Jake Sorgen is a music-maker, performer, and poet currently based in Chicago.

“Jake Sorgen’s languid, lugubrious voice, haunted by burble of whispering voices in the head, lit by backdrop of compassionately strummed acoustic guitar, tear drop steel, lyrical strings and river deep bass; occasionally straying to stranger, convoluted musical places; is illuminated by ruminative instrumentation, almost improvisational jazz and magnetically mesmeric, meandering, swaying half spoken vocal…impossible to put down.“

– Chumki Banerjee, Mudkiss Magazine

In his songwriting, compositions, and improvisations Jake’s music blurs borders between notated and improvised, music and theatre, poetry and song.

Text-music works include The Forgotten Suite (2021), Empty Gestures (2021) with the Invoke String Quartet, i’ve heard you had loved me (2022) with Ashley Bathgate (cello and voice), and the interdisciplinary ensemble, Small Giants with Actor/Director Matt Bowdren.

Other concert works have been performed by the Loadbang Ensemble, Kite Quartet, Outlet Trio and members of the Instant Composer’s Pool (NL) and Creative Music Studio (NY). In 2018 he was named the “Maverick Prodigy Composer” by the Maverick Concert Hall in New York and was awarded a 2020 Composer’s Fellowship and 2022 Audio Production Fellowship from the Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Jake has composed extensively for theatre, dance, podcasts, films, and intermedia performance. He served as Composer in Residence and Artistic Associate for the American Theatre Wing award-winning Rogue Theatre in Tucson, AZ and has worked with The Story Theatre, Trap Door Theatre, Theatre in the Dark, 2nd Story, Scoundrel & Scamp Theatre, Jewel Theatre, Human Communication Project, Arts+ Podcast, among others.

His forthcoming self-titled LP, Jake’s 6th album of original songs, will be released in 2022 on I Am Them. Records.

Jake holds a BA from Emerson College and an MFA in Music Composition at the Vermont College of Fine Arts where he studied with Carla Kihlstedt, Roger Zahab, and Michael Early.

“[Jake Sorgen] creates music—and often performs it live—that lends an incalculable depth to our experience of [The Rogue Theatre’s] shows”

– Tucson Weekly