Tomeka Reid met Mary Halvorson years before either of them was the leader of much of anything, playing together in Mike Reed's Living by Lanterns project in Chicago. That is the kind of scene the two came up in: everyone playing in everyone else's band until the lineups become as important as the names on the covers.
By 2015 Reid had turned that connection into her own group. The Tomeka Reid Quartet's self-titled debut, cut at Strobe Recording in Chicago and released on Thirsty Ear's Blue Series, paired the cellist with Halvorson on guitar, Jason Roebke on bass and Tomas Fujiwara on drums, a lineup unusual mainly for what it left out: no horns, no piano, nothing to hide behind.
dance! skip! hop!, out on Out Of Your Head Records this February, is the quartet's latest, and more than a decade in they sound less like a band settling into habit than one still finding new corners of the format.
Five tracks, all written by Reid, recorded at the Brink in Richmond and finished at Firehouse 12 in New Haven under engineer Nick Lloyd.
The title track leans on the timbral memory of Black string bands, cello and guitar phrased with a lightness that owes more to old-time fiddle music than to jazz convention. Oo long! turns hip and sinister within a few bars, Roebke's bass and Fujiwara's brushed drums locking into a groove Reid then works loose again. On Silver Spring Fig Tree, a plain five-note riff gives the other three room to answer, argue and wander, the most open conversation on the record.
What holds it together is Reid's own training. She came up through Chicago's AACM lineage, a tradition that treats composition and improvisation as the same instinct rather than opposite poles, and it shows in how deliberately unshowy this music is even at its most exploratory. Elsewhere, a(ways) For CC and CeCe and Under the Aurora Sky slow the pace without losing the pulse, ballads that still keep four strong personalities in play rather than settling for mood.
Halvorson's role here is different from the one she plays as a bandleader. There is no space for her to bend a piece toward her own vocabulary; instead her guitar threads through Reid's writing the way it does in other people's bands, a strong voice choosing, for once, to serve someone else's structure.
Eleven years on from that Chicago debut, dance! skip! hop! sounds like a band that has stopped needing to prove the format works and started using it for exactly what it wants.
