Jesse had decidingly devoted his life to music before finishing elementary school. Classically trained on both the viola and trumpet, Jesse began regular gigging at the age of 11. Before having a license to drive, Jesse had played some of the most prestigious venues in the world, including both St. Mark’s and Notre Dame Cathedrals, touring extensively internationally as principle trumpet in national wind ensembles and orchestras.

After graduating with degrees in both trumpet performance and music production & technology from the Hartt School of Music, where his passion for modern (and more often than not, highly experimental) composition was first nurtured, Jesse sidestepped a career of orchestral trumpet to further focus his own musical direction and begin work in extended performance/recording techniques while building his own swank project studio.

Now 25 and residing in the middle of it all in NYC, Jesse’s tastes for the slightly askew have led him down a broad path of musical stylings with dozens of projects in his wake. Often teamed with a small collective of Long Island based spazedelic improvisers, he’s provided just about every instrumentation imaginable, from run of the mill (guitar, bass, keyboards or drums) to abstract (theremin, E.V.I., turntables); traditional (trumpet, flugelhorn, viola, french horn, recorder) to the experimental (ring modulator, tape manipulations, electronics, radios).

Recording under the producer-pseudonym Pork Lion, as well as with numerous other acts including Grasshopper, The Fairy Godmothers and Last Level, Jesse also runs Baked Tapes, a cassette-centric experimental label as well as an offshoot artzine label, Budding Books.