Rob Mazurek “Scattered Amplitudes”, Milano, Intermezzo 11, 09.08.2022

Rob Mazurek is for sure one of the emerging instrumentalists and composers of contemporary jazz music, but not only. Famous at the end of the 1990s and at the beginning of 2000s for his collaborations with musicians related to post-rock as Tortoise or Jim O’Rourke, after a while Mazurek started becoming involved in improvised combos like the Chicago Underground Duo and Trio, with fellow drummer Chad Taylor and guitarist Jeff Parker.

At the same time his love for electronic composition and large ensembles gave shape to the Exploding Star Orchestra. But his love for contemporary composers led Mazurek to pay hommage to, only to make a name, Lawrence D. “Butch” Morris and his music in a solo performance held in 2015 at the S. Anna Arresi Festival “Ai Confini tra Sardegna e Jazz” where he played trumpet, piano and electronics alone in an intriguing and intimate hommage to one of the greatest conducers of all times.

But this evening the little gallery Intermezzo 11 in Milano, instead of offering a live set by Mazurek opened up the doors to an exhibition of sculptures made of fabric by Mazurek himself. In his own words: “Amplitudes in space time continuum. Pieces of material. An arc equals hotizontal/latitude. Another arc vertical/longitude. Pure color space. Layers. Amplitudes. Combining and shapeshifting we realize a place in pure space.

Layers. Amplitudes in the astronomical sense. These lines or arcs are not a boudary but demarcations in a pure space. As we discover more and more galaxies the idea of boundaries become even more absurd. We are beings on one on millions of planets in this pure space. Discovering my own limitations through the medium of physical making, I try and conjure thoughts of the infinite with these pieces that have no beginning nor ending.

It is these places between thought and the action I am interested in”. As you can see by the photos accompanying this post, the fabrics are a space between another space, where different lines and shapes intertwine themselves without limits nor end. The same space between them is a continuation of the works. This way, we are compelled to experience visually – but almost tactily – this absence of boundaries Mazurek talks about in his small writing.

In a way this fabric sculptures are not quite dissimilar to his own music. If you listen to it carefully, in effect, you can feel the same sense of continuity from one instrument to the other, both in solo and in group performances. Being in between the thought and the action means possibly that while you play, you are compelled to feel yourself and transmit yourself under shape of music. This gives you this sensation of being without borders because borders happens, even if under an illusion, because of yourself being disrupted, forced to belong to the realm of thought totally, or to that of action.

If you belong to the first realm, you are closed into your own mind. If you act without the thought, you possibly do mistakes, or something not related to yourself and what’s behind you at the same time. Being in this place in between the twos is the only opportunity to unite the two realms and ... flow. Flow as a person, or let the music flow if you are a musician. In any case, don’t miss the opportunity to see this exhibition while in Milano this week. 

 

Being a part of the whole (when I play it, I mean it): Bill Dixon [pt. 5]

Words: Gian Paolo Galasi

Sound and Vision Orchestra, 2007
Photo: Darcy James Argue's Secret Society 

“The music of Bill Dixon maintains such a powerful flavor, it is one of those things where you inevitably remember the first time you taste it. For me, it was his mid-career landmark recording November 1981. Within the one minute and twenty six seconds of Webern, the opening track, I realized I had to completely rethink the possibilities of the trumpet as an improvising instrument. By the end of the album, I realized I had to examine my assumptions about the nature of creative music in general.”

Cornetist Taylor Ho-Bynum included this statement at the beginning of an essay inserted in Tapestries For Small Orchestra (Firehouse 12, 2009), a double Cd plus Dvd documenting Bill Dixon’s residency at the 2007 NY Vision Festival. The line up features four of Dixon closest collaborators and disciples, Graham Haynes, Stephen Haynes, Rob Mazurek and Ho Bynum, along with double bassist and contrabass clarinetist Michel Côté, cellist Glynis Loman, bassist Ken Filiano and drummer and vibrafonist Warren Smith.

Aged 84 at the time of those live performances, Dixon’s work in the last decade is marked by a musical activity that spreads its wings well beyond the world of NY contemporary jazz. Or, better said, that enjoys the widening of the stream of what the avant jazz environment, and audience, is nowadays. Not by chance one of his last students, one of the few granted with private, individual lessons, was trumpeter, composer and visual artist Rob Mazurek.

