Jacob Wick is a Chicago-born trumpeter, singer and composer who has lived in Mexico City since 2014. His new album, I’ll Make You Coffee While You Still Sleep, came out in September on his own label and features his quartet of guitarist Federico Sánchez, bassist Alonso López Valdés and drummer Gibrán Andrade. They recorded it over three days in March and July 2025 at Pedro y el Lobo in Mexico City.
Wick tells us how the band started as a trio with no bass, and how reading David Hajdu’s Billy Strayhorn biography Lush Life led him to strip the songs back and rebuild them for quartet. He also explains why he both loves and hates “My Way”, remembers the first time he sang in public, in a barn in Athens, Georgia, and sends readers to Jazzorca on a Saturday night to hear Germán Bringas.
Each song on the album is built around a small moment: a rainy night on your balcony, the New Jersey Turnpike at 3am, making breakfast for a partner. Do you write new music constantly, or these are memories you pulled together when it came to making this album?
I’m writing something constantly, either music or words. Sometimes I draw but usually it’s music or words. For instance, for the first six months of this year, I only wrote in my blog. Now I’m writing a lot of new music. I process my life through expelling it onto paper – in the form of music, words, drawings. Sometimes what I write isn’t worth recording or publishing, and honestly my drawings aren’t very good. But creativity isn’t about perfection, it’s about the act of doing it, don’t you think?
After I write the song comes the memory. Sometimes a melody or harmonic rhythm or groove or whatever will occur to me in complete form, but usually it doesn’t. I often use indeterminate processes to set rhythms, harmonic progressions, and even melodic content. After I have the melody or the complete song, I’ll play it a few times and usually it will connect with a memory. “New Jersey turnpike…” is one of these. I wrote it using almost entirely aleatoric methods, but once I started playing it, I couldn’t stop thinking of a humid summer’s night in the hills of New Jersey, driving in the early morning with the windows down, heading home to New York after a weekend with a lover in Baltimore or Philadelphia.
Your quartet is drummer Gibrán Andrade, bassist Alonso López Valdés and guitarist Federico Sánchez. How did the four of you first end up on a gig together, and how different was it from the album we’re hearing today?
Wow! Good question. The quartet was a trio at first, without bass, and the music was a lot more complicated. As Gibrán and Fede and I were banging our heads against the music, getting nowhere, I was reading Lush Life, the amazing biography of Billy Strayhorn by David Hadju. I was struck by how Strayhorn would tailor a composition or an arrangement to the person or ensemble playing it in a way that would make both the song and the performer shine. After all, the idea that there exists some hierarchy where the composer/arranger is “above” the performer is pretty silly.
After a few shows where the music just didn’t work, I stripped all the songs down to the studs, invited Alonso, and rebuilt everything for quartet. Now the music makes sense.
You record a vocal version of “My Way” – a song you say you both love and hate. Can you tell us about that?
“My Way” is a song for a man’s man. The most famous versions that I know are by Frank Sinatra and Vicente Fernández (“A mi manera”). Fernández was famously homophobic, macho, misogynist, etc; Old Blue Eyes didn’t have the greatest reputation either. It’s a song that says, I did things how I wanted to do them and I was right, god damn it!
I hate that. Machismo is a disease. On the other hand, when I look back across my life I have made some pretty unusual, impulsive, sometimes flat-out dumb decisions, and I have never – and still don’t – regret or apologize for most of them. The words speak to me, so much that sometimes I cry while singing it. I have very much lived my life in my way, and despite my most lofty ambitions as far as who I am, this song is mine, just as it was Sinatra’s or Fernandez’s or hell, Sid Vicious’s.
Alongside “My Way” and “Every Time We Say Goodbye”, the one other cover on the album is “Un día nos vamos a morir” by the singer-songwriter Luisa Almaguer. What’s the story behind that, for someone who’s never heard it?
The chorus translates roughly to “One day we’re going to die / and you won’t be able to love me anymore / One day we’re going to die / I’ll do whatever you want.” It’s cloying, sweet, weird, a little sad, a little bitter even at the end – the last line translates (again roughly) to “Admit it, I made you laugh / Admit it, I make you laugh.” The whole album refers back to hyper-specific moments of different relationships, or hyper-specific moments that happen across different relationships – I’ve made coffee for a lot of people while they still sleep – and “Un día nos vamos a morir” fits perfectly. It’s also just an undeniably great song with gorgeous lyrics and a beguiling form.
You came to singing late, after years of experimental, extended-technique trumpet work. What was the first song you sang in front of an audience, and where?
I think it was “Rough and Rocky,” a traditional US folk song. I sang it in a barn in Athens, Georgia, at a series my dear friend Dan Nettles – a great guitarist and composer, check out his band Kenosha Kid – set up.
Your trumpet is on records by the likes of claire rousay, Mabe Fratti and Helado Negro. What’s something one of them asked you to play that you’d never have played on your own record?
Nothing!
Your MFA at California College of the Arts was in Social Practice. Is there anything from that course you’ve taken into your career as a musician?
I think the most important thing I learned at CCA was how to articulate myself and my practice. I also learned the difference between being critical and being negative. There is a practice of critical dialogue in visual art school that really should be adopted in music school – we need to be able to talk about each other’s work in a way that is not only positive or negative and we need to be able to hear criticism of our work without taking it personally or just gruffly saying, “oh you don’t get it.”
In any case the experience was invaluable. It’s important to fall on your face once in a while. I fell on my face and in the process learned what my music is, what I want out of it, and how to speak and write about both of those things. So maybe I didn’t fall on my face after all…
Which Mexico City musician should our readers go and hear, and where would you take them to hear them?
Go to Jazzorca on a Saturday. Germán Bringas will probably be playing and you’ll want to hear him. And please, learn a little Spanish first. 😉
