Dream Archives is the trio debut from pianist-composer and 2025 MacArthur Fellow Craig Taborn with cellist Tomeka Reid and drummer Ches Smith. The album was recorded in New Haven in 2024 and produced by Manfred Eicher.
The album centers on four extended Taborn originals, with the group shifting between tightly organized interplay and open-ended passages. Taborn describes the ensemble’s strength as “modularity,” citing the number of ways shared musical ideas can shift context within the trio.
Reid alternates between melodic lead and pizzicato lines that function as a bass foundation. Smith brings a wide range of approaches influenced in part by western classical percussion studies, while Taborn draws from acoustic piano and electronic colors. Taborn says the band can pivot quickly, “from a traditional jazz piano trio to some kind of contemporary chamber group and then to an electronics ensemble.”
Two covers highlight key influences: Paul Motian’s “Mumbo Jumbo” and Geri Allen’s “When Kabuya Dances.” Taborn has spoken about hearing one of Allen’s early solo performances at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis around 1985, an experience he credits as formative for his understanding of jazz tradition, freer contexts, and contemporary grooves within a single voice.
Among the originals, “Coordinates For The Absent” brings together acoustic and electronic elements, “Feeding Maps To The Fire” turns toward free improvisation, and the title track sets an atmospheric arc against more pointillistic motion. Taborn chose the Motian and Allen pieces, he says, because both composers offer distinctive writing that invites interpretation while remaining instantly identifiable.
Taborn’s MacArthur Fellowship occurred in 2025, with the foundation recognizing him as “a rare artist of unusual depth and originality” whose work expands collaboration and composition through exploration of sound, technique, and instrumentation.
His history with ECM dates to Roscoe Mitchell’s Nine To Get Ready (1997). His label catalog also includes the trio album Chants (2013), the quartet release Daylight Ghosts (2017), and the solo live set Shadow Plays (2021), recorded at Vienna’s Wiener Konzerthaus. Taborn also appears on Thomas Strønen’s Relations (2024).
Taborn and Smith have collaborated on ECM before, including The Bell (2016) with Mat Maneri and Tim Berne’s Snake Oil on Sun of Goldfinger (2019). Reid has worked with both musicians in other settings.
Craig Taborn: piano, keyboard, electronics; Tomeka Reid: violoncello; Ches Smith: drums, vibraphone, percussion, electronics.
Craig Taborn – Photo by Roberto Cifarelli, ECM Records
Author: World Music Central News Room
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