Fundamental Harmonic Motion was a book that evolved into an online course and community. The sole purpose of Fundamental Harmonic Motion is to help musicians more deeply understand the nature of harmony, how it expresses itself in our ears, on the fretboard, at the keyboard, and to use this understanding to inspire our improvisations and compositions.

     Jakob wrote this book because he realized that many musicians do not reach the level of playing they strive for simply because they have not integrated the fundamentals of harmonic motion! 

     The deeper we have integrated the fundamental harmonic pathways and relationships of music into our ears, eyes and hands, the easier it is to explore the more far out and extended harmonies of jazz and contemporary music, as well as to realize the vast array of options open to us in terms of harmonizing a song/melody.

     

     Jakob is an avid educator, teaching guitar, piano, harmonic theory and improvisation to students of all levels and ages. Jakob's deepest, most influential teachers - those that have shaped him and whose teaching and legacy Jakob strives to honor and share - include W.A. Mathieu, Pauline Oliveros, Fred Frith, Roscoe Mitchell, Ted Greene, John Stowell, and Tim Lerch.

     Jakob's creative work is avant garde, experimental, and improvisational in nature, the harmonizing of refined expressions of familiar worlds with journeys into uncharted domains of abstraction and discovery.

     His most recent album is a collaboration with percussionist extraordinaire Nava Dunkelman. DunkelpeK released their first studio album, "Fire's Hush", on AKP records in early 2022.

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     To hear Jakob perform is to hear a well-versed specialist of improvisation inspired in equal parts by nature and culture. Jakob's work feels somehow transcontinental and transhistorical, yet distinctly of the here and now. 

     A single improvised session by Jakob may traverse a multitude of atmospheres, all with a well-trained formal flow and clarity. 

     Established palettes and practices—Jazz fingerstyle and blues guitar, Indian rhythm, electronic music, Japanese Noh theater, etc.—are comfortably present and spiritually represented amidst abstraction, experimentation, and a contemporary approach. 

     His stream of diverse influences insists upon a clarity of identity and cohesion as found techniques and vocabularies emerge and overlap while integrated idioms combine and transfigure in this creative matrix.

     Jakob's has performed his original music at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, the Musica Medicina Festival in Pisaq, Peru, Yamaha's Electone City in Tokyo, Japan, and the Haight Ashbury Street Fair in San Francisco. 

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