By Don Phipps
The music on Rob Mazurek’s Live at the Adler Planetarium is
beautifully crafted and striking – a dramatic mix of emotions and
abstractions. Mazurek directs the ensemble, plays cornet, trumpet, and
bells, and composed the music. He even adds his voice to the proceedings.
The band, aptly named Exploding Star Orchestra, is comprised of a multitude
of incredible talents: Nicole Mitchell (flute, voice, electronics), Damon
Locks (voice, samplers, electronics), Tomeka Reid (cello, electronics),
Craig Taborn (Wurlitzer electric piano, moog, electronics), Angelica
Sanchez (Wurlitzer electric piano, moog), Ingebrigt Haker Flaten (bass),
Chad Taylor (drums), and Gerald Cleaver (drums). Wow… what a crew!!!
Mazurek has been creating music for the orchestra since 2005 and recorded
with the group first in 2007 on We Are All from Somewhere Else
(Mitchell was also on this album). The group has at times featured jazz
luminaries such as Bill Dixon (on the 2008
Bill Dixon with the Exploding Star Orchestra
– sadly, Dixon’s last recording), and Roscoe Mitchell (on the 2009 live
recording Matter Anti-Matter).
While Locks, Sanchez, and Taylor played on the group’s last three albums
(beginning in 2015 with Galactic Parables: Volume 1), Reid and
Flaten joined the unit for 2020’s Lightning Dreamers, and Cleaver
and Taborn made their debut with the band on the unit’s last outing, the
2022 album Lightning Dreamers.
Live at the Adler Planetarium
is a live version of the compositions recorded on
Lightning Dreamers
.
The New Jersey born and Chicago schooled Mazurek presently lives in the
remote artist colony of Marfa, TX, about 60 miles northwest of the Mexican
border. A visual artist (painter and animator) as well as musician, one can
understand Mazurek’s attraction to Marfa, a small desert city known for its
“Marfa Lights,” orbs in the sky that emanate from automobile headlights
distorted by warm desert air. Furthermore, one can understand why Mazurek
seems fascinated with celestial imagery and why this album was recorded in
a planetarium.
Those who have traveled the remote back desert of southwest Texas know how
stunning the night skies can be, and the music on Live is full of
mystery and awe – a kind of masterful interpretation of the overwhelming
sense of being one might experience looking at the vast night sky. The
album is also noteworthy for its pervasive and ubiquitous use of
electronics. It is as though Mazurek has tapped into the radio wave
emissions of such entities as pulsars and quasars – combining the imagined
sounds of space with an almost Indigenous point of view.
Locks’ poetry can be heard at times above the music:
- “Imagine a timeline opening up.”
- “Floating in the current.”
- “Accept the invitation to feel; accept the invitation to dance.”
- “In the dark, we fade away.”
- “Toes touch first upon the star dome!”
The first three cuts, “Dream Sleeper,” “Black River,” and “White River”
merge together like rivers flowing toward a junction and then out to a
wide oceanic expanse. Movement is conveyed by the electric piano and bass
lines, which float like buoys above fluid drum lines. Mazurek creates some
striking notes on trumpet, and Michell’s flute and Reid’s cello lines rise
to the foreground.
The sweeping theme of “Underneath the Star Dome” sounds visual. There is a
dance quality to the music – modern ballet weaving and bobbing. Listen to
the precision Cleaver and Taylor bring to the trap sets as they spin atop
the esoteric electronics. When the group reaches the flex point in the
number, the music become looser and freer – unglued – as Mazurek’s trumpet
roars. Voices join in, and the theme dissolves into a bluesy abstraction.
On “Spiral Parable,” there is a forward momentum, like a jostling safari, a
vehicle bouncing along a dusty road on a great plain. In the distance are
plateaus and buttes that front a blue and red sky. Great birds take flight
via Mitchell’s flute arcs. The drummers generate heat, their off beats and
rhythmic flourishes stretch and sway – creating the equivalent of a giant
drum circle around a huge bonfire, the flames lapping high into the evening
sky.
The concert (album) closes with “Parable 3000,” a funky exposition
featuring a repetitive yet interesting piano motif. Mazurek’s trumpet is a
tour de force and Reid’s cello lines splice neatly into the Sanchez/Taborn
chordal structures. There is an almost hallucinogenic quality to this
number – very trippy indeed.
Mazurek and crew deserve a major tip of the hat for this outing. What we
have is a synergy of great musical beauty and intensity that seems to
stretch time, like one momentous singularity, reaching out to the forever
darkness from the sands of an infinite desert.