The trio-debut of pianist, composer and 2025 MacArthur Fellow Craig Taborn with Tomeka Reid and Ches Smith has been eagerly awaited. In its review of the group’s live show from Fall 2025 the German daily Hamburger Abendblatt found nothing put praise for their performance, calling it “unpredictable, exhilarating”. The trio’s approach on Dream Archives is full of complexity, yet as the title suggests, a wide musical spectrum is covered as multitudes of idioms seem to be pulled from history and reconfigured to form a previously unheard sound world full of reveries.
Dancing grooves and powerful lyrical accounts arise in otherwise densely orchestrated trio interchanges – four extensive Taborn-originals making up the foundation. A lot of the music’s originality hinges on the trio’s unique three-way understanding – a common language deeply dependant on the unique personalities of which it is made up. Craig “immediately saw the potential for this ensemble, in terms of instrumentation but also the personalities. The modularity is the thing,“ the pianist notes. “A lot of things boil down to the number of ways a set of musical information can be contextualized. It takes people who have a broader awareness of these different kinds of approaches to music which provide different contexts that you can really work off their consideration.”
Tomeka on cello juggles with melodic lead on the one hand and a pizzicato bass bedrock on the other, coalescing – under tension – with Ches Smith’s versatile sound array (Ches’s studies in classical percussion come to play here) and Craig’s comprehensive grasp of the keyboard. The trio undertakes idiomatic shifts in the blink of an eye, extending “itself from a traditional jazz piano trio to some kind of contemporary chamber group and then to an electronics ensemble, and those moves can be made instantaneously,” says Craig. “It really has the broadest potential of a group I’ve done in terms of where it can go on a dime and that’s what’s exciting.”
Sometimes Craig wears his influences on his sleeve, and with the trio’s passes at Paul Motian’s “Mumbo Jumbo” and Geri Allen’s “When Kabuya Dances” two significant ones are paid homage to in exuberant fashion.
Craig witnessed one of Geri Allen’s earliest solo performances live at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis ca. 1985 and it was a concert that would leave an impression on him for the decades to come. Craig: “Her performance had within it the DNA of a lot of traditional jazz information with a clear fluency, with some freer context, with some more open context, and then something else which was very contemporary. I hadn’t ever previously heard somebody who so clearly had a reference point for a lot of R&B or funk things, or music even more contemporary. It was an early position for that kind of playing. At that point in time I don’t think there was anybody doing that. It also had a really strong and unique compositional voice, setting a strong example of a way to move forward in the music.”
Craig’s own compositions deliver plenty for us to make the similar arguments on his behalf. “Coordinates For The Absent” unravels an expansive sonic landscape with acoustic and electronic signals comingling in symbiosis, where “Feeding Maps To The Fire” takes a left turn into free improv territory with momentum building from alternating minimalist melodic patterns. On the title track a slowly unfolding atmospheric character and a boisterous, often pointillistic one are fused together, the opposite temperaments balancing each other out.
The trio’s pass at Paul Motian’s “Mumbo Jumbo” unfolds as a shrouded development of the brief theme, its tiny motifs dissected and spread across the instrumental array. “I’m feeling some sort of inclination to include the works of these people who have very singular compositional voices,” Craig outlines his reasoning of choosing this and the Geri Allen picks. “It has to do with the fact that their compositions offer a lot in terms of interpretation but have a really distinctive sound and approach. I listened to Paul for ever before starting to work with him in his groups at the Vanguard just years before he passed away. You can identify a Geri Allen or Paul Motian tune off the bat. A lot of Paul’s compositions sound like there’s a grand concept of a composition in his mind but then he pulls everything away, leaving only the essence.”
Dream Archives, recorded in New Haven in 2024, was produced by Manfred Eicher.
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Craig Taborn was made MacArthur fellow 2025, an honour he received for being “a rare artist of unusual depth and originality, who enhances musical collaborations and composition through his expansive exploration of sound, technique, and instrumentation” – in the foundation’s own words.
Since Craig’s debut for the label with Roscoe Mitchell’s Note Factory group on 1997’s Nine To Get Ready, the pianist-composer’s ECM output has gone from strength to strength. His solo-debut Avenging Angel was received with widespread acclaim, The Guardian’s John Fordham writing that “his musicality and his attention to detail is hypnotic... as is his remarkable sense of compositional narrative within a completely improvised performance”.
Besides continued collaborative efforts with Roscoe Mitchell as well as his contributions to the groups of Chris Potter, Michael Formanek, a duo recording with Vijay Iyer and more, Craig has since released his 2013 trio recording Chants (with Thomas Morgan and Gerald Cleaver), the 2017 quartet date Daylight Ghosts (with Chris Lightcap, Chris Speed and Dave King) and the solo live album Shadow Plays, recorded at Vienna’s Wiener Konzerthaus and released in 2021. “It’s an ethereal tour de force,” BBC Music Magazine raved of the latter, calling it “sonic poetry in its purest form.” He also appears on 2024’s Relations, an album of duo recordings between Norwegian drummer Thomas Strønen and a variety of musical partners.
Craig and Ches Smith have crossed paths on ECM before, most notably on their joint trio venture with Mat Maneri on 2016’s The Bell, but also as part of Tim Berne’s Snake Oil on the 2019 album Sun of Goldfinger. They’ve each collaborated with Tomeka Reid in various previous constellations, though this marks the cellist’s ECM-debut.
