US cellist and composer Tomeka Reid has reunited with guitarist Mary Halvorson, bassist Jason Roebke and drummer Tomas Fujiwara for a stunning new album, Dance! Skip! Hop!, which is already being hailed as an early contender for jazz album of the year. The quartet's fourth release features five tracks spanning almost 50 minutes, blending jiving swing, Latin-jazzy harmonies, hip-hop-infused fuzz-guitar burn-ups, and sensuous acoustic-cello reveries.
The title track opens with Fujiwara's hustling brushes setting up a churning guitar hook that evokes highlife bebop, before Reid's superb pizzicato cello solo takes flight. Halvorson comps in the background, and the two musicians engage in a spontaneous counter-melodic dance. A(ways) emerges from a faintly sinister guitar line, building into a graceful piece with brittle guitar chording and bowed cello, featuring an increasingly Latin feel.
Oo Long! is a hypnotic repetition of a cello-guitar hook on a samba-like pulse, escalating into a wailing fuzz-guitar clamour. Under the Aurora Sky offers a lyrical, haunting bowed-cello meditation that weaves around fragile guitar lines before the quartet exits in a storm of abstract sounds. The closing Silver Spring Fig Tree develops a gentle melody against pattering drums, evolving into fast strumming and birdlike chatters before a quietly receding finale.
Reid and Halvorson, both fearless musicians with backgrounds in the avant-garde, including work with Anthony Braxton and the AACM, here extend a conciliatory hand to the jazz-averse. The result is a dazzling, boundary-pushing yet populist set that showcases a contemporary band with wide appeal. As one critic notes, '2026 will have to be some jazz year to push this one out of the frontrunners come December.'
