8:30pm.
Mike Reed – drums, percussion, organ
Rob Frye – tenor saxophone, flute, percussion
Cooper Crain – guitar, synthesizer
Dan Quinlivan - synthesizer
Marvin Tate – vocals
Ben Lamar Gay – cornet, percussion
Mike Reed's Separatist Party announces their new album, Sing the Color Blue (out October 23rd via Thrill Jockey) and, in conjunction, release its lead single, “New Angels.” Sing the Color Blue is a recording assembled over years of sessions, rehearsals, false starts, and renewed approaches, eventually becoming a document of both persistence and transformation. Sing the Color Blue reunites Mike Reed with Rob Frye, Cooper Crain, Dan Quinlivan (all of the trio Bitchin Bajas), Marvin Tate, and Ben LaMar Gay in a set that moves between composition, reconstruction, improvisation, and song form. It follows 2023’s self-titled debut, praised by the New York Times as “ethereal, odd-metered, electrified airspaces with whiffs of Ethio-jazz.”
The unusual length and shape of Sing the Color Blue’s creation is part of what gives the album its character. Elements reach back across nearly a decade, with initial band tracking beginning in January 2022 at Constellation in Chicago and the majority of the recording completed between November 2023 and April 2024 at Electrical Audio. The project depended on a deep archive of session material that Reed recorded with poet/vocalist Marvin Tate, which he’d return to repeatedly until the final structure revealed itself. Today’s “New Angels” grew from these sessions.
Rather than treating those sessions as fixed songs, Reed used them as a source library. He reassembled fragments of Tate’s words and performances into new lyrical structures, often changing their original meaning completely, and in some cases provided Tate with melodic lines to sing against or within that material. The result is a record where authorship feels layered rather than singular: songs emerge from live interaction, archival excavation, editing, rearrangement, and re-composition at once. This approach is something Reed refers to as “collage recording”
The title Sing the Color Blue also reflects that spirit of transformation. Reed has said the phrase grew partly out of a friend’s critique of his nearly all-blue wardrobe and his longstanding attraction to Bauhaus aesthetics. He was also struck by a phrase from a documentary in which a historian described people being instructed to “dance the color blue.” Reed reshaped that line into Sing the Color Blue, a title that suggests synesthesia, instruction, abstraction, and also a subtle relation to the blues and to Chicago’s musical history. In that sense, the title names the album’s larger project: turning mood into form, color into sound, and fragments of lived time into music.
- - -
Will Miller- EVI / Pianet / Trumpet
Kenneth Leftridge Jr.- EWI / Woodwinds
Lane Beckstrom- Sampler / Bass
Jeremy Cunningham- SPD / Drums
Resavoir is the shapeshifting musical project of Chicago producer, composer, and multi-instrumentalist Will Miller. Since its beginnings in 2013, the project has existed in many forms—from Miller working alone in the studio to a touring band, a loose network of collaborators, and an 18-piece orchestra—but has remained rooted in a fascination with the space where organic and electronic music meet.
A jazz trumpeter and composer by training, Miller came up through Chicago Public Schools before studying at Oberlin Conservatory. As an instrumentalist and producer, his credits include SZA, Justin Bieber, Mavis Staples, Chance the Rapper, Mac Miller, Whitney, and others, and he spent several years as a member of Whitney. With Resavoir, those experiences have fed into a musical language that draws freely across genres.
Resavoir’s self-titled 2019 debut introduced that language through hazy horn arrangements, hypnotic grooves, and densely layered production, earning an 8.2 review from Pitchfork. A second self-titled album followed in 2023, expanding the project’s electronic vocabulary and introducing the EVI—a breath-controlled synthesizer that has since become central to Miller’s sound. Along the way, Resavoir has appeared at Boiler Room Festival in London, recorded at Total Refreshment Centre for Blue Note Records, toured internationally, and expanded into Orchestra Resavoir, with Miller arranging his music for an 18-piece ensemble. The orchestra made its debut at Chicago’s Thalia Hall in 2024 and was presented at Millennium Park’s Pritzker Pavilion the following summer.
In 2025, Miller and guitarist Matt Gold released Horizon on International Anthem, a collaborative album that grew from their shared love of 1960s and ’70s Brazilian music. Resavoir followed with Themes For Dreams in 2026, a largely drumless collection of ambient miniatures made to accompany rest and a fine cup of tea. The album marked another turn for a project whose identity has increasingly come from its ability to change shape without losing its voice.
That evolution continues with Above The Clouds, Resavoir’s most electronic record to date. The album grew out of regular improvisational sessions between Miller, bassist Lane Beckstrom, and drummer Jeremy Cunningham in Miller’s Chicago studio during the winter of 2026. Working primarily with EVI, samplers, guitars, synthesizers, and electronic drums, the trio set out to find something loose, conversational, and distinctly human within a palette more commonly associated with programmed music. Woodwind player Kenneth Leftridge Jr. and guitarist Gregory Uhlmann later joined the sessions, helping turn the group’s improvisations into a dreamy, rhythmically elastic sound the band began calling “cloud jazz.”
Drawing inspiration from the atmospheric sound worlds of Jon Hassell and Flying Lotus as well as the heavy drums, smeared samples, and weightless textures of cloud rap, Above The Clouds captures the current incarnation of Resavoir: a band using electronic instruments with the spontaneity and interplay of an improvising ensemble.
That balance—between composition and chance, acoustic and synthetic sound, solitary studio work and collective improvisation—has become the through line of Resavoir. Whether appearing as a four-piece band, an orchestra, or Miller alone, the project remains less a fixed lineup than an evolving musical world, built around curiosity, collaboration, and the possibility of discovering something new.
Constellation
3111 N Western Ave
Chicago, IL, 60618