I’m a blue-collar artist with more than a thousand gigs under my belt. Born into a musical family, my father was a jazz guitarist who played with Charlie Parker and Louis Armstrong. My sister is a Grammy nominated jazz flutist. My oldest brother toured with the Tommy Dorsey Band. Music was my birthright, but my journey has not been defined by the endless hours in a practice room or a billion jam sessions and jazz gigs. The true source and inspiration for my work has been my life outside of music – as a grad student in the Conservatory of Life! As a married father at seventeen, going to high school during the day and working in a factory at night. I’ve driven cab in NYC and Boston, been a moving man, worked construction, as a day laborer, graveyard shift janitor, dishwasher, waiter, house painter and more. All of that experience bleeds into every word I sing and every note I play. The music, musicals and plays I have written are permeated with those life experiences and the people I have known, not just on the bandstand, but on the streets and in the workplaces. Hitchhiking across America at 20 or ending up in NYC’s Bellevue hospital after a downtown mugging – those are experiences worth at least a thousand more hours in the practice room! All of that is reflected in my work. When my musical, Piper’s Song, was showcased at the Gene Frankel Theatre in New York’s Greenwich Village, it was greeted by critic Brad Bradley’s NY Curtain Up review that perceptively recognized my eclectic background…”John Ryerson’s score not only is exciting, but also, as performed by a stunning band of five, is a cornucopia of musical texture… a rich tapestry of energy and emotion that includes pop, Caribbean, and blues influences, as well as Musical Theater. Much of his music winningly suggests a Musical that might have resulted in a hypothetical 21st century collaboration by Brubeck, Bernstein, and Ellington… his Piper’s Song could become a song for the masses.”