Josiah Taylor is a jazz guitarist based in Philadelphia, PA, who plays and teaches both acoustic and electric guitar as well as piano and keyboard. His story with the guitar begins at age 11, when he learned the style of Django Reinhardt directly from his father — a rare and personal transmission of a tradition that most guitarists spend years chasing through recordings.

By age 13, Josiah was already performing regularly with The Hot Club of Reading, a Gypsy and Hot Jazz group that took him all over eastern Pennsylvania.

In 2020, Josiah attended Princeton University, where he majored in Astrophysics while studying jazz under Rudresh Mahanthappa, Dmitri Tymoczko, and Miles Okazaki. It was there that he discovered the transformative power of Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, and the jazz that emerged after the swing era.

The combination of rigorous scientific thinking and deep musical study gives Josiah's playing an unusual quality: simultaneously intuitive and architectural, spontaneous and precisely considered.

Josiah's influences span centuries and continents — alongside gypsy and hot jazz, he draws deeply from Jacob do Bandolim (Brazilian choro), Paco de Lucía (flamenco), Astor Piazzolla (tango), J. S. Bach, Led Zeppelin, and Van Halen. The result is a guitarist whose vocabulary is genuinely vast — and who knows exactly which word to reach for.