Josh Harlow

Describe Your Initiative

My family sings unique melodies at the Passover seder, artifacts of our ancestral village in modern day Ukraine; strikingly, so does the family of Jonathan Barahal Taylor (this project’s co-leader and percussionist.) Teiku started as a musical ensemble exploring these melodies through the lens of Creative Music (“jazz”) with a rotating cast of collaborators, and with PoweredBy we are expanding, providing more mechanisms for others to engage with Jewish culture through their ears to foster community. To this end, we are creating an online archive containing recordings of unique Jewish family melodies and the stories behind them, and performing arrangements of these melodies over the course of several concerts and participatory sound experiences in Chicago and Detroit.

What Are You Hoping to Learn from the Initiative?

The process of working with and presenting our family histories through song has brought a new level of depth to our practice as creative improvisers and empowered us as cultural stewards. For our peers looking to find meaning and community in Jewish culture, the expansion of the project to include an accessible archive, more melodies and arrangements, and several performances means centered around that archive means that we can help them connect with greater depth to their own personal/communal diasporic Jewish histories and ancestral legacies. I look forward to the process of interviewing families about their stories and to the powerful exchange of energies we can achieve through live musical performance.