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Rob Mazurek Quintet – Sound Is
Delmark DE 586
Compact Disc (2009)

Jazz cornetist Rob Mazurek consistently pushes beyond the expectations of his listeners, drawing together ideas out of sound, personalities out of space, and fusing color and light into the tones of his music. The debut record of this new quintet, featuring John Herndon on drums (Tortoise, the For Carnation), Matthew Lux on bass guitar (Isotope 217, Iron and Wine) Josh Abrams on acoustic bass (Town and Country, Black Earth Ensemble) and Jason Adasiewicz on vibes (Loose Assembly, Rolldown) pulls together an astounding array of personalities into a seamless and effervescent whole. Sound Is features 14 new Mazurek compositions.

1 As If An Angel Fell From The Sky 6:50
2 The Earthquake Tree 8:53
3 Dragon Kites 7:06
4 The Star Splitter 4:38
5 The Hill 7:52
6 Le Baiser (The Kiss) 3:15
7 The Lightening Field 3:31
8 Cinnamon Tree 4:49
9 The Dream Rocker 3:05
10 Beauty Wolf 5:56
11 Microraptagonafly 6:42
12 Aphrodite Rising 4:48
13 The Field 3:03
14 Nora Grace 0:54

Rob Mazurek- cornet, synth, piano
John Herndon - drums, percussion, synth
Matthew Lux - bass guitar
Josh Abrams - acoustic bass, piano
Jason Adasiewicz - vibraphone

All music by Rob Mazurek with contributions on some songs from the band.
Nora Grace Lux made: Nora Grace
CP OLHO ASCAP


Produced by Raymond Salvatore Harmon
Album Production and Supervision: Robert G. Koester
Engineered by Todd Carter
Mastered by Eric Butkus
Extra recording and sequencing by Mark Mazurek
Photos by Francois Perica
Design by ForDzign, Dave Forte
Rob Mazurek plays Denis Wick mouthpieces

Other Delmark albums of interest:
Chicago Underground Trio, Chronicle (573 CD, 1573 DVD)
Possible Cube (511)
Flamethrower (521)
Rob Mazurek, Silver Spines (540)
Chicago Underground Orchestra, Playground (503) Roscoe Mitchell, Sound (408) Anthony Braxton, For Alto (420) Sun Ra and the Arkestra, Sun Song (411) Sound of Joy (414) NRG Ensemble, This is My House (485)
Josh Abrams, Cipher (546)
Active Ingredients, Titration (547) with Rob Mazurek




How to send a powerful current of electricity continually through a great diamond

"Sound Is", it does not call for any particular complement –as a matter of fact, it calls for all of them. From there, from what is and what intends to reserve the right to fully assert itself and remain possible, even contradicting, all particular complements are welcome. If words can bring something to music, which does not qualify, for this creative and speculative music which does not attribute anything, which possibly tunes all, for this music of the imaginative world (at this point, please observe or read a few times the titles given to the tunes), it is to say things in a new fashion: sound is, of salt and diamond. And for example, here, and there, the sound of Rob Mazurek's cornet is of salt and diamond. Sound is, the key, the lock, the door, the shadow of the door and the light underneath the door. Sound is, of all origins, of all sources. And for example, here, and there, as if a back-world, the sound waves of the electronic instruments behind the effects of the acoustic instruments. Sound is, "the torrent of the given", if to give another twist to the expression twisted by Vladimir Ilitch Oulianov. Sound is, the all-possibility. Sound is, the verb to be. Sound is, the philosophical egg.

Instance: the lovers touching and comforting each other within the bubble hanging from the tip of a thistle in the Garden of Delights, as painted by Hieronymus van Acken, called Bosch...
Instance: in "Sent For You Yesterday", a novel by John Edgar Wideman, Freeda washes dishes in a house that isn't hers, in another world, and when a soap bubble gets stuck between her thumb and her index finger, a bubble containing all the colors of the rainbow and the Imago Mundi, she makes a wish to free the rainbow, the room, another world.

