by Khagan Aslanov (@virgilcrude)
For some time now, Tomeka Reid has occupied hallowed ground, her feet firmly planted at the intersection of every temple of experimental music in America. The masterful DC cellist, composer and educator is a member of AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians), a MacArthur Fellow, and has taught at the revered Mills College (which has sadly recently lost its independent status). She has played with both legacy titans of free jazz, including Anthony Braxton, Roscoe Mitchell and the Art Ensemble of Chicago, as well as the genre’s contemporary icons, like Makaya McCraven and Nicole Mitchell.
In addition to all this, she has built out a venerable catalogue of her own work—tirelessly leading and collaborating—a compendium of virtuosic technique and immaculate instinct. Her presence and her cello have long since become irreplaceable staples in the modern creative landscape, and dance! skip! hop!, her most recent outing, continues Reid’s ascension in fine style.
The ensemble Reid has gathered for the occasion are themselves vital parts of the current stream of the avant-garde—percussionist Tomas Fujiwara and bassist Jason Roebke have both built careers on sonic audacity and exploration. And guitarist Mary Halvorson hardly needs an introduction at all—her scintillating improvisational playing is the long-standing drawbridge between free form music and technical rock.
The moving parts of this quartet have all played together for years, colliding in various formations and cutting a sequence of records that continuously challenge traditional structure and what it means to coax massive amounts of beauty out of the strangest, most atonal places. Which is why what’s most immediately striking about dance! skip! hop!’s fusion is how seemingly approachable it is. At surface value, these pieces bop along on the very edge of mainstream composition, drawing the most amiable elements from jazz, funk, rock, chamber, and folk music, bringing Reid and company about as close to a radio-friendly undertaking as they have gotten in recent memory.
But don’t let the sunlit procession fool you – beneath dance! skip! hop!’s playfully accessible swinging frame beats the heart of an avant-gardist at the peak of her powers.
The collusion of genres is dizzying on “a(ways) for CC and CeCe,” a tribute to Reid’s great aunt Clarence James, a long-time patron of the Chicago jazz scene. Filtered through and locked into the angular phrasing of Halvorson’s Spanish-sodden fretwork, Reid’s plucked cello becomes a rotating amalgam of percussive funk and punch-drunk flamenco.
On “oo long!,” the quartet locks into another strange hybrid, spackling the piece’s muscular syncopated funk with noise punk affectations. Reid uses pizzicato technique to lend it layers of thrust, and as “oo long!” sways into its closing third, Halvorson lets loose the fuzz, and you’re suddenly and briefly overwhelmed with a roaring psychedelic groove. Fujiwara’s percussion is something to behold here—highly agile and thick with polyrhythms, it trades off on fading into a backbeat or crashing forth as a melodic foil.
On “Under the Aurora Sky,“ Reid’s bowing plaits into the guitar, and the result is simply heart-rending, both devotional and mournful, an elegy to an insurmountable loss that is somehow only amplified by the ragged, billowing crescendo it builds towards.
And then there is “Silver Spring Fig Tree.” Coaxed along by Roebke’s rich bass-work, Fujiwara’s brush-work and Halvorson’s iridescent tone, the quartet lock in proper, and as a result, the closing piece takes on a profoundly reflective melodicism. It is patient and tender, and a fantastic display of how unafraid Reid is to leap and just drop something straight up beautiful into the mix.
The best aspect of fusion music has always been that space, where when notes, tones and genre exist as something deeper than a functional relationship, and reach for a unified harmonic mood. By that measure only, dance! skip! hop! is a fantastically consuming listen. The record’s joyful tonality and tempos only serve to amplify how imposing and demanding the playing contained within truly is. As always, Tomeka Reid’s instincts hit every mark she sets before herself, and dance! skip! hop! is undeniably another grand architectural force that the cellist raises from the ground.