Jacob Manny, EdD

Education

• EdD, Higher Education: Policy, Planning, & Administration (2026)
  West Chester University of Pennsylvania (PA)
• MM, Trumpet Performance (2023)
  West Chester University of Pennsylvania (PA)
• BFA, Music Performance (2014)
  University of the Arts (PA)

About Me

I serve as the Academic Advisor for the College of Arts & Sciences. I am passionate about supporting students as they explore their academic interests, connecting their coursework to their goals as they build meaningful lives and careers. As a U.S. Army veteran and improvisational musician, I've performed and taught in Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, and Kuwait and this has expanded how I think about serving students and improvisational practices. As a freelance improvisational trumpet player, I constantly seek to expand teaching and learning through experiential learning practices and curriculum development in order to capture the human experience through music.

Personal Insight for Students

My favorite thing about Widener University are the people. Everyone is deeply engaged in the Widener community and is always seeking to make Widener a better place!

Research Interests

My research sits at the intersection of jazz pedagogy, performance, and the lived experience of music-making, examining how improvisation is taught, learned, and understood within higher education. Jazz curriculum development, how collegiate programs structure the cultivation of improvisational fluency, and what pedagogical approaches best serve emerging musicians is the focus of my improvisational pedagogy in education. This inquiry is grounded in jazz history, which I treat not as static repertoire but as an evolving tradition that informs how we understand improvisational practice today. Drawing on qualitative methods, I am especially interested in the phenomenology of improvisation: what performers actually experience in the act of creating music in real time, and how that experience shapes their development as artists. Ultimately, my scholarship returns to a broader question about the human experience itself and how music serves as a mode of expression, connection, and meaning-making that reveals something essential about who we are.

Beyond the trumpet, I'm an avid explorer of sound synthesis through the use of electronic wind controllers such as the EVI. This allows me to explore improvisational options that are unachievable through the natural acoustics of a standard brass instrument. The use of electronic synthesis  opens a space where my identity as a performer and my curiosity of sonic tinkering meet, keeping my relationship with improvisational music in a restless, playful, and ever evolving state.