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Jonathan Barahal Taylor is a Detroit-based drummer, improviser, composer, and educator. He leads groups representing a vast array of musical dialects including the art-rock band Saajtak, Your World is Fire, a solo project for drums and electronics, Teiku, which reframes his family’s ancestral Jewish melodies in a creative music context, and his quartet which explores his own compositions as well as interpreting music from the great composers of Black American Music. His profile as a sideman is similarly far-flung, as he’s equally at home with alt-punk band Throwaway, modern jazz group Kenji Lee’s Fortune Teller Trio, and singer-songwriter Abigail Stauffer. His playing is described as “carefully crafted chaos” (Midwest Action) and possessing “the rare ability to drive a band with constantly shifting rhythmic and melodic patterns … without ever overpowering the group” (SEMJA Review) while his compositions are noted as a “a balance between for and freedom” and “music for the head and heart” (All About Jazz). He has performed with such luminaries of creative music as Wadada Leo Smith, Dave Liebman, Angelica Sanchez, Michael Formanek, Tomeka Reid, Jaribu Shahid, and John Lindberg, and played at the Jazz Gallery in New York, Detroit Jazz Festival, Toronto Jazz Festival, Edgefest, DC Jazz Fest, the IASJ Conference in Cape Town, and Namba Bears in Osaka. He received his BFA in 2013 from the University of Michigan where he studied with Geri Allen, Andrew Bishop, Mark Kirschenmann, Sean Dobbins, and Evan Chambers, and is currently pursuing his Masters of Music.
