Secret Planet Presents Teiku at Reveler Experiences

Secret Planet Richmond Presents Teiku at Reveler Experiences.
Teiku’s origin story feels almost pre-ordained. Co-leaders pianist Josh Harlow and percussionist Jonathan Barahal built Teiku on the foundation of the music they grew up singing: their Jewish-Ukranian ancestors’ Passover songs, unique to each respective family and passed down aurally over generations.
It is worth pointing out how remarkable this is. The holiday of Passover is celebrated with liturgical songs, but for most American Jews, the melodies associated with these texts have become increasingly standardized. Harlow and Taylor’s families each steward a number of unique melodies that likely originated in their ancestral villages but survive only through their family lines. Despite both growing up surrounded by Jewish communities, neither knew of any other families with melodies of their own. The concept for the band had independently incubated for years inside the minds of the co-leaders, and both knew that these beautiful family melodies would somehow have a place in their musical futures. As luck would have it, the two met in the Detroit music scene and developed a strong musical chemistry, eventually discovering their strikingly similar histories and immediately setting out to make Teiku a reality.