Tomeka Reid: Cello, Family, and the Avant-Garde

Tomeka Reid has spent the last decade building one of the most distinctive voices in creative music. The New York Times called her a “New Jazz Power Source.” She’s a MacArthur Fellow, a founder of the Chicago Jazz String Summit, and a key collaborator with Anthony Braxton, Roscoe Mitchell, and Craig Taborn, among many others.

Her quartet with guitarist Mary Halvorson, bassist Jason Roebke, and drummer Tomas Fujiwara just released dance! skip! hop! on Out of Your Head Records. It’s their fourth album together, and it shows what twelve years of shared language sounds like: tight, playful, and willing to take chances. She also appears on Dream Archives, Craig Taborn’s ECM debut with this instrumentation, recorded in New Haven, Connecticut, and out earlier this year.

We talked about the cello’s role in jazz, how family history shapes her work, and what it means to lead a band that’s been together long enough to surprise itself.

(The musical excerpts heard in the interview are from The Tomeka Reid Quartet’s album dance! skip! hop!)

Originally published at https://podcast.thetonearm.com.