In every form of music there are the giants, the ones whose talent and ambition strut across the world stage, dazzling critical and commercial considerations alike. Then there are the quiet geniuses, the folks who display equal creativity and range to their more famous compadres, but with little interest in the spotlight – simply going about their business making music that doesn’t sound like anyone else. These folks’ music may likely be less-heralded, but will have an equally broad and meaningful impact in the years to come.
Cellist and composer Tomeka Reid is definitely one of those quiet ones. She’s unusual just by virtue of her chosen instrument – the cello is not the first axe one thinks of when we think about jazz. But there have been examples before – Fred Katz, Abdul Wadud, Hank Roberts, and Erik Friedlander, to name a few. What makes Reid really stand out is that, while likely influenced by her predecessors, she really sounds nothing like them, as a player or as a composer.
She rides that distinctive curvature like a surfer on dance! hop! skip!, the fourth album from her expert band. Backed by guitarist Mary Halvorson, bassist Jason Roebke, and drummer Tomas Fujiwara, Reid is as comfortable with pizzicato as arco, happy to pluck and strum her way through a piece as often as bow. Rather than naturall lean into chamber jazz, her compositions instead exploit rhythm, mixing and matching funk, swing, rock, and Latin pulses to make each piece roll along to its own cadence. “A(ways) For CC and CeCe” mutates a bossa nova into something familiar but different, allowing the three melodists to swirl around each other into a measured maelstrom of energy. The humor-frosted “Oo Long!” skitters across the pulse like a nervous raccoon, giving Reid and Halvorson encouragement to lock horns. The gentle pace of “Under the Aurora Sky” sparks on Reid’s forthright bowing, but Fujiwara and Roebke’s placid intensity and Halvorson’s spiraling axe figures give the piece toward a more apprehensive, even menacing vibe.
The final element that makes Reid a new jazz wizard is her unwillingness to hog the spotlight. She’s definitely a bandleader, but she’s not a star, preferring to mold her troop into a tightly bound juggernaut of collective improvisation – the Quartet is as much Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five as Ornette Coleman Quartet. All of her cumulative strengths come together in a new peak here, which not only makes dance! hop! skip! her best album so far, but demonstrates that Reid still has more summits to conquer.
