$20 7:00pm Show
Teiku is a Chicago- and Detroit-based jazz group featuring Josh Harlow, Jonathan Barahal Taylor, and Ben Willis. Their debut album, released in 2024 on 577 Records, reframes unique ancestral Passover melodies through a Creative Music lens.
“A testament to the power of music to transcend time and space” - DownBeat magazine
Teiku's origin story feels almost pre-ordained. Co-leaders pianist Josh Harlow and percussionist Jonathan Barahal Taylor build Teiku on the foundation of the music they grew up singing: their Jewish-Ukranian ancestors' Passover songs, passed down aurally over generations. Harlow and Taylor's families each steward a number of unique melodies that likely originated in their ancestral villages, but now survive only through their family lines. Using these songs as source material for expansive improvisation, the group weaves through an adventurous set that maintains its ritualistic origins while simultaneously venturing into the unknown.
Teiku plays liberation music, harkening back to the spiritual need for freedom for all people which animates the biblical Exodus story (and the Passover holiday based on that story), and which has since galvanized the free jazz movement of the 1960s.
