Biography
Tomeka Reid is a Chicago-based cellist, composer, curator, and educator who has done more than any other musician of her generation to bring the cello from the margins to the center of contemporary jazz and improvised music. Described as a “New Jazz Power Source” by the New York Times and recognized with a 2022 MacArthur Fellowship — one of the most prestigious awards in American arts and scholarship — Reid has built a body of work that combines extraordinary technical accomplishment with a compositional intelligence and community commitment that places her among the defining figures of contemporary Chicago music.
Reid grew up near Washington, D.C., and chose the cello in the fourth grade before discovering jazz during her undergraduate studies at the University of Maryland. After earning her Master of Music from DePaul University and completing a Doctor of Musical Arts in Jazz Studies at the University of Illinois, she became deeply embedded in Chicago’s improvised music community — joining the AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians) and developing collaborative relationships with figures including Anthony Braxton, Roscoe Mitchell, Nicole Mitchell, and Dave Rempis.
Her cello playing is immediately distinctive: a sound that can be earthy or ethereal, growling or sweetly serene, always rooted in a strong melodic sensibility and a deep rhythmic intelligence that makes her as effective as an accompanist as she is as a soloist. She uses extended techniques — attaching objects to the strings, exploiting the percussive qualities of the instrument’s body — to expand the cello’s sonic palette without losing the fundamental warmth and resonance that makes the instrument so expressive.
Reid leads the Tomeka Reid Quartet (with Tomas Fujiwara, Jason Roebke, and Mary Halvorson), co-leads the string trio Hear in Now (with Mazz Swift and Silvia Bolognesi), and founded the Chicago Jazz String Summit in 2013 — an annual festival celebrating string players in jazz and improvised music that has become a major international event. Her recordings on Aerophonic Records, including the two-volume Of Things Beyond Thule with Joe McPhee, Dave Rempis, Brandon Lopez, and Paal Nilssen-Love, document her fully within the Catalytic Sound cooperative’s collective project.
Her 2022 MacArthur Fellowship recognized not only her technical and compositional achievements but her role as an organizer and community builder — a musician who understands that sustaining a creative music scene requires as much institutional and social work as it does artistic practice. Reid embodies that understanding completely, and her presence in the Catalytic Sound cooperative reflects the cooperative’s commitment to musicians who bring this full picture.
