Checking in with cornetist-trumpeter-composer-bandleader-visual artist Rob Mazurek is always worthwhile. That’s because, to make it plain, the guy’s records just never miss. And when it’s a release by the Exploding Star Orchestra, that’s even better, as the band, which has been Mazurek’s primary musical focus over the last half decade or so (the group has been extant for nearly 25 years), is a certifiable murderer’s row of talent, of which more is said below. The latest album from Exploding Star Orchestra is Live at the Adler Planetarium, a sleek doozy of a performance captured in Mazurek’s old stomping grounds of Chicago. It’s out on vinyl and CD October 4 through International Anthem.
Rob Mazurek began leading ensembles of various sizes in the mid-’90s, but of particular note is the Chicago Underground Collective (17 releases ranging from duo to orchestra beginning with 12 Degrees of Freedom in 1998), São Paulo Underground (six releases beginning with Sauna: Um, Dois, Tres in 2006), and Exploding Star Orchestra (nine releases beginning with We Are All From Somewhere Else in 2007).
Live at the Adler Planetarium features Mazurek on trumpets, bells and voice (along with providing compositions and directing the band), Nicole Mitchell on flute, voice and electronics, Damon Locks on voice, samplers and electronics, Tomeka Reid on cello and electronics, Craig Taborn on Wurlitzer electric piano, Moog and electronics, Angelica Sanchez on Wurlitzer electric piano and Moog, Ingebrigt Håker Flaten on bass, and Chad Taylor and Gerald Cleaver on drums.
The music heard on Live at the Adler Planetarium was one part of an event that saw a stream of abstractions derived from Mazurek’s paintings and animations digitally projected above the heads of the audience and band in the planetarium’s Grainger Sky Theater. The record’s cover captures a glimpse of what the assembled experienced that night, March 24, 2023.
It’s a missing component, undoubtedly magnifying the feeling of not being there, that’s sorta inherent to live albums (the good to great ones, anyway). Fortunately, the preserved audio, which begins with three pieces from Lightning Dreamers, the Exploding Star Orchestra’s 2023 album released seven days after this performance, establishes a level of beauty, at times matching abstraction with abstraction but frequently launching into historically rich formal blends, that fills any voids.
Fitting for the locale of the performance, the Orchestra’s sound interweaves celestial Afro-Futurist threads reminiscent of Sun Ra’s Arkestra into a larger post-Coltrane Fire Music scheme, further blending an inspired stream of post-Beat/Amiri Baraka poetics (the word gush of Locks) with flurries of spiritual jazz (Mitchell’s flute) and an edgy mysteriousness that’s directly culled from those promising early Fusion excursions a la Miles (the dual electric pianos of Taborn and Sanchez). Rhythm is essential. Exploration is paramount.
In the consecutive 10-minute pieces “Underneath the Star Dome” and “Spiral Parable 1a” the group climbs to an elevated plateau and then just rolls. Reaching back the 2020 Exploding Star Orchestra album Dimensional Stardust, “Parable 3000” brings the performance to a powerful close. Altogether, Live at the Adler Planetarium flows forth as an exceptional synthesis rather than patchwork pastiche. As said up top, when Mazurek swings big he fully connects. Here’s another home run.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
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