Eleven years on from their last album, Rob Mazurek and Chad Taylor make their return as the Chicago Underground Duo and might find that since they left, ain’t too much changed. If anything the landscape of jazz and experimental music has shifted further in the direction of the post-rock terrain which they first began to traverse on the albums 12Ā° of Freedom, Synesthesia and Axis and Alignment which offered a free blend of jazz fusion and fourth world atmospherics supplemented by Mazurek’s electronics, always loosely ambient while bearing traces of house, intelligent dance music and dub techno.
Tortoise – the seminal post-rock band whose guitarist Jeff Parker frequently linked up with Mazurek and Taylor to make an expanded Chicago Underground ensemble, whether as part of a trio, quartet or larger orchestra while he also collaborated with Mazurek as the founder of Isotope 217Ā° – have their own revival impending on the Illinois bastion International Anthem. Meanwhile something of the same approach might be found in the backwoods or margins of works by Menchaca and Hourloupe for instance, or in the wiry dynamics of Mary Halvorson, the wide grooves of Mats Gustafsson, a longtime member of the Peter Brƶtzmann Chicago Tentet, or in the various projects of the Gastr del Sol veteran David Grubbs.
To staggeringly different results, all of these artists mix and muck together elements more commonly associated with the indie or punk rock of the nineties and use some of that angularity to offer contemporary takes on older forms. For their new album Hyperglyph, their eighth in total, the duo of Mazurek and Taylor cite the Chicago-based Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians which begat the careers of so many influential jazz artists like Anthony Braxton, Roscoe Mitchell, Lester Bowie, Kahil El’Zabar and Wadada Leo Smith alongside such diverse influences as the continent-spanning fusions of Don Cherry, the pioneering electronics, acousmatics and deep listening practices of Iannis Xenakis, Bernard Parmegiani and Ćliane Radigue and the production techniques of everyone from Autechre to King Tubby.
Most of all though Hyperglyph roots itself in the pioneering collaboration between Miles Davis and his producer Teo Macero, who made extensive use of tape manipulation and other studio effects to splice together the long sides of the trumpeter’s electric period, with Mazurek and Taylor heralding what they call the ‘Father, Son and Holy Ghost of extreme editing’ in the form of the albums In a Silent Way, Bitches Brew and Get Up with It. Stressing that ‘post production has always been a big part of our process’, for this new record they worked with the International Anthem engineer Dave Vettraino and say that his input effectively makes Hyperglyph the work of a trio.
Restlessly probing since the release of their previous album Locus some eleven years ago, Mazurek has continued to elaborate the cosmic energies of his Exploding Star Orchestra and forged another duo through the crackling dispatches of New Future City Radio with the vocalist Damon Locks. Outside of the International Anthem tent he captured one of the most stunning sessions of his career as he stopped off at Radio Popolare in Milan for a ‘one-man carnival of feverish ceremonial exorcisms’ while as one half of C6Fe2RN6 he helped to conjure something of a meditative atmosphere even as his small percussions, woozy synths, trumpet blasts and watery piano roiled the riverbed or abraded the surface alongside Nick Terry’s music box melodies and electric guitar.
Meanwhile the percussionist Taylor is more in demand than ever as he continues to go from strength to strength. Beyond his enduring partnerships with Mazurek and Parker, he was a steadfast member of Jaimie Branch’s beloved and free-spirited Fly or Die ensemble, links up with the bassist Luke Stewart as part of his Silt Trio and has been a constant presence behind the tenor saxophonist James Brandon Lewis, from the mainstream of their quartet to their yearning tributes to the agricultural scientist George Washington Carver and the gospel icon Mahalia Jackson as the Red Lily Quintet, and from their early duos to the intoxicating swirl and crisp stomp of Apple Cores which was released earlier this year. It is a year which has also brought an appearance on Live in Philadelphia as part of Marshall Allen’s Ghost Horizons while in June he joined up with Gustafsson, Ken Vandermark and Tomeka Reid for the impromptu stunner Pivot.
Having lost none of their swagger or step, the Chicago Underground Duo bound through the shop door on the Hyperglyph opener ‘Click Song’ via a bracing trumpet line and twinkling bells. Taylor commences a choppy, arms-and-legs-akimbo gallop on his drum kit and a woozy low-end on the synthesizer sounds like a spiralling helicopter for what is an immediately evocative and engaging headmost chase. The percussionist notes that while ‘there has always been a lot of African influence in the rhythms we play’ this record in particular utilises ‘rhythms from Nigeria, Mali, Zimbabwe and Ghana’ with the duo comparing their opening salvo to African click songs and the bountiful amplifications of Tuareg wedding music of a type exemplified by the Agadez rock band Etran de L’AĆÆr.
