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.
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