Pianist and keyboardist Craig Taborn is a shape-shifting musician. On his latest ECM Records release, he moves across several of his forms with a single, extremely versatile band. The trio is completed by cellist Tomeka Reid and percussionist Ches Smith, who moves from mallet percussion to drum kit to electronics as artistically necessary. With Taborn fluently ranging across acoustic and electric keyboards, the group can conjure a wide range of styles.
Taborn was named a MacArthur Fellow last year, and Dream Archives is the kind of ambitious project that distinction suggests. The leader is the composer of four searching, genre-blending compositions, and the band also covers wonderful tunes by pianist Geri Allen and drummer Paul Motian. The tone across the whole album is that of a band pushing past limits and connecting ideas with great musical intelligence.
“Feeding Maps to the Fire” is a highly rhythmic Taborn creation that weds a heap of atonal improvisation to a structured score that encompasses Stravinsky-ish thumps and marches in some places (the opening, which exploits the percussion of piano and drums) and lush romantic harmonies in others (a middle section with gorgeous chords that lift a thrilling cello melody). Here, as all across Dream Archives, Taborn is highly attentive to structure, using a Smith drum improvisation to bring back the first theme and then introduce a third, toggling melodic idea that brings cello and piano together over Smith’s chattering percussion.
The decision to record Motian’s “Mumbo Jumbo” speaks to Taborn’s compositional style. The piano and cello play the jagged but quite beautiful melodic theme in unison as Smith colors it with marimba and drum set. However, perhaps partly because it is presented in free time, it sounds as connected to a European sensibility as to an African-American one. The subsequent, relatively sparing episodes of improvisation work as “jazz” in that they are intelligently linked to Motian’s melody and its blues-interval connections, but their sensibility may be closer to New Music.
Similarly, Taborn’s title track, “Dream Archive”, begins with a brief theme that mixes jagged New Music-ish intervals with a moment of jazz harmony — and then launches into an extended and largely free group improvisation that never forgets the theme that birthed it. The band introduces a long, impressionistic section of electronic improvisation as well, which convincingly returns to the theme by the end of the performance. The group communication is elite and hypnotic.
Perhaps inevitably, Geri Allen’s “When Kabuya Dances” is the album’s most traditional “trio” track — the piano playing the swaying theme, with its lovely syncopations and blues intervals, Smith kicking in as it takes off, and Reid supporting the song’s robust and booty-minded bass line. When Taborn plays like this, you are reminded of how he first emerged playing in James Carter’s band in the early 1990s. He can swing as fervently as any pianist you like, and he takes a solo here that proves it in spades. He phrases his fevered solo with as much rhythmic urgency as Bud Powell but with the knife-edged balance between bop and “out” as Andrew Hill. Then he plays a repeated Latin figure under Smith’s drum solo that is at the opposite end of the spectrum from New Music-oriented chamber jazz. The performance comes back to earth in a slow, melancholy wind-down. This is brilliant music.
My favorite track, however, is the closer, Craig Taborn’s song “Enchant”. Throughout almost 12 minutes of seductive development, it mixes acoustic sonorities (piano rhyming against, vibes, for example, while cello plays a bowed bass line) with electronic shimmer. Taborn’s piano has always had a lyrical side, and he moves the band through atmospheric transitions that are a cinema of sound. Smith is superb, filling the space with cymbal drama, and Reid is never far from the next beautiful, spare piece of melody. Ultimately, Taborn alternates left-hand octaves with busted-up right-hand chords that suggest his debt to players like Geri Allen, and he leads the band back to the written theme. The mixture of Smith’s vibes and then his brushed snare drum drive ends the album on its most sublime bit of swingy propulsion.
The opener, “Coordinates for the Absent”, is a similar mixture of all of the fine elements of Dream Archives. This stew of lyricism and dissonance, jazz and modern classical music, improvisation and careful composition/arrangement is exemplary of what the New Jazz of the 21st century sounds like at its most heterogeneous and searching.
Craig Taborn, as represented on Dream Archives, may be one of our most consistently inventive and versatile American musicians. His art is omnivorous. When you read about his background, you can see how he exemplifies a Gen X jazz musician. Born in 1970, forms like jazz fusion, electronic music, avant-garde improvisation, and a deep schooling in theory (bebop and beyond) are coded into him from the start. He doesn’t really sew these things together in his art; he creates music that emerges from these forms as an organic whole.
In 2026, Craig Taborn and other great improvisers of that generation are at the peak of their wide-ranging creativity. This music, though now art rather than pop, has rarely been more elevated and refined, and, if your mind is open to it, more exciting.