Things we like: Tomeka Reid Quartet, Jason Robinson, Cecil Taylor

Friday brought bounty in the form of 3+3, the new album from the Tomeka Reid Quartet. The Chicago-based cellist-composer had just visited Texas with Myra Melford's Fire and Water Quintet, but that unit unfortunately didn't venture up to the DFW area. This is Reid's third album since 2015 (the second on Cuneiform) at the helm of this unit with guitarist Mary Halvorson (also a member of that Melford group), bassist Thomas Roebke, and drummer Tomas Fujiwara (a regular Halvorson collaborator).

While the Reid Quartet's earlier albums were showcases for the cellist's compositions -- a necessity for an artist who first came to prominence as a side musician (with Nicole Mitchell, Mike Reed, Anthony Braxton, and Roscoe Mitchell, among others) -- 3+3 puts the focus on the group's improvisational abilities and ensemble interaction. The spacious sound of this string-heavy band is more conducive to hearing the resonance of arco and pizzicato cello than some larger ensembles (not that Reid has any trouble making herself heard in such contexts). 

Reid's extended compositions run the gamut from gorgeously lyrical chamber music to loose-limbed swing to untrammeled improvisation. Relieved of her duties as composer and conceptualist, Halvorson does some of her finest recorded playing. Fujiwara sometimes careens into Elvin-via-Mitch Mitchell territory, and the leader demonstrates her outstanding command and distinctive voice on her instrument.

Also received Friday: Another disc recorded (like 3+3) by Nick Lloyd at Firehouse 12 in New Haven. Saxophonist-composer Jason Robinson is an artist I was only familiar with via a 2010 duet album for Clean Feed with pianist Anthony Davis, but he's been active since the late '90s, playing with the likes of Myra Melford, Nicole Mitchell, and Rudresh Mahanthappa, as well as leading his own expandable NYC-based Janus Ensemble. 

On Ancestral Numbers 1 (out May 14 on Playscape), he ruminates on genealogy and family history, inspired by the passing of his beloved maternal grandmother, who grew up in rural Arkansas and Texas before migrating to California as a teenager. Because Robinson's an abstract thinker, the ancestral experiences that inspired these pieces -- the Atlantic crossing, Ellis Island, westward migration -- aren't necessarily telegraphed by their musical content. 

Thus, "Malachi" evokes a journey through the American South using a circuitous post-bop structure, with a Robinson solo that veers into post-Ayler freedom. "Wattensaw," named for an Arkansas town that was a way station for Robinson's forebears, deploys an angular melody over a mutant fatback groove from drummer Ches Smith that gives trombonist Michael Dessen ample blowing room. On the title track, the leader and Dessen blow nimble contrapuntal lines before and after a brief but piquantly "out" solo from pianist Joshua White. The second volume of Ancestral Numbers is due on October 8.

Reviewing Phil Freeman's Cecil Taylor book reminded me of the plethora of posthumous CT releases, not the least of which are the complete Cecil Taylor in Berlin '88 box set on FMP ($125 digitally via Bandcamp, for those with deep pockets) and The Complete, Legendary, Live Return Concert at The Town Hall NYC November 4, 1973 (which includes the 90-minute main body of the performance of which Spring of Two Blue-J's was only the encores, a la Live at Leeds).

Back in March, First Visit Archive (the digital arm of producer Werner X. Uehlinger's Hat Hut enterprise) released Live at Fat Tuesdays, February 9, 1980, the complete recording of an hour-long set CT played at the NYC club/restaurant with a band of collaborators old and new: Jimmy Lyons on alto, Ramsey Ameen on violin, Alan Silva on bass and cello, Sunny Murray and Jerome Cooper (Revolutionary Ensemble) on drums. This was the same lineup and engagement that resulted in the 1981 release It Is In the Brewing Luminous. CDs of the set are now available on Hat Hut's ezz-thetics subsidiary via Squidco. How fortunate are we.