Far greater than the numbers of the entitled are the numbers of those who feel the instinct to be liberated. From what? They may not know, aside from the knot that collects in their gut when they glance at their bank balance or out their window (if they possess either).
It's no accident that the only words heard in "Live at the Adler Planetarium" by Rob Mazurek's Exploding Star Orchestra issue from the mouth of keyboardist-poet Damon Locks, whose day job is teaching art in a prison. "Scale the wall!" his voice reverberates. "In the dark we pave the way. Accept the invitation to feel!"
To feel? Really? That's some kind of danger, more dangerous than robbing a bank. If you start to feel the pain of what they're doing to you, you might just, uh . . . EXPLODE, like a STAR, y'know?
But Locks also invites you to dance. And the music of the Exploding Star Orchestra is no robo-disco experience that jerks you around like a puppet, it's a communal human pulse founded on the experienced drums of Gerald Cleaver and Chad Taylor -- sometimes driving, sometimes lightly marching, sometimes almost subliminal. This nonet delivers through some of the top jazz musicians around, including flutist Nicole Mitchell, a big thinker whose playing digs into the finest of detail, and multicapable electric pianist Craig Taborn, spieling out curlicues of fantasy that flash on one of his earliest influences, Sun Ra.
Ra's Arkestra (which plays the Lodge Nov. 25) keeps orbiting long after its founder's ascension; bandleader Marshall Allen turned 100 this year. Ra launched his career in Chicago, leaving his astral dust behind to influence trumpeter Rob Mazurek, born there several years after Ra's departure for New York. Most of the rest of the Exploding Star Orchestra are also Midwesterners from the same generation -- not old enough to have seen Miles' '70s foundational jazz-rock Fillmore jams, but witnesses to and participants in the jam/groove revival that took place in the 1990s and 2000s with the likes of Tortoise (featuring Jeff Parker, a longtime Mazurek collaborator). That's one tradition.
And Ra's tradition of severing slavery's bonds by rebirthing himself on another planet, followed by George Clinton's version via the space-suited Funkadelic (1970's "Free Your Mind and Your Ass Will Follow"), gets an Exploding Star update at a literal planetarium, Mazurek's jagged color projections looking like the kind of broken prisms with which you could cut some rope. Tomeka Reid's cello sawing urges the ensemble toward freedom, while the synth of Angelica Sanchez buoys you up and the eager bass of Ingebrigt Håker Flaten bounces with the rhythm. Behind mysterious sunglasses, Mazurek issues trumpet declamations like beacons in the storm.
For all the jamming, you hear riffs aplenty, making the course easy to follow as the orchestra builds to its psychedelic peak, the visuals simultaneously reaching their greatest complexity. Your personal preconceptions, meanwhile, crack enough to admit some rays; no acid required. Mazurek would not be insulted by comparisons to early Pink Floyd ("Let There Be More Light"). He's not the giver, of course; look at those shades. Just the doorman.
And what happens after? You go back to tolerating slavery? If change were off your radar, you wouldn't be listening.
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Watch the concert here. Support independent music by buying the soundz here.
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P.S.: California voters just defeated a measure that would have discontinued the practice of involuntary servitude in the state's prisons.