Mike Reed (musician)
Mike Reed is an American jazz drummer, bandleader, composer and music presenter.Career
Reed was born in Bielefeld, Germany, in 1974, but raised in Evanston, Illinois north of Chicago. He returned to Chicago in the 1990s after majoring in English and psychology at the University of Dayton in Ohio. He played with David Boykin Expanse, Rob Mazurek's Exploding Star Orchestra, and the Josh Berman Quartet. He led the quintet Loose Assembly and the quartet People, Places & Things, with whom he recorded several albums on the 482 Music label.
In 2000 he and cornetist Josh Berman started the Sunday Transmission music series at the Hungry Brain bar in Chicago in 2000. He helped start Downtown Sound music series, a free weekly concert program in Millennium Park that has included indie rock, world music, and contemporary soul. He is a founding director of the Pitchfork Music Festival and joined the committee that programs the annual Chicago Jazz Festival. Since 2013 he has been the owner and director of the performing arts venue "Constellation", and in 2016 he bought and reopened the Hungry Brain bar which had closed in 2014. He is a member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians in Chicago and served as vice-chair between 2009 and 2011.
In 2009, while on their European tour, band members were caught in a Neo-Nazi rally in the Czech Republic. The band consisted of four Americans, two of them African-American. This caused their lives to be in danger. The police found the band members and provided them with a safe house and passage to Kraków, Poland.Discography
As leader/co-leader
As sideman
