Spiral Mercury Chicago/Sao Paulo Underground Featuring Pharoah Sanders, Pharoah & The Underground

There are some albums that, once you hear them, seem to be meant to be. Such is Spiral Mercury Chicago/Sao Paulo Underground featuring Pharoah Sanders and their album Pharoah & the Underground (Clean Feed 301CD). It's a set recorded live at the Jazz em Agosto Festival in Lisbon last summer.

The lineup puts together an inspired gathering of Rob Mazurek's Sao Paul Underground (Rob on cornet, electronics, flute, voice; Guilherme Granado on synths, samples, percussion, voice; and Mauricio Takara on cavaquinho, percussion, electronics) with Spiral Mercury Chicago (Rob plus Matthew Lux on bass guitar and Chad Taylor on drums) and Pharoah Sanders on tenor and voice.

This is all I can assume under the direction of Rob Mazurek. It sounds that way. He provides the compositions. As with Rob's later ensembles there is a very electronic ambiance to the music plus lots of freeplay and avant breadth. It's a perfect foil for Pharoah and he sounds energized, in fine form. Rob takes a fair share of the soloing as well and he sounds his usual adventurous self.

It's one of those sonoric extravaganzas Rob has been doing in recent years. Everyone pulls together to make a joyful, sometimes raucous noise. There is much in the way of texture, spaciousness and freetime swing, all together or in parts depending on the moment.

The themes are provocative. The band has leverage and an excellent sense of dynamics. So you get arcs of drama and feel throughout.

Just on the basis on Pharoah's presence alone this is a winner. Combine that with Rob and the very hip ensemble put together here and you have a sure-fire set of sounds for the future of yesterday, which turns out to be today! Hear this many times and you'll know that Rob, Pharoah and company are giving you some of the best out music of our time!

Sao Paulo Underground, Beija Flors Velho E Sujo

As if again to remind us what a creative, dynamic force Rob Mazurek is in today's music, we have a fine release with the Brazilian-tinged electric trio Sao Paulo Underground, Beija Flors Velho E Sujo (Cuneiform). It's electric, electronically drenched contemporary post-Milesian music (with a relation to tropicalia and electronica as well) with drive. I read that it's a kind of shout-out to Ol' Dirty Bastard, the Wizard of Oz and Sun Ra.

This is a powerful threesome formed by joining together Rob Mazurek on cornet, harmonium and various effects, along with São Paulo’s Guilherme Granado on keyboards, synths, sampler and vocals, and Mauricio Takara on percussion, cavaquinho and electronics.

This is their fourth album. Rob's cornet sounds just beautiful; Guilherme and Mauricio contribute mightily to the sound. It has the bite of the electronic, interesting arrangements, powerful drumming, enough outness to provide traction and Rob in a definite groove. What more?

For a free download and earful of "The Love I Feel For You Is More Real Than Ever" (mp3 download) by the band, copy and paste this address into your browser and hit enter http://www.cuneiformrecords.com/realaudio/SaoPauloUnderground-The_Love_I_Feel.mp3

Chicago Underground Duo, Age of Energy, Chad Taylor and Rob Mazurek

Here's a good one, the 6th recording by the Chicago Underground Duo, Age of Energy (Northern-Spy 020). It's Chad Taylor on drums and percussion and Rob Mazurek on trumpet, and I assume both on computers, keyboards and drum machines.

Both players play and compose with a deep structural sense. That comes out here in a series of really engaging electro-jazz-rock-funk things that are as much rooted in earth as they are cascading toward space.

The electronics work very well with the conventional instruments. All work together like different colored threads in a tapestry. They fit. They give you much more than what each individual thread might if left alone and unintegrated.

The ghost of psychedelic Miles lurks in the wings as an important influence, as well he should. But Taylor-Mazurek are light years away as far as what they do with the free-electro-rock idea. Much of it has a soundscape richness that in its own way makes use of the sound-color legacy of Fripp-Eno but in a more linear manner.

Chad sounds great, Rob sounds great and the electronics give it all a big, cosmic sound. This one smokes it in very futuristic ways. Dive into this one and you'll be glad you did.

Farewell Bill Dixon...Dixon with Exploding Star Orchestra, 2008

The great Bill Dixon is gone. I am late at putting my hand at a fitting memorial line or two. This is all I think I need to say: Bill Dixon never sounded like anybody else on trumpet and he never wrote a line that didn't have his indelible stylistic footprint squarely emblazoned upon it.

