26 Facts About Tomeka Reid

Tomeka Reid was born on 1977 and is an American composer, improviser, cellist, curator, and teacher.

Tomeka Reid leads the Tomeka Reid Quartet, with Tomas Fujiwara, Jason Roebke, and Mary Halvorson, and is co-leader of Hear In Now, a trio with Mazz Swift and Silvia Bolognesi.

Tomeka Reid founded and, as of 2024, still runs the now-annual Chicago Jazz String Summit and was named a 2017 "Chicago Jazz Hero" by the Jazz Journalists Association.

In 2019, Tomeka Reid was appointed Darius Milhaud Distinguished Visiting Professor at Mills College.

Tomeka Reid is a 2021 United States Artists Fellow and 2022 MacArthur Fellow.

Tomeka Reid grew up outside of Washington, DC, and in the 4th grade began playing cello at her elementary school in Silver Spring, Maryland.

Tomeka Reid attended a French immersion school, but spoke very little French; she attributes much of her early enthusiasm for cello to the allowance of English in music class.

Tomeka Reid primarily studied classical music, but Kamalidiin introduced her to jazz performance and improvisation.

Tomeka Reid met Nicole Mitchell as an undergraduate, during a summer spent in Chicago; Mitchell became another close mentor in improvised music, and Tomeka Reid went on to perform on over ten albums with her, many as part of Mitchell's Black Earth Ensemble and Black Earth Strings quartet.

Tomeka Reid continued to focus on classical music for the next several years after meeting Mitchell: she earned her Bachelor of Music in 2000, and then moved to Chicago, where she continued her studies in classical cello performance at DePaul University.

Tomeka Reid became increasingly involved in the jazz community after moving to Chicago, and in 2009 she decided to more fully commit to the genre by beginning coursework toward a Doctor of Musical Arts in Jazz Studies.

Later that year Tomeka Reid played a show at The Hideout in a special version of Mike Reed's Loose Assembly, with the quintet of Reed, Tomeka Reid, Greg Ward, Jason Adasiewicz, and Joshua Abrams joined by Roscoe Mitchell.

In 2010 Tomeka Reid was appointed Treasurer of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians and played the Umbria Jazz Festival as part of the AACM Great Black Music Ensemble.

In 2011, Tomeka Reid left her job as orchestra director at the Lab School, choosing to instead focus on her career as a musician.

New Braxton House released Trillium E, the first studio recording of an Anthony Braxton opera, featuring the Tri-Centric Orchestra, which Tomeka Reid had joined for the recording.

In 2013, Tomeka Reid founded the Chicago Jazz String Summit, an international festival of avant-garde string performances.

Tomeka Reid ran the 2020 and 2021 Chicago Jazz String Summits as online streamed events, via Chicago's Experimental Sound Studio's facilities, due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Tomeka Reid performed with a quartet arranged by Roscoe Mitchell, a recording of which was released later that year as Celebrating Fred Anderson, and performed at the Chicago Jazz Festival, Hyde Park Jazz Festival, Pritzker Pavilion, Symphony Center, and Chicago Cultural Center.

In 2016, Tomeka Reid performed with Anthony Braxton's "10+1tet" at Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, Tennessee and was the recipient of a 3Arts Award.

Tomeka Reid was named 2017 "Chicago Jazz Hero" by the Jazz Journalists Association.

In 2018, Tomeka Reid performed with the Chicago Composers Orchestra in premiering her first orchestral composition, and traveled to Ethiopia, where she studied the masenqo, an East African string instrument.

Tomeka Reid appeared on 2018 releases including a collective trio album with Dave Rempis and Joshua Abrams, titled Ithra; Geometry of Caves, by a quartet with Kyoko Kitamura, Taylor Ho Bynum, and Joe Morris; and on Makaya McCraven's Universal Beings.

In 2019, Tomeka Reid was a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists recipient; the award assisted her in commuting between tour and work when she was notified in late August that she had received a fall appointment as Darius Milhaud Chair in Music Composition at Mills College.

Tomeka Reid was winner of the "Miscellaneous Instrument" category in the 2019 and 2020 DownBeat critics polls and is a 2021 United States Artists Fellow.

In October 2022, Tomeka Reid was awarded a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship.

In 2020, Tomeka Reid moved back to Chicago, after having left for New York City circa 2016.