(Modern Creative, Avant-Garde Jazz, Jazz Cello) Tomeka Reid - Tomeka Reid Quartet (Mary Halvorson, Jason Roebke, Tomas Fujiwara) - 2015, MP3, 320 kbps

Classically trained cellist Tomeka Reid doesn’t mind when she plays octaves that are slightly out of tune. That wasn’t always the case. But nowadays, she plays the cello with a great degree of freedom, and the result might be funk, jazz or chamber music.
Elements of multiple genres are blended into the pieces she composed for her namesake quartet’s self-titled disc on the Thirsty Ear label. The new album—recorded with bassist Jason Roebke, drummer Tomas Fujiwara and guitarist Mary Halvorson—is the product of a recent surge in Reid’s self-confidence.
Reid’s musical discoveries began when she was growing up outside of Washington, D.C. As a late starter in a French immersion elementary school, songwriting provided a safe space where she didn’t have to worry about saying the wrong word in a foreign language.
Reid’s inventive impulses gradually were suppressed when she began playing cello and studying the classical repertoire at the University of Maryland. After she started investigating jazz, Reid met flutist Nicole Mitchell, who convinced her to move to Chicago in 2000. There Reid found a network of supportive musicians. Mitchell and singer Dee Alexander showed her new improvisational possibilities, and drummer Mike Reed encouraged Reid to become a leader. When she joined the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, the organization reignited her imagination.
In addition to composing material for her quartet, Reid writes songs for various combinations of strings in the trio Hear In Now, where her percussive attack complements the work of violinist Mazz Swift and bassist Silvia Bolognesi.
On Aug. 20, Reid conducted the AACM’s Great Black Music Ensemble for the premiere of her 10-song suite In Spite Of, We Thrive at Chicago’s Millennium Park. This ambitious piece, which includes sitar and oud arrangements, reflects her views on unjustified police killings and the Black Lives Matter movement.
Reid took part in a different AACM-affiliated concert when she joined saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell’s quartet for a performance at Chicago’s Constellation on March 27. That set—featuring Mitchell, Reid, bassist Junius Paul and drummer Vincent Davis—is documented on the album Celebrating Fred Anderson (Nessa).
—Aaron Cohen
http://www.downbeat.com/digitaledition/2015/DB1511/single_page_view/22.html

It’s been a long time coming, but next month Tomeka Reid finally releases her debut album as a leader (via Thirsty Ear Records). A cellist possessing gorgeous tone, technical precision, and melodic command, Reid has become a vital component of Chicago’s improvised music community over the last decade, playing in Mike Reed’s Loose Assembly and various Nicole Mitchell projects. She’s also led a trio, Hear in Now, but it’s with this recent quartet and their eponymous debut that we get to fully bask in her compositional abilities. Her band features longtime collaborator Jason Roebke on bass, guitarist Mary Halvorson, and drummer Tomas Fujiwara, the latter a pair of fantastic New York musicians the cellist first worked with in Living by Lanterns, a bi-city octet led by Reed and local vibist Jason Adasiewicz. On the upcoming album Reid pays tribute to some elders: “Etoile” reaches back to the playing of violinist Stuff Smith with its languid sense of swing and long, elegant lines; “Billy Bang’s Bounce,” a salute to the late free-jazz violinist, is but one of many pieces where Reid and Halvorson’s interaction is both fiery and finessed. Still, while lyric, that effort is without serious drive—a quality served up with abandon on the ferocious “17 West.” The album also includes a couple of affecting improvisations, characterized by tender melancholy as the players sync up emotionally. — Peter Margasak
http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/tomeka-reid-quartet/Event?oid=18780824
http://www.npr.org/2015/10/13/448297104/tomeka-reid-quartet-offers-a-tightly-sync...cello-and-guitar

Tomeka Reid, cello;
Jason Roebke, bass;
Mary Halvorson, guitar;
Tomas Fujiwara, drums.