Jakob Pek is a musician and artist based in Oakland, CA. He creates a contemporary world music for the new century.
Avant garde, experimental, and improvisational in nature, Jakob's music interweaves chaos with symmetry, harmonizing refined expressions of familiar sonic worlds with journeys into uncharted domains of abstraction and discovery.
To hear Jakob perform is to hear a well-versed specialist of improvisation. Inspired in equal parts by nature and culture, Jakob's improvisations feel 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—American 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. Ingested idioms merge and transfigure in this creative matrix.
A distinctive soloist, Jakob is equally comfortable joining others as he is guiding the stream on his own. He performs regularly as half DunkelpeK, a duo with like-minded percussionist Nava Dunkelman. Jakob has performed with many pioneers of contemporary improvisation, such as Fred Frith, David Behrman, Arrington de Dionyso, Theresa Wong, Rent Romus, Chris Brown, and Sandy Ewen. Some of Jakob's notable performances have included performances at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, the Musica Medicina Festival in Pisaq, Peru, and the Haight Ashbury Street Fair in San Francisco. He studied music and the arts at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA and completed graduate work in music at Mills College in Oakland, CA.
A creative pioneer and artistic cowboy exploring the outer and inner limits of musical experience, Jakob's work inspires, challenges, and enlightens. He currently lives in Oakland, CA where he performs, creates, and teaches.