Mike Reed (musician)
American jazz drummer, bandleader, composer and music presenter
Mike Reed (born May 26, 1974) 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 leads 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 Chicago's Millennium Park that has included indie rock, world music, and contemporary soul. He is a founding director of the Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago and until 2025 joined the committee that programs the annual Chicago Jazz Festival. Since 2013 he has been the founder and director of the Constellation performing arts venue in Chicago, originally as its for-profit (nominally) owner and then, from 2018, as its nonprofit organization president. Then in 2016 he bought and reopened the nearby Hungry Brain bar, which had closed in 2014, continuing to present live music there, as of 2024.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Mike Reed (musician)” is american jazz drummer, bandleader, composer and music presenter. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Mike, Reed and musician, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “american jazz drummer, bandleader, composer and music presenter” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1933445. VIAF identifies the subject as 170153470. The Library of Congress control number is no2011059424. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1974, 2000, 2025 and 2013.
Later biographies can compress uncertainty and repeat inherited reputations, so apparently settled claims may still require comparison. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.
- Establishing names and roles
- Building a first chronology
- Locating cited institutions
Personal papers, civil or court records, institutional files and the scholarship cited by the source.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Mike Reed (musician)”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Mike Reed (musician) primary sources, Mike Reed (musician) archive and Mike research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Mike Reed (musician)”?
- Which primary records establish identity, chronology and institutional ties?
- How has the subject’s reputation changed across later accounts?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “Mike Reed (musician)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.