Dream Archives belongs to the kind of record taxonomy that always collects admiring reviews.
Look above. Glance below. There you go.
It flatters the intellect. It also contains quite a few known quantities. All three: pianist Craig Taborn, cellist Tomeka Reid and drummer/vibist/percussionist Ches Smith are distinguished leaders in their own right.
All have an individuality about them and they gel well together given a shared outlook as improvisers and advanced thinkers. And contained within the tunes are also some very cool choices in Paul Motian’s jagged 1990s Sound of Love piece ‘Mumbo Jumbo’ and Geri Allen’s serene ‘When Kabuya Dances.’
It’s almost a piano trio. Almost because it’s cello instead of bass and almost but again not at all because Smith also makes use of vibes. However, it shares something with that format. I think it’s close to what Vijay Iyer often does with Tyshawn Sorey and Linda May Han Oh. But close is not the same.
It’s serious music-making in the sense that it’s solemn music making. (And yes of course serious music-making doesn’t have to be solemn.)
There was additionally a sense of solemnity at a Ches Smith gig too before Christmas. But what’s here is very different to the microtonalism of Clone Row.
That’s largely due to the abstract expressionist harmonic ideas of Craig Taborn – known for his work with Roscoe Mitchell, Chris Potter and Michael Formanek, whose sound on this studio album recorded in America in 2024 often dominates as on his own piece ‘Feeding Maps to the Fire’ one of the tracks I like most. I enjoyed listening. But it doesn’t blow me away.
However, to return to the starting point it’s the kind of music that flatters your aspirations to be more of a thinker than perhaps you are or ever will be.
For that alone it’s worthwhile to be challenged and to enter a world both mysterious, quite oblique in places but one where the more you listen the more you will feel eventually completely at home and may even begin to understand what’s going down.
Further reading
- A 2023 review of Angelika Niescier, Tomeka Reid and Savannah Harris’s Beyond Dragons
– A 2021 live review that found Taborn with Chris Potter and Nasheet Waits at the Pizza Express Jazz Club
– Also from 2021: a review of Ches Smith and We All Break’s Here’s the Light
– PLUS a 2019 duo piano recording review of a work featuring Taborn and Vijay Iyer called The Transitory Poems
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