The Cedar Presents
Jeremiah Chiu and Josh Johnson
Tuesday, November 3, 2026
Doors 7PM | Show 7:30PM
Seated | All Ages
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about this show
Jeremiah Chiu is an LA-based synthesist widely recognized for his versatile electronic music as a solo artist, textured recordings in a duo with violist Marta Sofia Honer, and the experimental quintet he co-leads, SML. Josh Johnson is a saxophonist, composer, multi-instrumentalist, and Grammy Award-winning producer. He is a member of the quintet SML, Jeff Parker ETA IVtet, Uhlmann Johnson Wilkes trio, and Openness Trio with Nate Mercereau and Carlos Niño. Recently, Johnson produced and performed on Flea's debut solo album, Honora.
Jeremiah Chiu
Jeremiah Chiu is a synthesist in the broadest sense of the word—a craftsperson of the modular synth and other musical instruments and tools, as well as an artist, designer, and educator whose work continually brings disparate forms of knowledge into new relationships. While widely recognized for his versatile electronic music as a solo artist, textured recordings in a duo with violist Marta Sofia Honer, and the experimental quintet he co-leads, SML, Chiu has simultaneously maintained a practice as a graphic designer and visual artist, developing a practice attentive to both the structure of technological systems and the contingencies of liveness and emergence.
For Chiu, visual thinking and musical thinking are not separate disciplines but different expressions of the same innate compositional sensibility. This point of view is born equally from his idiosyncratic sense of aesthetics and his capacity for a warm and porous exchange within a thriving community of creative collaborators that stretches between Chicago and Los Angeles.
Rooted in Chicago's deeply interconnected experimental music community, his music has consistently developed through long-term collaborations and shared artistic inquiry. Following years of performing with groups including Icy Demons and Chandeliers and within the Shape Shoppe collective, Chiu emerged as a distinctive voice on the International Anthem label through a series of acclaimed recordings that include Recordings from the Åland Islands (2022) with Honer, his solo album In Electric Time (2023), The Closest Thing to Silence (2024) with Honer and the late Ariel Kalma, and his ongoing work with the exploratory ensemble SML—a group formed out of this thriving sense of kinship and its emergent possibilities, pointedly explored in the live moment. Alongside collaborators including Jeff Parker, Sam Prekop, Makaya McCraven, Josh Johnson, Marquis Hill, Booker Stardrum, Celia Hollander, Takako Minekawa, and many others, Chiu is one of the key bondbuilders within both Chicago and Los Angeles for a musical moment with momentum—one grounded less in genre than in attentive listening, improvisation, and a shared commitment to expanding the possibilities of composition. This interdependent community made him a natural fit for national tours with Mary Lattimore and M83.
His musical output resonates beyond traditional venues and specifically in cultural institutions looking to animate their architecture and contexts with transformative sound. This affinity has led to unique happenings at LA Phil’s Noon to Midnight, The Getty Center, LACMA, Cincinnati Contemporary Art Center, The Chicago Cultural Center, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, amongst others. A commission for the Getty Museum’s project PIANO-GRAPHS (2018) transformed words and graphic forms into a composition for the player piano, collapsing typography, image, mechanical technology, and sound into a work that treated the piano roll much like a photograph: a surface upon which time itself could be inscribed. This project anticipated Chiu's later experiments at Los Angeles's Vintage Synthesizer Museum, where he sequenced the museum's vast collection of synthesizers without the use of MIDI and recorded the resulting improvisations to analog tape.
Across his work runs a sustained attentiveness to the unfolding natural world. Whether incorporating field recordings into albums, or through open-air live performance, or through his regular participation in LA's Living Earth series held in public parks, Chiu composes with environments as much as within them. Electronic systems become receptive to the contingencies of wind, birdsong, shifting acoustics, and time itself.
