Rob Mazurek, Rome

Rob Mazurek, cornetist, electronician, composer and bandleader, has in the last several decades made some monumentally important recordings in the realm of avant new jazz. I have been happy to cover many of them in these blogs, and I again put fingers to keyboard in order to give my take on his newest, a solo album entitled Rome (Clean Feed 435).

In this case it is Rob going it alone, playing in and contemplating the eternal city of Rome, what it means in musical terms and how it feels to be doing a spontaneous multi-instrument foray with a particular set of creative actions frozen in time via the recorded medium.

As always it is about Rob's distinctive cornet artistry and also about a great deal more. We get the piano/prepared piano/electronic immediacy that goes into making Rob's singular musical vision what it is. Only in the bare bones solo context we get it unvarnished, expressionist yet not as multiple-lined as his larger and sometimes very much larger bands.

This is a more introspective Mazurek, with boldly underscored cornet, yes, but also his new music piano inventions a very central part of it all, along with an acute sense of sound color that comes out most contrastingly in his electronic spontaneous "orchestrations."

It is an album that does not overpower so much as it opens up a wide space within which some rather profound musical events take place.

It is a slightly different, more intimate Mazurek at hand on this set. Yet with a few concentrated listenings you experience once again some breathtaking possibilities unfold, like pastels on paper as compared with the oversized multiply-worked "canvases" of some of his larger group projects.

Outstanding! Give this your ears, whether you are friends, Romans and/or countrymen!