The careers of trumpeter Rob Mazurek and percussionist Chad Taylor have been inextricably linked for more than three decades, functioning as the core behind countless projects, none more long-lived and essential than the various iterations of the Chicago Underground – in duo, trio, and quartet formations. While both musicians and composers have produced a ton of work independent of one another, their partnership still seems to loom over everything they do, with an elastic aesthetic revolving around rhythm and melody. It’s been eleven years since the duo released its last album, Locus, but as Mazurek notes about the duo’s arc, “When it feels right we do it. We have worked together and have been friends for a long time. This creates a kind of continuity not only in the music, but in our lives.”
On one level the project’s return on Hyperglyph simply extends the duo’s central themes, but while post-production has always been a big part of how they make music, they’ve never used the studio with such rigour. Part of the credit goes to Dave Vettraino, the house engineer for International Anthem Records. He worked closely with Mazurek and Taylor in the studio à la Teo Macero, bringing a dazzling clarity to the layers of electronics and overdubbed percussion used to shape the collaborative tunes. On the surface, the album opener ‘Click Song’ conveys the essence of CUD: a joyful, indelible trumpet melody redolent of Don Cherry’s innate lyricism, dancing over propulsive, skipping percussion. Yet beneath the veneer is a deceptively complex collision of two electrifying drum patterns – derived, like so much of Taylor’s playing here, from his study of traditional African grooves – while undergirding the deliberately blown-out sound of Mazurek is an insistently snaking synthetic bassline.
From there things only get denser and more multi-layered, with an in-the-red intensity and thickness that reinforces the trumpeter’s take on Japanese guitarist Masayuki Takayanagi’s notions of sound projection. On the title track Mazurek briefly channels another important influence, succinctly laying out the harmonic form with a few chords played on an RMI electric piano, a tool featured often in the electric music of Miles Davis. Trumpet and circular drum figures quickly enter the fold, providing a deft transition into a revoicing of the tune’s core on synthesizer atop a fiercely churning electronic ostinato as Taylor roams all over his kit with an aggression rarely heard in his playing.. The trumpet returns with a clarion call bathed in reverb. In addition to his melodic gifts, Mazurek is also a rhythmic inventor and his inchoate blasts are all about energy and time, so when he switches to the sort of wordless vocal chanting that’s become part of his arsenal over the last decade it feels like the same expression on a different instrument. As the electronic din thickens and grows louder it feels like a response to his hectoring voice. When his voice returns on ‘Contents of Your Heavenly Body’ he’s reciting an elliptical poem summoning a divine power in blocky cadences that recall the delivery of one of his closest artistic foils, Damon Locks. The piece is cleaved open with a rhythmic shift and imploring, upper register horn blowing that unfolds in the background.
‘The Gathering’ offers a mild stylistic shift, as a hovering drone is embroidered by Mazurek’s cornet, further knit by Taylor’s introduction of a taut, circling tom pattern and reverb-drenched cymbal splashes. The soundscape recedes, replaced by a lengthy kalimba meditation from Taylor, a cascading stream of sweet-toned arpeggios splintered by electronic manipulations. Mazurek rejoins at his most tender and melodic, yielding one of the most beautiful, unadorned passages on the entire album. Taylor has worked with various thumb pianos for decades, but his connection to the African roots of jazz and improvised music have become an increasingly important facet of his music, whether enfolded in larger contexts like the various Chicago Underground projects or his exquisite duo with bassist Joshua Abrams in Mind Maintenance, where the latter plays his auxiliary axe, the Moroccan guimbri.
The middle of the album includes two brief yet haunting Taylor compositions: ‘Plymouth’, a fragile tip-toe collision of mbira and austere trumpet, and ‘Hemiumu’, a cyclical ripper with a piano riff that could make for a house anthem if not for Taylor’s rhythmically complex accompaniment, which quietly serves as the tune’s focal point, as it spends the entire five minutes transforming itself, giving the trumpeter steady grist for his improvisational mill. The piano line grows more feverish and complex, while the trumpet blares louder, interrogating the seesaw melodic figure with coarse smears and washes of echo and delay.
Mazurek pays homage to his late friend and mentor Bill Dixon on the three movements of ‘Egyptian Suite’. In the first section, ‘The Architect’, CUD dispenses with the electronics in favor of a visceral trumpet-drum kit dialogue which finds Mazurek balancing fury and beauty, a no-holds-barred exchange where both musicians lay it all out, only to turn inward on the second section, ‘Triangulation of Light’. Taylor seems to turn his cymbals inside out, bowing them to produce a hybrid of upper register friction and tone-bending peals, inviting Mazurek into a microtonal environment marked by warped, vibratory pitches. Somehow the pair melds their individual output into an instinctive exploration of charged harmony, sustained sound, and livewire tension. Taylor opens up his full kit as the piece drifts into its third section, ‘Architectonics of Time’. It’s a virtuosic performance of brute force and elaborate polyrhythms over which Mazurek delivers some of his most abstract, multivalent playing on the entire album, landing somewhere between Dixon and Wadada Leo Smith in terms of attack and technique, but fully rooted in his own sound.
The album concludes with the airy, reflective ‘Succulent Amber’, a sparkling kalimba-synth duet in which the duo’s penchant for folksy melodic figures is enhanced by heightened contrapuntal intimacy. When a partnership between such bold artists can endure for decades in spite of individual prerogatives, you can be assured it’s deep and real, and as Mazurek and Taylor each continue to expand their own practices, Chicago Underground Duo only gets richer.
