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. That’s the whole record in one gesture: a thing that insists on motion, on presence, on your attention.
I’ve been listening to Tomeka Reid work for long enough to recognize what she’s doing here. She’s not trying to prove anything anymore. She’s past that phase. What you hear on dance! skip! hop! is the sound of a musician who knows her instrument so thoroughly that she can make it do something impossible without announcing it — a musician who composes the way she plays: with zero flourish and complete intentionality.
Why the Cello Took So Long?
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. Look at the history and you see the problem immediately. The cello was largely absent from jazz’s first hundred years. Sure, you had Fred Katz in the fifties, Harry Parlan before him, and scattered others who treated the instrument as a serious compositional voice. But the cello never became part of the jazz conversation the way the saxophone, trumpet, or even the trombone did. We built entire harmonic and rhythmic systems around instruments that occupied their natural register. The cello got left out.
On dance! skip! hop!, that absence is not just addressed — it’s rendered beside the point. Reid’s instrument functions simultaneously as lead voice, rhythm section anchor, and textural counterpoint. Sometimes all three 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. That contrast is deliberate. Reid composes for the instrument she actually plays, not for the instrument people expect.
The Trio Precedent
Context matters here. Reid worked extensively with pianist Craig Taborn and drummer Ches Smith on the ECM trio Dream Archives, which arrived just months before this quartet release. That record proved something specific: she can anchor a group as the only melodic front-line voice. No saxophone. No trumpet. Just cello, piano, drums, and space. The trio has a contemplative quality that lets each voice inhabit its own sonic territory. The quartet does something different. It densifies that territory. It argues.
How Composition Changes What You Hear
Reid’s titles are never casual. dance! skip! hop! is a suite of movement, and she composes that movement into the DNA of each piece. The title track has a funk bassline underneath all that chamber music counterpoint. “Oo long!” arrives late in the sequence like a pressure valve, all psychedelic fuzz and syncopation. “Silver Spring Fig Tree” takes the record’s emotional center and makes it spacious, almost liturgical. Each piece has its own harmonic and textural logic, and each one makes the next one seem inevitable.
How Does a Quartet That’s Played Together for Eleven Years Actually Sound Different?
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 in ways that transcend the usual platitudes about ensemble cohesion. The communication on dance! skip! hop! is not telepathic. It’s 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.
Here’s the specific evidence: 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. Roebke sits underneath the whole thing with this patience that comes from years of hearing what these three voices need at any given moment. Fujiwara’s drumming is hyperattentive — he’s not keeping time so much as negotiating with it.
The production choices reinforce this intimacy without overdoing it. Nick Lloyd mixed and mastered the record at Firehouse 12 in New Haven. Everything is clean and present without being overproduced. The cello’s resonance has room. The drums are close. Halvorson’s guitar occupies its own frequency band without competing with Reid’s bowing. It’s the sound of a conversation you’re allowed to listen in on, not a performance you’re watching from the audience.
| Track | Length | Key Features | Standout Moments |
|---|---|---|---|
| dance! skip! hop! | 7:12 | Unison riff, brushed shuffle | Pizzicato-arco interplay |
| a(ways) for CC and CeCe | 6:48 | Dedication piece, chamber warmth | Melodic arc, family references |
| Oo long! | 5:33 | Psychedelic fuzz, funk base | Halvorson’s delayed release |
| Silver Spring Fig Tree | 8:14 | Liturgical spacing, bowed patience | Reid’s solo section |
| Under the Aurora Sky | 6:59 | Textural counterpoint | Contrasting rhythmic intensity |
What Does Mary Halvorson Contribute When She’s Actually Listening?
Mary Halvorson plays guitar like arguably no one else in jazz or anywhere adjacent to it. On records where she’s the focal point, she can overwhelm a space with texture and invention. On dance! skip! hop!, she exercises a discipline that makes her contributions more effective precisely because she’s holding back. She comps with angular chords and iridescent tone. She doubles Reid’s melodies at unexpected intervals, extending them rather than ornamenting them.
The real discovery here is Halvorson’s restraint. She’s learned how to be essential by being selective.
When she finally lets the fuzz loose on “Oo long!,” the release is enormous. A roaring psychedelic groove emerges from the quartet’s syncopated funk as if it had been building pressure for three tracks straight. Fujiwara’s polyrhythmic drumming underneath is the thing that holds the whole passage together. The drum part is so intricate that Halvorson’s wall of guitar doesn’t just sound like noise — it sounds earned. It sounds like the conclusion of something.
What Do the Titles and Photos Actually Mean?
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 dedication on “a(ways) for CC and CeCe” honors 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. These aren’t performative gestures tacked onto the artwork. They’re woven into the compositions themselves.
Listen to “a(ways)” with the dedication in mind and you hear how the melodic arc carries actual warmth. It’s personal without being private. The piece has a generosity built into it, the way certain melodies do when they’re written in gratitude rather than ambition. Cece is alive while this record exists. Francis Elizabeth Bean and Estelle are documented. Clarence James lives inside this music. That’s not sentimental — that’s structural.
The photographs on the album cover show faces across generations, and they’re central to understanding what Reid is doing compositionally. She’s not writing abstract pieces that happen to have family members attached. She’s writing music that makes room for actual people she loves. That changes everything about how you listen.
Where Does Reid Sit Now in the Landscape?
dance! skip! hop! is the Tomeka Reid Quartet’s fourth album and their second with 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 label’s approach is refreshing. No apologetics. No framing document. Just the music and the people who made it.
The record was produced by Reid herself and recorded at the Brink in Richmond, Virginia. That level of creative control matters, especially for someone with Reid’s compositional specificity. She didn’t hand her music to someone else’s vision. She guided the entire process from conception to mastery.
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, maybe even modest. 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.
What Should You Actually Take From This?
This is five compositions that balance structural rigor with physical joy. The playing is as demanding as anything happening in free jazz right now. It just happens to make you want to move. The cello is no longer an instrument trying to justify its presence in a jazz group. It’s what grounds the entire conversation. Halvorson, Roebke, and Fujiwara have heard where Reid is going and met her there without hesitation or confusion. That’s the sound of a quartet that has earned the right to sound this free.
If you’ve been waiting for evidence that advanced harmonic thinking and groove aren’t enemies, this record is that evidence. Reid built it. The others believed her and played accordingly. Listen to that title track opening — that unison riff locked over the shuffle — and you understand immediately what a decade of collaboration sounds like when it’s operating at full intelligence.
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