Tomeka Reid Quartet

As a composer, arranger and teacher, the cellist Tomeka Reid has become one of the leading figures in contemporary jazz. In 2020, she won the Jazz Journalists Association Award as the “String Player of the Year”, and she was recently the recipient of the Herb Alpert Award in Arts. Old New, her quartet’s second album, shows once again how Reid – with her stunning playing technique – is bringing the cello back to the fore in jazz. Together with guitarist Mary Halvorson, drummer Tomas Fujiwara and bassist Jason Roebke, the artist from Chicago formed the Tomeka Reid Quartet in 2015, an electro-acoustic string band in which each musician can take over the bass at any time, and be alternately responsible for the melody and the rhythm. “I wanted a harmonic instrument, but not piano,” says Reid. With this instrumental line-up, she is aiming to achieve the perfect balance of expressive freedom and lyrical harmony – and thanks to an extraordinary talent for improvisation and a profound melodic sensitivity, that’s exactly what she does.