Steve Reid American jazz drummer died he was 66

Steve Reid ^[1] was an American jazz drummer who played with a wide range of artists including Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, James Brown, Fela Kuti and Sun Ra, and as a session drummer for Motown.

(January 29, 1944 – April 13, 2010)

Reid picked up drumming at age 16^[2]and in the same period his family moved to Queens, NYC, three blocks away from John Coltrane. This was the early sixties which was a peak for Coltrane but also for the jazz scene in NYC. Before going to college he worked at the Apollo Theatre as a musician, under the direction of Quincy Jones. An article describes Reid: "Steve had always been passionate about music but it was the rhythms that really got him." ^[3]

He then graduated at Adelphi University in Garden City, NY.

After this trip Reid started playing with some of the big names of Jazz and black music, including James Brown, Sun Ra, Ornette Coleman, and Miles Davis (on the album Tutu).

In 1969 Reid was arrested as a conscientious objector. In an interview he affirmed he did not want to have anything to do with the war in Vietnam.^{[citation needed]}

In the early seventies Reid started his own label, Mustevic Sound Inc.

Reid lived in Europe for several years (Lugano, Switzerland) in his later life and released several recordings for labels such as Soul Jazz records in London, UK, and German jazz label CPR. For his final releases, his ensemble was based around Reid himself, Chuck Henderson (soprano saxophone; previous saxophonist Lena Bloch, tenor sax, left to play with the UMass Amherst jazz ensemble), Boris Netsvetaev (piano; living in Hamburg, Germany) and Chris Lachotta (double-bass; living in Munich, Germany).

In 2006, Reid teamed up with the groundbreaking electronic musician Kieran Hebden^[4], better known as Four Tet, to release an improvisational experiment, The Exchange Session Vol. 1. The duo enjoyed this initial collaboration so much that they went on to release three further albums: The Exchange Session Vol. 2 (2006), Tongues (2007), and NYC (2008). In an interview discussing the duo's collaborations, Reid referred to Hebden as his newly-found "musical soul mate".^[5]

On April 13, 2010, Reid died in New York. ^[6]

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