The Full Story

JP Reynolds was not supposed to survive. Born Rodney Jeremiah Reynolds in Cleveland, Ohio, doctors warned his parents he might enter the world brain dead after oxygen deprivation in the womb. He didn't. He arrived, defied the odds, and was given a prophet's name — Jeremiah — as if his parents already understood that his life would be spent telling truths the world needed to hear.

He grew up in Cleveland, raised in the Baptist church, surrounded by family, learning to love music before he could fully explain why. The saxophone. The choir. The particular feeling of gospel, not just as sound but as testimony. When he was eight, his family moved to Mount Vernon, New York, and the musical education deepened. A few years later, his Aunt Ree played him The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, and something locked into place. Here was an album that felt like church and sounded like the streets. Spiritual, soulful, lyrically precise, and emotionally honest. It pointed toward the kind of artist JP would spend the next two decades becoming.

His teenage years were spent commuting daily from a predominantly Black, middle-class neighborhood to Rye Country Day School, a predominantly white and upper-class college preparatory institution. The forty-minute ride each morning was a daily education in code-switching, identity navigation, and finding ground in yourself when the worlds around you refuse to overlap. His headphones were his anchor. Jay-Z, OutKast, Kanye West, the Ruff Ryders. And they carried him. He would spend years learning to blend those sounds with the jazz, funk, gospel, and soul he absorbed at home and in church, eventually arriving at what he calls "rap gumbo": a music that holds everything at once.

At Yale University, JP Reynolds budded as a scholar, an athlete, and a community builder simultaneously. He was a running back on the 2006 Ivy League Championship football team. He co-founded and served as president of the Yale Black Men's Union. He pledged Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity, Inc. And in his senior year, guided by poet and scholar Elizabeth Alexander, he wrote a prize-winning essay that would quietly predict the rest of his life's work. The paper,"I Know of No Better Way to Express the Struggle of Our People: King, Hughes, and the Poetics of the Civil Rights Movement," drew on unpublished letters between Martin Luther King, Jr. and Langston Hughes held in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, surfacing a rich reciprocal relationship between Black poetry and social movement that had not been fully documented. It won the 2010 William Pickens Prize, Yale's highest honor in African-American Studies. But more than an academic achievement, it was a thesis statement for a life: art and movement are not separate. The storyteller and the organizer need each other. Neither is complete without the other.

He continued at Yale Divinity School, earning a Master of Divinity in 2013, receiving his license to preach the gospel, and beginning, quietly, to record music in dorm room closets under the name J Prophet. He performed at Bobby Jones Presents in Nashville. And at the Lincoln Memorial during the 50th Anniversary March on Washington. The preacher and the rapper were never two different people — they were always the same person, speaking the same truth in different registers.

After graduate school, JP poured himself into community work. He directed youth programming at Harlem Children's Zone. He led youth ministry at First Presbyterian Church of Stamford. He coordinated Freedom Schools for the Children's Defense Fund. And from 2015 to 2019, he served as a Dream Director at The Future Project, designing passion-based learning experiences for young people at underserved New York City high schools — building culture, facilitating design sprints, and helping more than a thousand students find their voices. These years deepened something already present in him: the conviction that helping someone tell their story is a form of liberation.

During this same stretch, JP began building his music career in earnest. His debut album Guavamatic Space Dream (2016) was crowdfunded. It was the first of several campaigns that would prove something important: there were people willing to bet on him before any institution did. In 2017, he formed The PEACEANDPOWER Band with music director and bassist Criston Oates, and the live show they built together — electric, soulful, and deeply relational — became something audiences described as a baptism. Rap Gumbo followed in 2019, funded again by community, toured through a first wave of Kitchen Sessions before the pandemic halted everything.

The pandemic years were generative and disorienting in equal measure. JP launched Stir Crazy (2020), an experimental fusion record with producer BACHTROY. He created and hosted the Stir Crazy Podcast — 33 conversations with artists, activists, and leaders navigating an unprecedented moment. And through the consulting practice he had been building since 2016 — Peace and Power Media — he found himself increasingly in demand. High-profile clients sought him out: the Apollo Theater, WarnerMedia, Tarana Burke, Misa Hylton, Kenneth B. Morris, Jr. What had begun as a creative side practice became, over a decade, a full-service studio trusted to handle the most delicate and high-stakes branding and storytelling work with what clients would later describe as "soul, story, and strategy."

In 2022, he released Soul Raps, a precise and soulful hip-hop collection. In 2023, Kitchen Sessions returned — ten stops, nine cities, seven states, a Ten To One Rum sponsorship, and further evidence that the relational, community-powered touring model JP had pioneered was not a workaround but a genuine innovation. And in 2024, Peace and Power Planet arrived: the debut album with The PEACEANDPOWER Band, six years in the making, crowdfunded once more, capturing the music they had built on stages, in basements, in churches, and at outdoor festivals all along the East Coast.

None of this arrived without cost. There were seasons of real fragmentation — years of reaching toward institutions and opportunities that didn't have a category for someone who holds everything JP holds. Doors that opened and then closed. Moments that arrived and dissolved. Through all of it, he kept building, kept releasing, kept showing up. For his music, for his community, for his son, and for a vision of creative infrastructure that he could feel but hadn't yet had the space or the resources to fully realize.

Peace and Power Media's chapter is now complete. On March 5, 2026, JP Reynolds founded Studio NINE23, a Brooklyn-based creative production house offering experiences, music, and design for artists, leaders, and organizations. It is not a rebrand of what came before. It is something new: an entity built on a decade of earned relationships and hard-won craft, designed for a moment when culture workers, healers, and storytellers need creative infrastructure. Studio NINE23's nonprofit arm, The Peace and Power Foundation (501(c)(3) in formation), is designed to structurally expand that access, ensuring that the people most called to this work aren't excluded from the spaces built to support it.

JP is currently building toward a permanent physical studio and cultural space in New York City. A premium hybrid venue that will generate revenue, embed equity, and serve as a home base for the creative ecosystem he has spent fifteen years assembling.

In parallel, he is completing REVIVAL. It’s a 21-song offering across five thematic EPs, the most autobiographical and expansive work of his artistic life. Rooted in healing, reckoning, and resurrection, REVIVAL is the record that could only come now, from someone who has lived all of this and chosen — with clear eyes and full faith — to keep going.

JP Reynolds is a father. A licensed minister. A Yale-educated scholar who walked into one of the most prestigious rare manuscript libraries in the world at twenty-one and found something no one else had thought to look for. A community builder who has shown up for young people across more than a decade and a dozen organizations. A recording artist who has independently released five albums, run two national tours, and built a loyal community without a label, without a manager, without waiting for permission.

He is not hustling. He is devoted. He is not proving. He is presenting. He is not chasing. He is stewarding — with faith that what has been placed in his hands is worth the care, and that the world is ready to receive it.