This attention to the human experience with various landscapes echoes throughout his approach to graphic design. As founder and creative director of the Los Angeles studio Some All None, Chiu has developed projects for clients including Google, Sonos, dublab, the Venice Architecture Biennale, ICA LA, and the Renaissance Society, while teaching at Otis College of Art and Design, where he received the Teaching Excellence Award. Alongside this work, his visual practice has included exhibitions, publications, installations, and commissions that continually explore the multi-dimensional relationship between language, image, systems, sound, and perception.
His compositions possess an unusually spatial quality. Rather than simply organizing melody or rhythm, they organize attention—guiding the listener through shifting fields of texture, proximity, repetition, and depth. Listening becomes less an experience of following a linear narrative than inhabiting an environment whose forms continually reorganize themselves. That same attentiveness extends throughout Chiu's broader practice, where sound, image, typography, design, teaching, and kinship become different manifestations of a singular way of thinking.
Josh Johnson
Josh Johnson is a saxophonist, composer, multi-instrumentalist, and Grammy Award-winning producer.His unique presence and tone is immediately recognizable, and paired with his superlative musicianship, have made him a sought-after collaborator. Johnson regularly performs and records with some of contemporary music’s most innovative artists, including Jeff Parker, Makaya McCraven, Meshell Ndegeocello, Brandee Younger, and Joel Ross.
Johnson is a member of the innovative quintet SML, whose 2024 debut album, Small Medium Large, (International Anthem) was released to wide acclaim and a Billboard cameo on the Contemporary Jazz charts. Johnson’s other most recent recording projects include a pair of trio albums in 2025: Openness Trio (Blue Note), with Nate Mercereau and Carlos Niño and Uhlmann Johnson Wilkes (International Anthem), with IAP colleague Gregory Uhlmann and LA jazz fixture Sam Wilkes.
Jeff Parker’s lauded ETA IVtet recordings – 2022’s Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy (Eremite Records) and 2024’s The Way Out of Easy (International Anthem/Nonesuch) – both garnered Pitchfork’s ‘Best New Music’ accolade and featured Johnson on saxophone and effects as part of the longstanding quartet (the latter of which debuted on Billboard’s Contemporary Jazz charts). This further cements Johnson as a fixture of Parker’s catalog, following notable contributions to 2016’s The New Breed and 2020’s Suite for Max Brown.
Johnson’s solo debut, 2019’s Freedom Exercise (Northern Spy) was featured in Rolling Stone’s Best Music of 2020 and Bandcamp’s Best Jazz Albums of 2020. Pitchfork called the record “excellent, daringly melodic” and PostGenre praised it as “a songwriting marvel”. His second solo album, 2024’s Unusual Object (Northern Spy), contains a striking collection of futuristic jazz and modern composition. This work for processed saxophone and subtle electronics displays Johnson further sharpening his unique compositional voice. Unusual Object, Johnson says, “is a development and documentation of a more personal world of sound – “what’s it like for me to create the context for my sound, to frame it myself?”
Between 2018 and 2022, Johnson held the role of Musical Director for soul singer Leon Bridges, with whom he also played keyboards and saxophone. During his time with Bridges, Johnson performed throughout Europe, North America, Asia and Australia, with performances at the Hollywood Bowl, Glastonbury and the Sydney Opera House. Along with Nate Walcott (Bright Eyes), Johnson arranged 14 of Bridges’ songs for a performance with London’s Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, also contributing a choral arrangement and directing the concert.
Johnson is quickly gaining notoriety as an in-demand record producer. He produced Meshell Ndegeocello’s album The Omnichord Real Book (Blue Note), which was awarded the 2024 Grammy for Best Alternative Jazz Album. Johnson also contributed writing to several tracks for Ndegeocello’s follow-up, No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin (Blue Note). His distinctive sound can be heard on wide-ranging recordings by artists such as Harry Styles, The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Moonchild, Keifer, Broken Bells, Miley Cyrus, Louis Cole and Carlos Niño, among many others. He currently resides in Los Angeles.