Chad Kouri is a Chicago-based working artist, musician, and storyteller interested in the healing powers of color, sound, and abstraction. His mixed-race identity is mirrored by his multidisciplinary studio practice with interests focusing broadly on visual communication, improvisation, radical joy, social justice and community empowerment, and Chicago’s monumental history of resistance music and the avant-garde. At any given time, his studio contains a continuum of works-in-progress ranging from public art, paintings, homemade instruments, recordings, publishing projects, ongoing research, curatorial projects, and more. Utilizing a wide range of skills and strategies, Kouri reminds us to stay curious and make time for play, rest, and introspection, enabling us more bandwidth for personal and communal grounding, awareness, and empowerment.

Josh Harlow is a pianist, keyboardist, and composer based in Chicago. He plays a wide array of music, touring the country with several musical projects: the Jewish roots exploration Teiku, instrumental psychedelic band Submerser, his duo projects with Joe Suihkonen and Peter Formanek, and his piano trio. He has collaborated with a variety of likeminded peers and mentors, including Wadada Leo Smith, John Lindberg, Michael Formanek, Jaribu Shahid, Dana Jessen, and Joo Won Park.

In addition to his work as a composer and performer, Josh is an experienced and committed teacher. He teaches private and group lessons and has an ongoing relationship with Make Music NOLA, a free music-for-social-justice afterschool and summer program for underserved children in New Orleans. As for his own formal education, he graduated Oberlin Conservatory in 2016, where he studied Jazz, composition, and improvisation.

Vincent Davis, born in Chicago is an internationally acclaimed jazz percussionist, composer and teacher. The seed of music was planted in Davis early, growing up in a home filled with the influences of rock, jazz and gospel. In 1979 Davis left Chicago to attend the Milwaukee Conservatory of Music, where his love of jazz and skill at drumming further bloomed and flourished. It was here that Davis met his mentor Manty Ellis. Davis trained and studied with Ellis, primarily focusing on Jazz trap drumming.

Since 1985, he has belonged to groups of Roscoe Mitchell as his Note Factory and its trio with Harrison Bankhead and Jaribu Shahid , with whom he also toured several times in Europe and Asia and performed at international festivals such as the North Sea Jazz Festival . He is also on Mitchell’s album Songs in the Wind and This Dance is for Steve McCall as well as sound recordings of Jodie Christian and Scott Fields and founded the ensemble Laws of Motion . He also starred with Matthew Shipp, Arthur Blythe, David Murray, Joseph Jarman, Marilyn Crispell, Von Freeman, Hamid Drake, Corey Wilkes, Ed Wilkerson and many other musicians.

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Tags: Chad Kouri, Chicago, Josh Harlow, Kouri Harlow Davis Trio, Second Floor, Vincent Davis