Rob Mazurek, cornet player, improviser/composer, sound/vision abstractivist, has always played with transparency. An edenic transparency or a tumultuous transparency – here, and there, through the stained glass of the vibraphone, upon the division line of the waters which flows in between the two basses, through the fluid axe of the rhythms – a transparency which distinguishes him from one of his heroes, one of his sound relative, Bill Dixon, who has always been working within the depths of the music. Rob Mazurek's music is played on and below the surface, immediately, between rays and shimmers. A June's afternoon. Water lilies between Uranus and Neptune. Of the dazzling vacancy of a few instants (on As if an Angel Fell from the Sky, Dragon Kites or Beauty Wolf), which are not repetitive but rotative, never stopped but instead fixative, throughout which sounds seem to recite an alphabet of resonances, to the speeds of the improvisations, urgent and squandering, constantly at blazing strength (on The Earthquake Tree, The Hill or Aphrodite Rising), there is only the value of a sliding moment. To the tension and release couple, Mazurek has substituted a coupling of hatching and swaying. Alternating between the dazzling whiteness and the ashen light to gather melodic flowers blooming morning, noon and evening on the fiery earth and going up in smoke. Ashen light: this music is not obscure, it is translucent. Dazzling whiteness: this music is not clear, it is translucent.

Instance: The Arnolfini Lovers, as painted by Jan van Eyck, holding hands, their backs reflected in the circular mirror hanging behind them, with another couple facing them we wouldn't see otherwise...
Instance: in "Locus Solus", a novel by Raymond Roussel, Faustine, the dancer with musical hair (each of her strands is a string), frolics inside a colossal diamond filled with a prodigious liquid, the “aqua-micans”, which makes it possible to breathe underwater.

We pretend music consists of the voluntary art of organizing sounds, of introducing humanity's order and reason into the raw sound reality. But sounds may also answer to other laws of attraction and assemblage. Maybe they hold within themselves other magnets (for example, here, and there, beacons of electronic glimmers). Maybe we should pay more attention to the fantastic beings that the distribution of sound, magnetic, respiratory frequencies put in circulation, between our clear consciousness and our fascinating consciousness. Focus well. The musician first is the one who more specifically listens, then the one who brings us to listen. Focus well. What does Rob Mazurek hear in the climates, the spheres and spectrums of sounds he brings to rolling, within this softness and splendor he knows how to kindle, whether the melody is formulated (The Star Splitter) or unformulated (Microraptagonafly)? Does he perceive the correspondence between the torrent of the given and the sound that is, which is not an unity but a cell or an alveolus, a bubble of air or a drop of water, a diamond, a philosophical egg? Sound is, and the current travels.

Instance: in "The Diamond", a novel by André Pieyre de Mandiargues, the young Sarah Mose faints, loses balance inside the diamond she was examining. There, she meets a fire being with a lion head and couples with him. Later, the young Sarah Mose has the diamond set on a ring while within her settles the fruit of their union.
Instance: in "The Diamond Lens", a novel by Fitz James O'Brien, and conversely, a microscope manufacturer builds a device with a diamond lens which allows him to get absorbed in the contemplation of Animula, a feminine form with mystical violet eyes who lives, unattainable, within a drop of water: “For an instant I saw nothing save what seemed to be an illuminated chaos, a vast luminous abyss. A pure white light, cloudless and serene, and seemingly limitless as space itself, was my first impression. Gently, and with the greatest care, I depressed the lens a few hairs' breadths. The wondrous illumination still continued, but as the lens approached the object, a sense of indescribable beauty was unfolded to my view. […] Far away into the illimitable distance stretched long avenues of these gaseous forests, dimly transparent, and painted with prismatic hues of unimaginable brilliancy. The pendent branches waved along the fluid glades until every vista seemed to break through half-lucent ranks of many-colored drooping silken pennons. […] What seemed to be either fruits or flowers, pied with a thousand hues lustrous and ever varying, bubbled from the crowns of this fairy foliage. No hills, no lakes, no rivers, no forms animate or inanimate were to be seen, save those vast auroral copses that floated serenely in the luminous stillness, with leaves and fruits and flowers gleaming with unknown fires, unrealizable by mere imagination." There, inside this sun chamber, this philosophical egg, within Rob Mazurek's music, lives Animula, which "floated forth with the serene grace of a frail bubble ascending through the still atmosphere of a June day."

A last instance, maybe: the bell of the cornet on the picture illustrating the sleeve of "Sound Is". The earth is round and Rob Mazurek now lives in São Paolo. But he always comes back to Chicago, where Roscoe Mitchell recorded "Sound", for Delmark, in 1966 (it is no coincidence, it is often in Chicago's laboratories that the virtues of sound are rediscovered), where await him so many friendships (and for example, here, and there, Adasiewicz, Abrams, Lux et Herndon), so many youthful fountains. For the first time since another life, Mazurek has accepted to lead, nominally, a group which takes the form of a "jazz quintet". But the jazz quintet must be a fantastic being: whatever the waves and effects, the settings and disturbances, this is where spheres and spectrums of sounds are cultivated, where fields of diamonds are plowed.

Alexandre Pierrepont