Ryan Keith Porter was born on July 31, 1979 in Los Angeles, California to Maggie Louis Schaffer. Raised in South Central Los Angeles with his sisters YeVeet, Nannette and Family, he grew up surrounded by Jazz, Black musical traditions, and the deep cultural lineage of a city that would shape both his sound and his spirit. Spending his early years with his Grandfather Thomas Watford, he was introduced to the records of legendary trombonist J.J. Johnson, who became his hero on the instrument. This is where Ryan’s love of trombone was born.
As a teenager, Ryan attended Washington Preparatory High School, where he studied under renowned educator Fernando Pullum and began private lessons with trombone master George Bohanon, both of whom became deeply cherished figures in his life. During this formative period he also met trombonist Issac Smith, who became both a mentor and musical older brother.
Ryan came of age during a period when music education had been systematically stripped from many public schools across Los Angeles. Yet throughout the 1990s, through the determination of educators Reggie Andrews and Fernando Pullum, artists Billy Higgins and Kamau Daáood, and community advocates and organizers including Barbara Sealy and Bob Brodhead, a powerful cultural rebuilding effort emerged across Los Angeles. Through organizations such as the Multi-School Jazz Band, Buddy Collette's JazzAmerica, and the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz, along with proving grounds like The World Stage, young musicians once again gained access to instruments, professional mentorship, performance opportunities, and a living artistic lineage. Ryan became one of the brightest products of that movement, entwining his life deeply within a tradition he later helped carry forward.
It was during these years that Ryan met many of the musicians who would remain lifelong collaborators and brothers, including Kamasi Washington, Terrace Martin, Ronald Bruner Jr., Stephen Bruner, Cameron Graves, Miles Mosley, Tony Austin, and Brandon Coleman. Inside youth ensembles, late-night jam sessions, practice rooms, garages, and small clubs across Southern California, a generation slowly began shaping a new musical language rooted equally in jazz tradition, Black Los Angeles, experimentation, spirituality, and community.
Ryan later attended the Manhattan School of Music in New York, studying under Steve Turre, Wycliffe Gordon, and David Taylor while further developing his voice as both a musician and composer. New York expanded his musical world, including dream performances with legends like McCoy Tyner and others, yet Los Angeles continued calling him home.
After returning to Los Angeles in the early 2000s, Ryan moved seamlessly into the pulse of the city’s creative heartbeat. His trombone carried him through an extraordinary range of artistic worlds alongside artists such as Snoop Dogg, Ms. Lauryn Hill, Freddie Hubbard, Quincy Jones, Stevie Wonder, Raphael Saadiq, Rihanna, Gnarls Barkley, Cameo, and the Clayton-Hamilton Jazz Orchestra. Yet he never drifted far from the countless sessions, small stages, rehearsals, and hopeful dream-building that forged him as a leader and prolific musician.
During these years, Ryan became one of the defining voices of a new generation of West Coast jazz, shaping a sound that reconnected the music to its ancestral relationships with funk, soul, blues, and the African diaspora. Night after night, his horn soared through spaces like The World Stage, 5th Street Dick’s, Piano Bar, Leimert Park, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Echo, The Jazz Bakery, Catalina’s, Central Avenue, and other festivals, becoming part of the atmosphere itself, another voice carried into the long unfolding song of Los Angeles.
In 2007, love came along and Ryan married Donalysia McGuire. Together they welcomed their daughters, Anaya in 2008 and Anya in 2009. Fatherhood profoundly transformed Ryan and became the deepest source of meaning and inspiration in his life. He shared his love of creativity freely with his daughters, surrounding them with music, humor, imagination, and encouragement. With Anaya, he nurtured a deep connection to visual art, encouraging her gifts in painting and drawing and helping her cultivate the creative confidence that continues to live within her work today. With Anya he found joy in teaching her to play trombone, passing forward not only the instrument itself, but the lineage and love that had once been given to him.
Alongside his brothers in what would later become the West Coast Get Down collective, Ryan spent years developing a new musical language through garage recordings, relentless rehearsals, weekly residencies, and marathon creative sessions that stretched late into the night. The Collective slowly built a body of work that existed long before the wider world had language for it. That long incubation reached a creative turning point during the renowned 2011 sessions at Kingsize Soundlabs (KSL), recordings that would later help shape a generation-defining movement between jazz, hip-hop, and Black American music.
That movement would soon reach a global audience through works that Ryan contributed to, including To Pimp a Butterfly and The Epic, carrying the spirit of Leimert Park, South Central Los Angeles, and decades of community mentorship onto the world stage.
As global recognition grew, Ryan stepped forward fully as a bandleader and solo artist. His albums Spangle-Lang Lane, The Optimist, Force for Good, and Resilience revealed the depth of his musical vision: soulful, spiritual, joyful, fearless, and deeply human. The years surrounding Force for Good and his 2019 European tour marked one of the happiest and most creatively fulfilled periods of Ryan’s life, as the music he had spent decades building finally reached audiences around the world under his own name. The tour culminated in his only live recording Ryan Porter (Live at New Morning, Paris). Through touring, collaboration, mentorship, humor, and brotherhood, Ryan became beloved not only for his musicianship but for the warmth, smiles and heart he brought into every room he entered.
Ryan was a devoted son, brother, husband, father, collaborator, and friend. He leaves behind a profound musical legacy carried not only in his recordings and performances, but in the countless lives he uplifted through his generosity, wisdom, laughter, and sound.
Ryan Porter passed away on May 16, 2026 at the age of 46 surrounded by loved ones. He once said, “I give by spreading love and unity through music.” And so it is that his spirit will live on forever through his two beautiful daughters, the community and movement he helped build, his music, and in the simple truth that we all experienced more love because he was here.