Teiku: Klang

Teiku is a Talmudic acronym that translates to "unanswered question," a concept the Chicago-Detroit quartet has adopted as a full artistic identity. Co-leaders Josh Harlow (piano) and Jonathan Barahal (percussion) formed the band after discovering a striking coincidence: Both grew up singing Passover melodies unique to their ancestral Ashkenazi-Ukrainian villages. Passed down by ear through generations from communities wiped out by persecutions, these liturgical songs became the raw material for a creative jazz project that registers as deeply spiritual yet predominantly avant-garde.

Five of the album's six tracks are settings of the exact same liturgical text—"Ki Lo Naeh"—each filtered through a different melody. Rather than feeling repetitive, the sequence unfolds as a compelling study in variation and the tenacity of a living tradition.

The album opens with the cheery "Ki Le Noeh (Krumholz Melody)." Harlow's piano enters with sparse, open voicings—implying the melody rather than imposing it—while Barahal holds time with a pulse that feels more ritualistic than strictly rhythmic. The Krumholz lineage surfaces as an austere, searching modal thread before Jason Stein's bass clarinet begins quietly destabilizing the mood, tugging the improvisation toward darker, unresolved terrain. Even so, Harlow launches a brisk line of attack during the bridge that touches on bop via cyclical passages, and his lengthy solo builds energy through hammering chord clusters.

On "Khasul Seydur Peysakh (Chasman Melody)," the energy shifts. The source material carries a more propulsive, ceremonial drive, and Stein leans into it with focused urgency, his lines cutting through the texture with near-vocal directness. Bassist Jaribu Shahid—whose decades with the Sun Ra Arkestra and Art Ensemble Of Chicago have cultivated extraordinary structural patience—anchors the bottom end while the group builds and releases tension with intuitive collective timing. Here, Harlow switches to the Fender Rhodes, deploying it as a colorful harmonic base that shades the surrounding instruments before the track erupts into a frenetic improvisational free-for-all.

The closer, "Odir Bimlikhe (Lunski Melody)," is an expansive statement, drawn from a community whose traces now survive mostly in old manuscripts. The quartet locks into a passage of sustained intensity as Stein's haunting lines radiate spiritual weight, eventually raising the ceiling through a scorching breakdown before the opening melody returns to seal things off.

Klang is liberation music in the truest sense—made by serious musicians with real skin in the game.