US cellist and composer Tomeka Reid and her frequent guitar soulmate Mary Halvorson have collected so many compliments for their jazzily genre-loose innovations over the past decade and a half, that they don’t need to waste a moment proving anything to anybody. These two fearless musicians have played alongside the tough, cerebral Anthony Braxton, and Reid has been part of that great Chicago avant-jazz institution, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). But if they ever considered extending a conciliatory hand to the jazz-averse, it might sound like this entrancing and aptly named set.
This is the fourth release by Reid’s quartet featuring Halvorson, bassist Jason Roebke and drummer Tomas Fujiwara. Over five tracks and almost 50 minutes, they race and cruise through jiving swingers, fast brush-shuffles, Latin-jazzy harmonies, hip-hoppish fuzz-guitar burn-ups, and sensuous acoustic-cello reveries.
Fujiwara’s hustling brushes set up a churning guitar hook on the title track that sounds infectiously like a kind of highlife bebop, before Reid’s superb pizzicato cello solo takes off with Halvorson comping the tune in the background. Her own seamlessly skimming improvisation is then followed by a spontaneous counter-melodic dance between the two of them.
A(ways), a graceful songlike piece with brittle guitar chording and bowed cello, slowly emerges from a faintly sinister guitar line against a bass-like cello vamp, and another Reid/Halvorson entwined improvisation that has an increasingly Latin feel. Oo Long! is a hypnotic repetition of a cello-guitar hook on a samba-like pulse that builds into a wailing fuzz-guitar clamour. Under the Aurora Sky is a lyrical and haunting bowed-cello meditation that comes and goes around fragile guitar lines before the quartet exits on a storm of abstract sounds. The closing Silver Spring Fig Tree develops a gentle melody against pattering drums into fast strumming, birdlike chatters, and a quietly receding finale.
This is a dazzling contemporary band with a wide appeal: 2026 will have to be some jazz year to push this one out of the frontrunners come December.
Also out this month
Patternmaster (ECM) could justifiably be the generic title for almost everything the brilliant US saxophonist Mark Turner does. His undemonstratively symmetrical themes and chamber-musical restraint can suggest classic Birth of the Cool jazz tunes gliding over the polyrhythmic grooves of the 21st century, and this fine set of originals probably even has the edge over his superb 2022 album Return From the Stars.
On Time to Live (ACT), the virtuosic Norwegian saxophonist and crossover composer Marius Neset is partnered by his homeland’s acclaimed Bergen Big Band and former Phronesis drums phenomenon Anton Eger, in a collage of churchy chordal sounds through which Neset’s sax meditatively breathes, or dances around frenetic orchestral hooks, brass fanfares and hand clapping grooves.
And UK saxophonist/composer Tim Garland and longtime US piano sidekick and former Art Blakey protege Geoffrey Keezer show how high the bar can go for warp-speed improv conversation on their delightful duo set Mezzo (Tim Garland/ECN Music).
