Photo by Giovanni Piesco
As a drummer, Mike Reed has been part of the vibrant Chicago jazz and improvised music community since 1997. He has performed regularly with local luminaries such as Fred Anderson, Nicole Mitchell and Rob Mazurek, as well as Chicago Jazz legends Ira Sullivan, Julian Priester and Art Hoyle. Reed was named Chicagoan of the Year for Jazz (2008) by the Chicago Tribune and in the 57th annual Downbeat critics poll was distinguished as “Rising Jazz Star”.
Reed leads three widely acclaimed groups: Loose Assembly, Living by Lanterns and People, Places & Things
People, Places & Things
Greg Ward – alto saxophone
Tim Haldeman – tenor saxophone
Jason Roebke – double bass
Mike Reed – drums
The music of this quartet is inspired by Chicago’s jazz-scene from the period 1954-1960. Music from that era, and new compositions, combine the spirit or the fifties with the musical language of today.
People, Places & Things was elected ‘Jazz Group, Rising Star’ in Downbeat Critics Poll.
Over the past year the quartet People, Places & Things, led by drummer Mike Reed, has grown into the most electrifying jazz band in town. (Peter Margasak)
Loose Assembly
Greg Ward – alto saxophone
Tomeka Reid – cello
Jason Adasiewicz – vibraphone
Joshua Abrams – bass
Mike Reed – drums
Mike Reed’s Loose Assembly was called “one of Chicago’s most sublime Jazz outfits” by Time Out Chicago. It’s debut CD, Last Year’s Ghost, documents aural poems Reed created based on the compositional ideas and freeform playing of his band mates, linked by the common theme of “the traces of people and places past.”
At the 2009 Umbrella Music Festival the group performed with the legendary Roscoe Mitchell. They engaged in what Reed calls ‘collective arranging’, an approach in which the structural development, harmony, and shape of a piece of particular music is created spontaneously by the entire band.
Living by Lanterns
Taylor Ho Bynum – cornet
Ingrid Laubrock – tenor sax
Greg Ward – alto saxophone
Tomeka Reid – cello
Mary Halvorson – guitar
Jason Adasiewicz – vibraphone
Joshua Abrams – bass
Tomas Fujiwara – drums
Mike Reed – drums
For the Chicago JazzFest 2011 Reed was commissioned to create a performance based on the 700 hours of the Sun Ra/El Saturn Audio Collection. For this project he added five young musicians to the Loose Assembly, thus mixing the Chicago and New York scenes.
Together with Jason Adasiewicz he fully considered the possibilities of taking this very unrefined material and teasing out raw ideas, bits and undeveloped fragments from it, and developing and composing them into full compositions that the band perform and make their own. The music is rich and exciting; full and sparse; mysterious and inviting; challenging and tuneful.