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. 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 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. He is a member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (
AACM) in Chicago and served as vice-chair between 2009 and 2011. In 2009 while on their European tour, the four members of Reed's band People, Places, and Things - two of them African-American - were caught in a
Neo-Nazi rally in the
Czech Republic, putting their lives in danger. The police found the band members and provided them with a safe house and passage to Kraków, Poland. Reed is the founder of the Sound & Gravity music festival, taking place in Chicago at, and in the neighborhood of, Constellation and the Hungry Brain, featuring an international retinue of experimental musicians. == Personal life ==