Michael Jakobi, also Michael Jacobi (* 1618 in Sanne; † 19 October 1663 in Lüneburg) was a German cantor and church musician known mainly for his musical collaboration with Johann Rist (1607-1667).
Michael Jakobi was born in 1618 in the village of Sanne near Arendsee in the Mark Brandenburg. His father was a Lutheran pastor, his mother a pastor's daughter. He went to Stockholm for three years before enrolling as a law student in Strasbourg in 1641. Two years later he began a life of travel that took him through France, Italy (Venice, primarily a soldier (cavalry) in Venice's war against the Papal States, but also Milan, Padua and Bologna), the Netherlands and Denmark.
In 1647 at the latest, he began working with the Hamburg pastor Johann Rist, only eleven years his senior, who once called him his "valued and beloved friend in his son's stead"; he contributed simple song settings for his poetic works. On Rist's recommendation, he became city cantor in Kiel in 1648. There he married the merchant's daughter Katharina Holsten on 16 September 1650; eight children were subsequently born to the couple.
