Jacob William

bass player, composer, improviser and educator

Born and raised in India, Jacob arrived via rare routes to play on the vast fields of Jazz and other creatively improvised and composed music. Jacob grew-up in a syncretic milieu; he attended parochial school and traveled extensively from a very young age. His earliest years in music were spent singing in choirs and being engaged in informal learning of a wide array of diverse hybrid music and playing various instruments. In his teens, Jacob started playing the bass guitar and soon began playing concerts and festivals all over India in the company of many forward-looking elder musicians who had a particularly deep interest in Jazz. Jacob moved to the U.S. in 1991 after receiving a scholarship to study music.

In 2001, Jacob received a Master of Arts in Music degree from Wesleyan University, where his studies and work combined ethnomusicology, world-music and experimental composition under the guidance of Anthony Braxton, Neely Bruce and Alvin Lucier. In the realm of world music, he also studied South-Indian vocal music with T. Viswanathan and percussion music with Ramanad Raghavan and David Nelson. During 1998-1999, he attended the New England Conservatory of Music and studied in the department of Third Stream Music / Contemporary Improvisation under Ran Blake and studied the bass with Cecil McBee and John Lockwood. From Berklee College of music, he earned a Bachelor of music degree in 1997 after studying Composition and Arranging while concentrating on jazz bass performance, and he studied with Bruce Gertz, Whit Browne and Rich Appleman. During this time, he also participated in Kenny Werner and Bob Brookmeyer master classes in composition and improvisation. He also privately studied jazz improvisation with John Laporta, Hal Crook and Charlie Banacos.

Jacob has worked with a diverse range of renowned personalities in Jazz and World-Music arenas, such as Abraham K. Adzenyah, Louiz Banks, Ranjit Barot, Maynard Ferguson, Joe Hunt, Jay Hoggard, Rudresh Mahanthappa, Charlie Mariano, Gustavo Ovalles, Len 'Boogsie' Sharpe, Omar Sosa among many others. He has also appeared in concert halls, festivals, clubs, studios and other venues in Asia, Europe and the United States, as well as on Indian National Television and Radio DRS (Zurich). Jacob was also founding member of the group J.E.R.M. with drummer Ed Nicholson, saxophonist Rolf Schlonvogt and pianist Michael Beck with whom he recorded and toured in the US and Europe between 1998 and 2003.

Jacob has contributed to over 20 recordings; some of which have been released on labels such as Warner, Intuition, Magnasound, and Not Two, among others. In 2009, Jacob's Quartet recording titled Secondary Deviations was released internationally by Swedish record label Ayler. In 2010, Jacob recorded the music of his Para Quintet and Trio.

Jacob has also performed with Allan Chase, Tom Hall, Neil Leonard, Dave Bryant, Croix Galipault, George Garzone, Jorrit Djikstra, Joe Morris, Ken Vandermark, Nate Wooley, Forbes Graham, Amit Heri, Jim Hobbs, Jeff Galindo, Steve Lantner, Pandelis Karayorgis, Laurence Cook, Luther Gray, Chris Bowman, Junko Fujiwara, Jerry Sabatini, Jeff Song, Curt Newton, Eric Rosenthal, Syd Smart, Glynis Lomon, Jon Damian, Eric Hofbauer, Garrison Fewell, Jason Robinson, Andria Nicodemou, Bill Lowe, Royal Hartigan, Charlie Kohlhase, Noah Kaplan, Joe Moffett, Bob Gullotti, Eric Zinman, among others.

Jacob was a graduate teaching assistant at Wesleyan University. He has also taught improvisation and composition as part of Excel Summer Program on the campuses of Williams College and Bennington College and lectured and demonstrated how to use current technologies to enable learning of music at University of Iowa, among other places.

Jacob has been visiting lecturer at Bridgewater State University and at University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth.

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