The title piece arrives swiftly and shares the same driving character but swaps out some of the elements. A falling line on the RMI Electra-Piano – an instrument which became a staple of the progressive rock bands of the seventies and was memorably played by Chick Corea on Miles Davis’s transitional 1969 album Filles de Kilimanjaro – plus Taylor’s steady cymbal patter and Mazurek’s skidding trumpet soon give way to an all-out rumble. Another blaring, buzzing synth and the spectral, somewhat quizzical quality of the keys build over Taylor’s loping percussion before a big wafting and vibrating trumpet blows out its guts in the middle of the piece, with enough power to shake out or distend the other instruments. Shakers and a synthesized bass line which evokes a brassy trombone set the scene for carnivalesque chanting, ebullient and rambunctious without getting too carried away as the elements of ‘Hyperglyph’ finally congeal into a big swarming drone.
On ‘Rhythm Cloth’ another stellar trumpet line and Taylor’s stop-start hits and kicks are framed by a strangely wheezing synthesizer which reminds me of the early-aughties electronica of the German band The Notwist. And the circular rhythm on ‘Contents of Your Heavenly Body’ is furnished with a vocal by Mazurek redolent of Pavement and Shellac as the trumpeter turned caterwauler surveys a landscape of soiled charisma, reversed benevolence and scorched throats. The drums and a synthesizer melody which hangs somewhere between a dialup modem connection and a fairground theme provide the other constants, with a scorching trumpet cresting the piece then multiplying as ‘Contents of Your Heavenly Body’ threatens to judder or careen ‘towards oblivion’ or at least loose of its tracks.
At its moodiest Mazurek’s trumpet tends to remind me of Miles Davis on Sketches of Spain. Here that dolorous yet defiant tone and its timeless reverberations roll out over an ominous synth wash. Rumbling drums come up from the soil, conjuring a big vaporous cloud before Taylor segues into an extended mbira pattern which is gently buffeted by Mazurek’s samplers, shakers and bells. The pattern evokes Bjƶrk on albums like Vespertine and MedĆŗlla but especially the song ‘Crystalline’ from Biophilia which makes use of a so-called gameleste, a celesta modified to sound like gamelan percussion as an aching trumpet comes in to burnish the limpid and glassy rhythm.
While the other compositions are attributed to the duo, the amorphous, somewhat hesitant ‘Plymouth’ with its sputter and growl and ‘Hemiunu’ belong solely to Taylor. The latter piece, a freewheeling waltz, sounds almost like a riff on the opening tracks, nodding again to African folk rhythms while also summoning up something of the Deep South as its roiling piano figure calls to mind the sublimated vehemence of Nina Simone’s civil rights anthem ‘Mississippi Goddam’.
Always in the air, the music of Don Cherry has been manifested potently over the past year first by the Swedish quartet Nacka Forum, whose album Peaceful Piano offered ‘A Crank of Mu’ in homage to the pair of records by the trumpeter and the percussionist Ed Blackwell. Then in the spring Angel Bat Dawid and Naima Nefertari released Journey to Nabta Playa, a meditation on memory, mythology and ancestral science which interpreted tunes by Don and his son David Ornette Cherry, with the multi-instrumentalist and archivist Nefertari the late David Ornette’s niece, while Cosmic Ear a newfangled quintet led by Mats Gustafsson, the trumpeter Goran KajfeÅ” and the Don Cherry collaborator Christer BothĆ©n drew explicitly on TRACES from his Organic Music Theatre of the seventies and his later groundbreaking efforts with the Codona trio. ‘Hemiunu’ exists in the same sphere, the piece on Hyperglyph which bears Cherry’s influence most boldly and proudly through Taylor’s steep percussion, Mazurek’s trumpet and that repeating piano figure which together produce a wide-furrowed groove before the horn again skids out and a kalimba twinkles in the distance.
In fact ‘Hemiunu’ which lends its name from the ancient Egyptian prince also serves as a portal unto the record’s climax by way of a three-part ‘Egyptian Suite’. While Mazurek’s tone might variously conjure the greats from Davis or Cherry to Kenny Dorham and Lee Morgan, the suite is billed as a kind of reckoning with his late friend and mentor Bill Dixon with ‘Part 1: The Architect’ reflecting his use of wide intervals as Mazurek takes a high declamatory arch replete with long trilling tails. ‘Part 2: Triangulation of Light’ on the other hand sounds metallic and cavernous, with Taylor’s bowed cymbals scraping and swooshing while Mazurek’s piccolo trumpet like a wailing and plaintive cry ekes out above the din. And then on the grand finale ‘Part 3: Architectronics of Time’ those spacious intervals return as Taylor’s rumbling drums take over the suite, pummelling beneath the vaulting arc of the trumpet on a composition which is somehow strained and anxious while also providing a note of bombast.
That leaves ‘Succulent Amber’ with its whistling flute and kalimba, which sounds tender like the pitter-patter of raindrops collecting in a bucket. There is a trace of the quixotic Arthur Russell and his signature composition ‘In the Light of a Miracle’ to be found in the tentative keys of the piece, tugging and lulling until a few deep organ chords courtesy of the same RMI Electra-Piano finally shut down the projection, which no longer flickers but leaves handprints and geometric marks imprinted in the wall like so many beguiling signs and symbols.