Rob Mazurek - Photo by Jim Newberry

Born in 1965 in Jersey City, Mazurek started playing in a quartet in the early 1990s in Chicago, where after three albums he also founded the collective Chicago Underground with guitarist Jeff Parker, drummer Chad Taylor, bassist Noel Kupersmith and trombonist Sarah Smith. While recording for Delmark and other labels as a Duo, Quartet, or Orchestra, Mazurek often collaborated with combos coming from experimental rock such as Tortoise, Gastr del Sol, Stereolab and Sam Prekop.

This was one of the first generations of musicians newly aware, after the grunge/indie limelights, of the possible connections ‘outside of their mainstream’, to gain curiosity and then consideration into the avant jazz/contemporary milieu, as happened abut twenty years before with DNA’s drummer Ikue Mori and guitarist Arto Lindsay, or in Europe with guitarist Terry Ex, just to name a few.

Close at hand with the new millennium, Dixon’s releases featured a quartet album for the German label FMP titled Berlin Abbozzi. With a line-up similar to some of his Soul Note records – two basses, Matthias Bauer and Hans Koch, his trumpet and Tony Oxley on drums – it features a 60 minutes long composition, structured in three parts. At the change, Dixon will be on duty to carry his musical legacy with his younger acolytes.

Taylor Ho Bynum, Wadada Leo Smith, Stanton Davis, Stehpen Haynes
at the National Jazz Museum in Harlem - Photo by Richard Conde

As Tapestries,  its, posthumous, follow up Envoi (Victo, 2011) enjoy the same line up, the same instrumental colors, and the same extended form. Clearly at that point in time, after his long teaching status, and the previous decade outputs, Bill Dixon is finally ready to affirm himself as one of thw most important contemporary composer. As Clifford Allen aptly wrote, Dixon’s music at that point in time can be compared to such contemporary composers as Toru Takemitsu, Lucas Ligeti and Morton Feldman.

Responsible of sharing Dixon’s heritage in the present, revisiting Envoi at a memorial in New York’s St. Mark’s Place in 2010 with Joe Morris added as a second double bassist to the original band, or with the same year exhibiton at the Antwerp-based Follow The Sound festival with Dixon collaborators Franz Coglmann, Jacques Coursil and Barry Guy, or again in New York’s Rubin Museum of Art collective concert with Wadada Leo Smith, Taylor Ho Bynum, Stanton Davis, William Parker and Warren Smith, trumpeter Stephen Haynes, since 1973 former Dixon student at Bennington College and one of his closest collaborators, points at:

“His limning of the unexplored areas of the trumpet through consistent, controlled usage of multiphonics and extended range alone earns Bill the mantle of trumpet innovator. […] his mapping and harnessing of the lower, ‘off the horn,’ pedal register […]; his use of electronics, delay and reverberation, as well as his employment of extreme modality of attack and articulation […]. Dixon’s currently decreased employment of upper register multiphonics reflects organic change and the artist’s use of what is available to create new work.”

Taylor Ho Bynum at the Vortex Jazz Club
London, Oct. 2011 - Photo: Gian Paolo Galasi

And while 2008 AUM Fidelity 17 Musicians in Search of a Sound: Darfur, issued not that much after being hosted into Rob Mazurek Exploding Star Orchestra ensemble (Thrill Jockey, 2007), is dedicated to the military-drive genocide in the African country, its ten movements – mostly short, with the central Sinopia as the only composition to oversize 20 minutes - features four trumpets, two trombones and one tuba, bassoon, three saxophones and one bass clarinet, double bass, cello and percussion.

The most extended of Dixon’s large ensembles to date, it follows the results achieved with Bill Dixon 7-tette and above all Intents and Purposes, while finally grounding in the same area of musicians involved in the music of composers such as Anthony Braxton in the same years another great composer and multi-reedist, Henry Threadgill, is finally being acknowledged as a true master of contemporary music.

Related discography:

Berlin Abbozzi (FMP, 1999)

17 Musicians in Search of a Sound (Aum Fidelity, 2007)

Bill Dixon with Exploding Star Orchestra (Thrill Jockey, 2008)

Tapestries for Small Orchestra (Firehouse 12, 2009)

Bill Dixon/Aaron Siegel/Ben Hall: Weight/Counterweight (Brokenresearch, 2009)

Envoy (Victo, 2011)