The long-anticipated trio debut from pianist and composer Craig Taborn with cellist Tomeka Reid and drummer Ches Smith arrives as a bold statement of intent. Following electrifying live performances in Fall 2025—praised by Germany’s Hamburger Abendblatt as “unpredictable” and “exhilarating”—Dream Archives reveals a group operating at a rare level of shared intuition and creative freedom. The album unfolds as its title suggests: a wide-ranging musical reverie in which idioms from across history are pulled apart, recombined, and transformed into a sound world that feels entirely new.
At the heart of the record are four expansive Taborn originals, whose densely orchestrated trio exchanges give rise to dancing grooves, striking lyricism, and moments of raw abstraction. Much of the music’s originality stems from the trio’s deep three-way understanding—what Taborn describes as a modular approach rooted in the distinct personalities of the musicians involved. For Taborn, the ensemble’s potential was immediately clear, not only in terms of instrumentation but in how each player’s broad musical awareness allows ideas to be instantly recontextualized.
Tomeka Reid’s cello functions fluidly as both melodic lead and pizzicato bass foundation, existing in a constant, dynamic tension with Ches Smith’s wide-ranging percussive language—shaped in part by his background in classical percussion—and Taborn’s comprehensive command of the piano and electronics. The trio shifts idioms in the blink of an eye, moving seamlessly from a traditional jazz piano trio to contemporary chamber music and even into electronic terrain. For Taborn, this elasticity represents the broadest potential of any group he has led, where direction can change on a dime without losing coherence.
The album also pays homage to two towering influences through exuberant reinterpretations of Paul Motian’s “Mumbo Jumbo” and Geri Allen’s “When Kabuya Dances.” Taborn’s connection to Allen runs deep, dating back to witnessing one of her earliest solo performances in the mid-1980s—a formative experience that shaped his understanding of how tradition, freedom, funk, and contemporary expression could coexist within a singular compositional voice. Those same qualities resonate throughout Dream Archives, where Taborn’s own writing invites similar comparisons.
Original pieces like “Coordinates For The Absent” open vast sonic landscapes in which acoustic and electronic elements intermingle organically, while “Feeding Maps To The Fire” veers into free improvisation, propelled by alternating minimalist figures. The title track fuses slowly unfolding atmospheres with more boisterous, pointillistic gestures, balancing contrasting temperaments into a unified whole. The trio’s reading of Motian’s “Mumbo Jumbo” further distills this philosophy, taking a fragmentary theme and spreading its essence across the ensemble with quiet intensity.
Recorded in New Haven in 2024 and produced by Manfred Eicher, Dream Archives also arrives in the wake of Taborn being named a 2025 MacArthur Fellow, honored for his “unusual depth and originality” and his expansive exploration of sound, technique, and instrumentation. It stands as a powerful addition to an ECM discography that has steadily grown since his 1997 label debut with Roscoe Mitchell’s Note Factory and includes acclaimed releases such as Avenging Angel, Chants, Daylight Ghosts, and Shadow Plays.
While Taborn and Smith have collaborated previously on ECM projects, and each has crossed paths with Reid in other settings, Dream Archives marks the trio’s first recorded convergence—and Reid’s ECM debut. The result is music that feels open-ended yet assured, reverent of its influences yet boldly forward-looking: a document of three singular voices discovering just how far their shared language can travel.
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