Rob Mazurek’s latest cosmic carnival of an album for International Anthem is playful, epic and riotously inventive

For his composite installation show Cosmic Stacks, the artist Rob Mazurek made a row of what look like gnarly meteorites. Given that his other visual works have titles such as Constellation Scores or Extensions and Other Dimensions, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Mazurek himself has been twice around the asteroid belt.

A composer and creator of wide renown, Mazurek hails from New Jersey, has been active in Chicago, but now resides in Texas. Dimensional Stardust is his latest album and features a core of US talents such as Damon Locks, Tomeka Reid, Jaimie Branch and Jeff Parker. Mazurek has talked about “bursting out of the galaxial ceiling of what we know” and tackling social issues with holistic-positive thoughts. So far, so Sun Ra, but space was the place for jazzy types even before the Son of Saturn’s first efforts. Back in 1956, Sid Bass released From Another World with its hyper-real exotica of trombone and baritone sax. Mazurek’s work is perhaps more informed by the astral trips of Lonnie Liston Smith, or even Alice Coltrane’s daring take on Stravinsky. Either way, Dimensional Stardust is playful and epic and riotously inventive. A real cosmic carnival. For sure it’s ‘free’ in parts, but Mazurek imposes solid blocks of composition to flirt around.

“Sun Core Tet (Parable 99)” opens with impish strings, out of which Nicole Mitchell’s flute comes spiralling. There’s a real touch of Vegas lounge too in the percussion and vibraphone. Pizzicato violin and drawling horns add further to the relaxing vibe. “A Wrinkle in Time Sets Concentric Circles Reeling” maintains this chilled intro, but then comes Damon Locks’s digitised voice – part human, part cyborg. The woodwind twitters a celestial bird song as the narrator delivers his defiant free verse. It’s like an opus of interplanetary echoes, given a dystopian twist by Locks who might be the universe’s sole survivor.

“Galaxy 1000” merges an anxious flurry of strings into a jit-jive chorus and highlife drums. “The Careening Prism Within (Parable 43)” delivers space rock with fuzzy guitar lines and buzzing microwaves, while on “Abstract Dark Energy (Parable 9)” Locks sets his liberated verbals over a sunlit backing. Mitchell’s circular flute phrasing then returns for the Aquarian ballad “Parable of Inclusion”. What is it about the flute that so ably evokes the spheres? An instrument with a strange power, it takes our consciousness close to the divine in Mitchell’s hands.

Mazurek is a creative who thinks in colour and light, aiming to break down walls between the senses. If brighter colours suggest joy and plenty, then the frisky major keys, the flashes and harmonies used by Mazurek imply likewise. Students of Arthur Wesley Dow in the 1900s were asked to draw what they heard from a gramophone. The artist Arthur Dove pursued a ‘music for the eyes’ theory, painting visual tributes to George Gershwin’s work. So a picture has colour and form, but is static. Music has movement and duration, but stays invisible. Yet a well-balanced mixture can evoke many responses, aurally and visually. Any instrument, like any colour, offers varied shades of tone.

Mazurek thus shuns the stereotype of space as some darkly disturbing spot. His idea of infinity is to bask in the beauty of existence, rising above the mundane. “Dimensional Stardust (Parable 33)” sees Joel Ross’s bright vibraphone bobbed along by the percussion towards a giddy street parade. “Parable 3000 (We All Come from Somewhere Else)” lays Jaimie Branch’s Latin-tinged trumpet over snake-dance percussion and mystic flute. Finally, the seductive layers of “Autumn Pleiades” build to an expansive orchestral mass, with Locks asking, “What inner songs emerge when the curtain of twilight is withdrawn?”

The best futurism at heart is about finding harmony, or yearning for connection. No one’s expecting utopia to replace global instability, but this album seeks a varied, more hopeful tomorrow. Mazurek’s offering is a spirit symphony for the senses and achieves its radical aims.

Rob Mazurek’s website

International Anthem Bandcamp

Gareth Thompson
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