Tomeka Reid Interviewed

Source: Bandcamp Daily.

Raised in a single-parent household where money was tight and her mother was more artist than caregiver, Tomeka Reid was an outsider to the rarefied air of Euro-classical music. Before coming to Chicago, she was unaware of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), the organization founded in the 1960s that was—and remains—a foundational influence on jazz improvisation and originality. But Reid flourished in both jazz and classical environments, creating bold, distinctive hybrids of structured composition and spontaneous creation that earned her a MacArthur Genius Fellow in 2022, among many other honors.