasional looney toon fan. There is more blue hair in the audience than Marge Simpson. I don’t blame them. You’re not going to hear a sixteen year old outcast kid jonesing for a Stravinsky concert to blow some serious steam. You are not going to see the cut up t-shirt of Beethoven, because your girlfriend is a huge fan, but can’t fit into the smallest unisex size of t-shirts at the orchestra’s merch table. You are not going to drink yourself silly and make random friends in the line for the bathroom at a Mozart concert. Mainly because these guys have been dead for literally centuries. That automatically cuts off one form of accessibility to the audience. Grant it, you might have had these scenarios happen in their respective times since Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” did inspire a riot, and Mozart was as much a boozy partier as he was a genius with a photographic memory. Oddly enough, these guys struggled to get money or attention by being ahead of their time. Yet, when they peaked, they took the whole genre with them for centuries to come. That is why your community orchestra seems to always be playing the same thing to untrained ears. That is also why these guys are household names, but other concert composers get lost in the shuffle. In fact, the only new names you hear in contemporary composition come from the film scoring world. A lot of us score to film more than concerts because those are the more guaranteed commissions, and the last frontier to any sort of glory. Why? Because orchestral composition doesn’t have to find an ensemble with their intended instrumentation, they can hire and outsource anyone with a computer. They don’t need to push the playability and manufacturing of instruments and tuning, because we have synthesizers. They don’t need to have concerts, when the films essentially force-feed the audience new music by chasing it down with visuals, franchises, and beautiful people. That’s why when you ask a modern listener if they can name three composers they will more than likely say John Williams, Danny Elfman, and Han Zimmer, or at least say ‘The guy who did the music of Star Wars, or Batman.”
Heck, the only way to get a modern crowd to digest an orchestral performance is with the film connected to it playing in the background. Yet colleges and conservatories still pump out people like me with false hopes of greatness without educating us on all the compromises involved.
You want a society to best support someone like me? Stop the unsolicited/need a representative, call for scores only from specific ages, euro-centrically favored nonsense. Play my music in local schools and colleges. Commission me for your next fight song, or political campaign. Promote me like Long Beach promotes Sublime and Snoop Dawg. Stop coupling “New Music Nights” with old dead composers. Any time I see a program from an orchestra that has any of classics on there but dares to market themselves as modern makes me throw up in my mouth. It’s false advertising, and it is reinforcing that my music is the same as their music, when its not. I am not the next of them, I am the first of me.
Big Orchestras, I am talking to you especially if you posted a Black Square on your Instagram, and patted yourself on the back by finally hiring a few black and brown musicians to exploit on your picture page. How about playing some New Black and Brown music? You already have the equipment necessary to double the loudness of an orchestra in your fancy venues, so how about we knock out the first three rows of seats, and have people stand for the show. Let them dance if they want to. Let them clap along… or even better clap whenever they feel particularly moved, instead of feeling like an idiot when they do it between movements of a piece. You control how our music is presented, and squander many opportunities to truly be part of the culture by favoring the “sure thing’ of an abundance of classics done by the same dead white Europeans. I used to get frustrated when my dad would play the same album over and over when we drove out to places. Imagine how I and many other writers feel knowing that the same playlist has been on repeat for hundreds of years, and the people who could make a real change are too spineless to do anything that involves risk. Those venues and orchestras don’t represent contemporary and modern music, or the cultures that inspire it… they represent an antiquated, classist, sometimes racist part of music that has no place in a modern American society and makes people think that our genre only came from 18th century Germany or a movie screen. We have Hispanic, Native American, African, Asian and so many more influences bubbling around in this melting pot. We have so many sub-genres from so many different lands that have added nuance and character to modern compositions, but are severely under represented because the powers that be can’t stand change. Even though their way of doing things is killing our part of the industry.
To make a long response short (I know, too late), a great reformation in how we experience orchestral music is needed, show organizers need to appeal to modern times with rotating fresh music, and regulate the performances of classics to special nights or occasions. Contemporary Orchestras need to embrace new music, especially from their local ambitious composers. With this, composers will feel more inclined to take more chances, and audiences will be more diversified.

Have you ever had to pivot?

I have had to pivot many times in order to keep the proverbial dream alive. That usually means taking on non-composition related jobs to keep the collection calls at bay. I have been a ride and show attendant, a hotel front desk agent, and a college professor. I have worked in retail, food service, and even a billiards bar. But, no matter what name-tag or hat I’ve had to put on to make money, I have and will always be a writer of music. Its not really a career as much as it is a life-style. Even now, I predominantly work as a production sound mixer and boom operator for film while also providing post-production audio. I have the skills to accomplish these jobs, and my love for sound and its trouble-shooting allows me to mix with a variety of characters. Bonding with these folks has allowed me to compose for their films and each project keeps my ears sharp for new avenues in tone and texture, while learning the many ways to tell a story. But, I still put out music every year. I am actually in the process of pivoting again by going back to my songwriting roots. I have the itch to work with some new artists and see where my new ideas place me in this world. I will still be film and concert scoring, but it is important to diversify my content, so that I don’t get stuck in the same tropes.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.jehadchoate.com
• Instagram: @jehadchoate
• Facebook: @jehadchoatemusic
• Twitter: @jehadchoate
• Youtube: @jehadchoate

Image Credits
My logo was designed by Rob DeVita.