So we turn to one of his last recordings, Bill Dixon with Exploding Star Orchestra (Thrill Jockey 192). As I nabbed this as a download I as per the usual received the music with absolutely no information about it, which is fine for the pop hits of the day but terribly insulting to the artists who do creative music. So here is what I managed to gather about the music after that fact of downloading. It's a collaboration of Bill and Rob Mazurek's Exploding Star Orchestra, quite obviously. And it was recorded in 2008. It seems as if Mazurek was responsible for the compositions but even that wasn't clear on the key sites that had to do with promoting this release. I've gotten to know the Exploding Star through later recordings and it is a beautifully advanced large outfit with many of the leading lights of Chicago's new jazz, but I was unable to find a personel listing for this recording. No matter.

What's important is that the music is quite wonderful. Exploding Star is a fine free orchestra, the music is adventuresome and Bill Dixon plays every note with deliberation and personal conviction. I believe I read a review a while ago where the writer complained that he sounded like he was aging and tired. I think he sounds like Bill Dixon in his last years. I'd rather hear him in that stage of his career than 100 of today's players at the peak of their physical ability. Like the late paintings of Picasso or DeKooning, it is a last statement filled with meaning.

Starlicker Trio (Mazurek, Adasiewicz, Herndon) Turns Up the Heat On "Double Demon"

The trio Starlicker (as heard on their release Double Demon, Delmark DE2011) is not your usual line-up playing the usual sorts of things. First off the instrumentation is not at all the norm. There's Rob Mazurek on cornet, Jason Adasiewicz, vibes, and John Herndon on drums. What this means in terms of sound has much to do with how the band approaches what could be a somewhat quieter ambiance, especially compared with Mazurek's large ensemble Exploding Star Orchestra (see this past December's blog postings for a review of their last album).

Key here is Adasiewicz's hard-hitting, ringing chordal style on vibes, something he showed us well in his trio recording of several months back (do a search in the blogger search box at the top of the page to call up that review). He hammers and sustains chords with insistent rhythmic propulsion, something like classic McCoy Tyner comping from his harder-edged days, only it's the vibes involved and Jason goes about it his own way. This rhythmic-harmonic vitality and density allows drummer John Herndon to play a harder, dynamically dense sort of ringing kicked style. In turn Rob Mazurek soars atop the intense wash. So the result is a trio that projects with burning hardness, the opposite of a gentile sort of chamber jazz that could come about with this instrumentation. Everybody is playing flat-out HOT and they really tear it up.

The second factor, something always a part of the Rob Mazurek presentation is the quality and through-composed nature of his writing. There are very memorable themes and chordal-rhythmic motifs that permeate every number, giving the band a unified stance and a very recognizable identity.

Now that I've set this up for you the only thing left is for you to take over--and listen. That I most certainly recommend you do because this is a very hip set and it freely devastates as much as it demonstrates what a contemporary ensemble of this sort can achieve. And that is very much. Starlicker is yet another bright light on the Chicago jazz scene.

They are on the last leg of a US tour this month, hitting some key midwestern cities and concluding their travels with a return to Chicago and a final tour appearance there May 23rd.

A New One From Rob Mazurek's Exploding Star Orchestra

I have little doubt that Chicago is resurging as an important center for the new improvised music (known as jazz or simply improvisation). It never disappeared from the world scene, of course, but there is so much great new jazz coming out of there lately that there is a special feeling I get after listening to what's been forthcoming and when I weigh it mentally-musically as a whole.

One of those wonderful things that has emerged is cornetist-composer-bandleader Rob Mazurek and his avant big band, Exploding Star Orchestra. Their new CD/LP Stars Have Shapes (Delmark 595) illustrates all that's good in Chicagoland. It's a Chicago all-star lineup--14 stellar improvisers in Rob, Nicole Mitchell, Jeb Bishop, Jason Stein, Greg Ward, Jason Adasiewicz, Mike Reed, and so on.

The compositions have flow and density. And Maestro Mazurek makes use of electronics at certain points to alter the sounds and add to the color of the performance. The band improvises collectively in a beautiful way, the compositions give contrast between drone, avant smear, sound poetry and full-blast-off power in ways that further distinguish this effort.

Stars Have Shapes is a fruitful meeting of Chicago titans, and Mazurek's compositional and conceptual direction puts them in a very attractive and important place in the new jazz today. Yes, it's that good, I think.