The title track opens with a unison pizzicato riff — cello and guitar locked together over Tomas Fujiwara’s brushed shuffle. The rhythm is propulsive and slightly off-center, the kind of groove that makes your body respond before your ears have finished parsing the harmony. Tomeka Reid’s cello is plucked with enough force to function as a bass instrument, but the melodic content is too agile to sit in the low end. It moves.

The Quartet

This is the same lineup Reid has led since 2015: Mary Halvorson on guitar, Jason Roebke on bass, Fujiwara on drums. A decade of playing together shows. The communication on dance! skip! hop! is not telepathic in the way that word usually flatters jazz quartets — it is more practical than that. These four musicians know each other’s habits well enough to take risks that would collapse in a less familiar group. When Reid shifts mid-phrase from arco to pizzicato on “a(ways) for CC and CeCe,” Halvorson is already adjusting her voicings to fill the timbral space Reid just vacated. Nobody signals. Nobody needs to.

What the Cello Does

Reid has spent the better part of a decade arguing, through performance rather than rhetoric, that the cello belongs at the center of a jazz ensemble. On dance! skip! hop! the argument is settled. Her instrument functions simultaneously as lead voice, rhythm section anchor, and textural counterpoint — sometimes within a single phrase. The bowed passages on “Under the Aurora Sky” carry a melodic patience that contrasts sharply with the rhythmic intensity elsewhere on the record. The contrast is deliberate. Reid composes for the instrument she actually plays, not for the instrument people expect.

The Halvorson Factor

Mary Halvorson plays guitar like no one else in jazz or anywhere adjacent to it, and on this record she exercises a discipline that makes her contributions more effective than on sessions where she dominates. She holds back for most of dance! skip! hop!, comping with angular chords and iridescent tone, doubling Reid’s melodies at unexpected intervals. When she finally lets the fuzz loose on “Oo long!,” the release is enormous — a roaring psychedelic groove that emerges from the quartet’s syncopated funk as if it had been building pressure for three tracks. Fujiwara’s polyrhythmic drumming underneath is the thing that holds the whole passage together.

The Family Record

Reid’s album titles and artwork consistently reference her family. dance! skip! hop! features photographs of her great-grandmother Francis Elizabeth Bean, her grandmother Estelle, and her great-aunt Cece. The song “a(ways) for CC and CeCe” is dedicated to two people who shaped her life: Clarence James, a patron of Chicago’s Velvet Lounge who died in 2018, and Aunt Cece, who turned ninety last summer. The dedications are not performative. They are woven into the compositions themselves — “a(ways)” carries a warmth in its melodic arc that feels personal without being private.

Where It Sits

dance! skip! hop! is the Tomeka Reid Quartet’s fourth album and their second with a new label — Out of Your Head Records, run by bassist Adam Hopkins. The label has quietly built a catalog of serious creative music: Tim Berne, Matt Mitchell, Adam O’Farrill, Tomas Fujiwara himself. Reid fits naturally here, in a context that treats adventurous jazz as something that simply needs good distribution, not explanation.

The record was produced by Reid, recorded at the Brink in Richmond, Virginia, and mixed and mastered by Nick Lloyd at Firehouse 12 in New Haven. It sounds clean and present without being overproduced — the cello’s resonance has room, the drums are close, and Halvorson’s guitar occupies its own frequency band without competing with Reid’s bowing.

Nate Chinen predicted that 2026 would be “the year of Tomeka Reid.” Two albums in the first quarter — this one and Dream Archives, her ECM trio with Craig Taborn and Ches Smith — suggest the prediction was conservative. Reid is a MacArthur Fellow, an AACM member, and a collaborator with Anthony Braxton, Roscoe Mitchell, and Makaya McCraven. None of that context is necessary to hear what dance! skip! hop! accomplishes on its own terms: five compositions that balance structural rigor with physical joy, played by a quartet that has earned the right to sound this free.