Steve Reid  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search

"Steve Reid played with Miles Davis, Sun Ra, Fela Kuti, James Brown, Ornette Coleman, Lester Bowie, Freddie Hubbard, Jackie McLean, Dionne Warwick, Archie Shepp, Chief Bey, Olatunji, Arthur Blythe, Dexter Gordon, Gary Bartz, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Sam Rivers, Leon Thomas, Lonnie Liston Smith and Horace Silver"--Sholem Stein

Related e

Wikipedia
Wiktionary
Shop


Featured:

Steve Reid (January 29, 1944 – April 13, 2010) was an American jazz drummer who has played with a wide range of notable artists including Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, James Brown, Fela Kuti and Sun Ra, and as a session drummer for Motown. He made his recording debut with Martha and the Vandellas' iconic "Dancing in the Street." In 2006, Reid teamed up with the electronic musician Kieran Hebden, better known as Four Tet. One of his best-know tracks is "Lions of Judah".

Biographical

He picked up drumming at age 16 and in the same period his family moved to Queens, NYC, three blocks away from John Coltrane. This was the early sixties which was a peak for Coltrane but also for the jazz scene in NYC. Before going to college he worked at the Apollo Theatre as a musician, under the direction of Quincy Jones.
He then graduated at Adelphi University in Garden City, NY, and then made a three year trip to Africa, opening up his influences even more. He affirms Africa is the heart of drumming.

After this trip Reid started playing with some of the big names of Jazz and black music, including James Brown, Sun Ra, Ornette Coleman, and Miles Davis (on the album Tutu).

In 1969 Reid was arrested as a conscientious objector. In an interview he affirmed he did not want to have anything to do with the war in Vietnam.

Nessa, Tribe, ESP-Disk, and Strata-East were some indie labels that shared the same radicalism as Reid regarding matters such as the importance of pure music, the affirmation of black society, etc. At the same time new kinds of music groups, who worked out more as communes, were starting to form, such as Sun Ra's Arkestra, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Black Artist's Group, and Tribe. :)

In the early seventies Reid started his own label, Mustevic Sound Inc., which was self-produced and distributed.

Reid has now been living in Europe for several years (Lugano, Switzerland) and has released several recordings for labels such as Soul Jazz records in London, UK, and German jazz label CPR. For the past few releases, his ensemble has been based around Reid himself, Chuck Henderson (soprano saxophone; previous saxophonist Lena Bloch, tenor sax, left to play with the UMass Amherst jazz ensemble), Boris Netsvetaev (piano; living in Hamburg, Germany) and Chris Lachotta (double-bass; living in Munich, Germany).

In 2006, Reid teamed up with the groundbreaking electronic musician Kieran Hebden, better known as Four Tet, to release an improvisational experiment, The Exchange Session Vol. 1. The duo enjoyed this initial collaboration so much that they went on to release two further albums: The Exchange Session Vol. 2 and Tongues. In an interview discussing the duo's collaborations, Reid referred to Hebden as his newly found "musical soul mate".

Albums

For Daxaar, the vibe took Reid to Senegal. Accompanied by two of his regular collaborators—keyboardist Boris Netsvetaev and electronicist Kieran Hebden—he auditioned some local musicians, had the bare minimum of rehearsals, and went into Dakar's Studio Dogo to lay down another chapter in his quintessential, outernational, saga of the groove.




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Steve Reid" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

Personal tools