Oddly enough, what struck me first about the new Rob Mazurek album, is how familiar it sounds. It felt like it slotted so peacefully into the milieu of Chicago music at the end of last year that it almost escaped my notice; this is in no way a comment on its quality, though. Dimenstional Stardust is an excellent album. It is a complex, and at times, fanciful listen that connects many stray points of interest and influence within the contemporary jazz scene and fastens them into an eloquent and recognizable constellation. And that's kind of what makes the album seems so familiar; it feels like THE archetypical International Anthem release.
I became aware of International Anthem through their release of Ben LaMar Gay's Downtown Castles Can Never Block The Sun, a jazz album with the feel of an underground hip hop release. This melding of high and low, acceptable and incorrigible, and cognizable and obtuse, is the tension at the heart of the label's curatorial aesthetic. It is the latent conceit of their almost single-handed revitalization of mine and other's interest in jazz as both an engine of outsider art and standard-bearer of America's legacy of contributions to the canon of classical compositions. Into this rumbling aurora borealis of sound presently streaks a new shooting star, one that cascades from one end of the horizon to other, seemingly collecting all of the celestial bodies in its magnetic wake. Who else could this be but Rob Mazurek and the Exploding Star Orchestra?
Rob Mazurek is a well-recognized figure within the Chicago jazz community, having played a formative role in the many permutations of the Chicago Underground Duo, Trio, Quartet and Orchestra, and supporting players and institutions as luminary as Jeff Parker and Pharoah Sanders. He even worked with Tortious and Stereolab once upon a time. The Exploding Star Orchestra is one of Mazurek's many projects that have longe endured, possibly, despite its auspicious origins, as a commissioned exercise by the Chicago Cultural Center and the Jazz Institute of Chicago, which requested a jazz band be assembled that represents all of the city's diverse, but painfully segregated, neighborhoods. Dimenstional Stardust is now the Exploding Star Orchestra's seventh album, demonstrating both the longevity of this thoroughly collaborative project, as well as Mazurek's passion for maintaining the potential of its liberatory scales.
The current line up of the Exploding Star Orchestra includes Damon Locks, John Herndon, Nicole Mitchell, Jaimie Branch, Macie Stewart, Mikel Patrick Avery, Jeff Parker, Tomeka Reid, and the incomparable Chad Taylor, among others, and was convened to perform at the 2018 JazzFest in both Berlin and Chicago. Upon returning stateside, International Anthem was able to convince Mazurek to record an album with the then-current line-up of the Orchestra. This project began in 2019, and through a triathlon of intense writing, recording and post-production relays, eventually became Dimenstional Stardust.
The inversion of pop sensibilities and avant-garde affordances buttress the polyrhythmic, jungle-beat jab and mischievous slam-poetics of the star-clashing "The Careening Prism Within (Parable 43)" which cuts through the upper stratosphere like a bullet through water vapor, propelled by the combustive solo salvo spun off Jeff Parker's cosmic-dust laced fretboard. "Dimensional Stardust (Parable 33)" proceeds cautiously as if on a midnight heist, the prattle of percussion like a drizzle of rain that provides cover for the covert operation, every anxious thought echoing in one's mind with the weight of an approaching footstep, while every physical step is as soft and careful as a cat walking on the vertical planks of a neighbor's fence. "Parable of Inclusion" pairs an air raid siren with an effervescent flute and mallet groove, that opens into a playful field of conversive pianos, flowering string, and a brush of soothing saxes, crafting a narrative that explains the urgency of bringing down the barriers that prevent people from accessing each other's humanity, and the paradise that resides on the far end of that necessary struggle.
I said before that Dimensional Stardust feels like the archetypal International Anthem album and I stand by that statement. What this means practically is rather simple. Every revolutionary text has its peers, even manifestos on transcendence as thoroughly convincing as the one which Mazurek has presented here.
