About Dario

Dario Acosta Teich’s masterful guitar technique serves an endlessly imaginative musical mind. He has spearheaded jazz ensembles, composed for orchestras, and improvised with jazz icons such as William Parker and Mike Stern, all while cultivating his deep Latin American roots. He has collaborated and performed with Argentine greats, including Pipi Piazzolla, Franco Luciani, Quique Sinesi, Nahuel Pennisi, Juan Falu, and Ernesto Snajer. He has also explored a world of other sounds, playing with everyone from Garifuna icon Aurelio Martinez to Tim Ries, long-time brass player with The Rolling Stones, Stevie Wonder, Donald Fagen, and more. 

​

Dario, as a solo performer and as part of groups and ensembles, has appeared at major festivals and key venues in 16 countries around South America, North America, the Middle East, West Africa and Europe. He has released five albums and contributed to countless others as an engineer, producer, and musician. In 2022, he was awarded the Mercedes Sosa Award for Best Jazz Album. 

​

Currently based in New York City, his latest release is FOLKLORE, an experimental jazz tour of Argentina’s varied sonic regions. On FOLKLORE, Dario presents his homeland in new sounds based on age-old rhythms and contexts, some pensive, some festive, but all fresh. For this exploration, Dario gathered a group of trusted players, GRAMMY and Latin GRAMMY winners including Leo Genovese, Julio Botti, Franco Pinna, Pablo Aslan, Moto Fukushima and Fernando Huergo, and invited several special guests such as world renowned artists Jaques Morelenbaum, Mike Stern, and Zach Brock. 

​

 “Known for pushing and expanding traditionS...the whole improvisational jazz experimental thing is really cool." - NPR

​

“A remarkable representative of Argentine music” - Página12 (Argentina) 

​

Dario hails from northern Argentina, a region with a wealth of long-lived musical traditions. From birth, he became part of those lineages thanks to his highly musical family. Dario’s father Kato, a luthier and musician, brought him to local folk music gatherings (peñas) and taught him his first guitar chords. Dario was hooked on the instrument, still his main musical companion. 

​

Even from a young age, Dario yearned to expand these roots, embracing classical music and jazz to find his own distinctive voice. He graduated from the conservatory in his hometown of Tucumán and entered the University of La Plata near Buenos Aires, Argentina’s leading university and a hub of musical creativity. He studied composition and, a year later, he became an Associate Professor of Folk Music there at age 20. 

​

Musicians face uphill battles in Argentina. Therefore, when Dario, drawing on his Jewish heritage, discovered he could deepen his training in jazz performance at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, he left his homeland for Israel. Based in Tel Aviv for five years, Dario became a mainstay of the jazz scene, winning kudos from prominent musical voices such as Albert Beger, Daviv Broza, Achinoam Nini, and Idan Rachel. 

​

His boundary-erasing work led him to tour extensively as a solo performer, as part of Guitarras del Mundo and as part of the music and dance performance “Argentina: Bombo y Milonga”, which was sponsored by the government of Jalisco, Mexico to celebrate the 2011 Pan-American Games. In 2021 Dario’s recording of the iconic “Libertango” was picked up by the Argentine foreign service and played at embassies around the globe, a symbol of the country’s artistic vitality and distinct culture. 

​

For Dario, the greatest musical moments have come from heartfelt experimentation, at the peak synthesis of technique, freewheeling imagination, and his deeply felt folk roots. This approach emerged in some of his earlier compositions for orchestra, such as “Que no escuche la montaña” performed by the Tucuman National University Orchestra in 2012. His latest works increasingly channel adventurousness. On To Fly (2017), for example, Dario set daring ground rules: Each track would be recorded in a single take, forcing Dario to take risks in the moment. 

​

In addition to live and static recorded music, Dario has begun to explore collaborative livestreams/videos that reimagine jazz standards and international hits in distinctly Latin ways. His series Latin American Versions has featured stirring duets with Tim Ries, Quique Sinesi, Franco Luciani, Lilian Saba, Cecilia Zabala, Nestor and Omar Gomez, Marcelo Nami, Joca Perpignan, Ricardo Moyano, and Pipi Piazzolla. With his frequent collaborator, vocalist/songwriter/cellist Eleanor Dubinsky, Dario has become a cultural envoy of the U.S. Department of Educational and Cultural Affairs and African Regional Services, leading virtual and in-person educational programs via U.S. Embassies in Argentina, Mauritania, Guatemala and Honduras.

​

“For my whole career, I’ve dreamed of creating something technically complex and well executed but also super connected with my roots, that achieves a high level of improvisation,” reflects Dario. “With my most recent projects, I am finally getting there.”