Who says you can’t come home again? Though he currently lives in Texas, Rob Mazurek remains closely identified with Chicago. The 54-year-old multi-instrumentalist, composer, improviser, and multimedia artist grew up in Naperville and right out of high school moved into the city, where he attended the Bloom School of Jazz and learned on the bandstand from local luminaries such as Jodie Christian and Lin Halliday. Since the mid-1990s he has maintained the Chicago Underground Duo with drummer Chad Taylor, and they’ve kept the Chicago Underground name (sometimes as a trio, quartet, or orchestra) even though Taylor long ago moved to the east coast and Mazurek spent eight years in Brazil.
Rob Mazurek’s Desert Encrypts Vol. 1 Fri 8/30, 3-4 PM, Von Freeman Pavilion
“Flamingos Dancing on Luminescent Moonbeams,” which appears on the City Was Yellow project’s set list, is the second track on the Chicago Underground’s 1998 debut, Playground. On that album Mazurek first broke loose from his early grounding in mid-20th-century modern jazz, and the influence of figures such as Art Farmer is evident in the piece’s lyrical cornet melody and loose, sauntering groove. Those features periodically recur on 2019’s Desert Encrypts Vol. 1 (Astral Spirits), the self-titled debut by Mazurek’s latest quartet, but they emerge from elaborate, interlocking structures and passages of protean free improvisation, and they share space with spacey soundscapes and cosmic poetry.
It’s just the kind of place for Mazurek to get things done. “I wake up in the morning and I make a morning sound—morning drones is what I call them—on my synthesizer in the music room,” he says. “Then I make the coffee. Then I’ll practice for a couple hours; then I’ll go out to the painting studio for a couple hours, work on paintings that I’m working on or sculptures. Then I’ll come back in and compose for a couple hours.” Because cosmic themes loom large in Mazurek’s compositions, he especially appreciates the desert sky. “You also have a designated black-sky area, so you see the Milky Way every night,” he says. “The sky goes on forever, and the sunrises and sunsets are so spectacular every day.”
