By Sena Christian

Like many small town athlete-musicians, Jay Myers’ halftimes during his high school football games were busy. He would rush to remove his football pads to play drums with the marching band, then hustle back for the second half of the game. 

That was life in Cope, South Carolina, a town of about 100 residents, where Myers first started playing the drums as a child at the church his grandmother attended. He’s been honing his chops ever since.

“Pretty much, growing up, all my life was drums,” he says.

While attending SC Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities as a teenager, he studied percussion under top-tier musicians. “That was amazing, honestly, just learning about the history of music during the Baroque era, some early jazz stuff — pretty much all of our homework being music history. It really taught me a lot about musicianship, performance and then being a musician.”

From there, Myers joined the Air Force for about five years, which brought him to Sacramento. When his service ended in 2018, he picked the drums right back up and became a professional musician, composer and educator. He specializes in marching percussion, gospel, neo-soul, jazz and alternative music, according to his website.

This is his fourth season with the Sacramento Kings Drumline; he’s the drum captain. He’s also been hired as the co-director of the drum line for Sacramento State’s new Black Honors College. He says this is a full-circle moment for him.

“I remember growing up as a kid and watching South Carolina State University marching down our small town, or going to the homecoming game, just watching the drum line, always just being enamored with the performance and the marching aspect and the cadences,” he says. “Now being able to put my own touch and feel, and bring that slice of home to California, I cannot express how excited [I am].”

As if he’s not busy enough, Myers also plays with the Symphonia Phonotone orchestra, which performs 1920s and 1930s syncopated jazz music around Sacramento and California. His band, Cosmic Roots, has been performing regularly at Powerhouse Pub in Folsom and at The Side Door in Sacramento. Last year, he released his solo EP “Diaspora,” available on streaming platforms.

Myers is a firm believer that “music is a universal language” and it’s been one of his goals to spread this language through music education. He has taught at Bach 2 Rock Music Schools in Folsom and at Music Lab Davis, and he offers private lessons. He says he has taught a spectrum of students, including those with learning disabilities or hearing deficits. “Teaching students, it’s very fulfilling seeing them being able to progress through music,” he says. 

In terms of his own education, he has plans to return to school to earn his master’s degree in music therapy. Both his mother and sister have worked as nurses, and he remembers visiting hospitals and nursing homes and seeing how older people respond to music. He was a witness, he says, to the power of music.

This story was funded by the City of Sacramento’s Arts and Creative Economy Journalism Grant to Solving Sacramento. Following our journalism code of ethics and protocols, the city had no editorial influence over this story and no city official reviewed this story before it was published. Our partners include California Groundbreakers, Capital Public Radio, Outword, Russian America Media, Sacramento Business Journal, Sacramento News & Review, Sacramento Observer and Univision 19. Sign up for our “Sac Art Pulse” newsletter here.