About Jake Dester

Jake Dester is a composer, saxophonist, and educator based in New York City. His work moves between jazz, electronic music, songwriting, and the quiet discipline of teaching. Each of these forms is a different way of searching for connection.

From performing in subway tunnels to composing for BET and Univision, his path has never followed a straight line. What connects it all is a constant awareness of the unseen bridges between things: art forms, disciplines, human experiences. He looks for what isn’t being said, what hasn’t been built, and tries to make something that allows people to feel more alive, even for a moment.

Dester describes his creative drive less as passion and more as a haunting. Ideas visit him, often uninvited, asking to be understood and given shape. Through sound, writing, or conversation, he studies these visitations until they reveal what they need to become. The goal is never perfection, only honesty and the courage to keep showing up for the work itself.

His music, teaching, and compositions all point toward the same idea: that peace and understanding begin within, and that art can open the space where those things are possible. Whether guiding a student through the language of improvisation or playing a melody that makes a stranger stop mid-commute, he is trying to make room for light, compassion, consciousness, and love to move through the world.