The Chicago Underground Duo formed in late 1997 as an organic offshoot of the larger Chicago Underground Collective. The Duo consists of Rob Mazurek (cornet, electronics, piano) and Chad Taylor (percussion, electronics, vibes, guitar), both stalwarts on the Chicago Jazz front.

The Duo can easily be seen as the "workhorse" of the Chicago Underground Collective. They've logged the most touring and releases, five counting the recent 2010 release Boca Negra (Thrill Jockey, 2010). Rob and Chad have toured extensively in the U.S, Canada, Europe, Japan and Brazil, while maintaining rigorous individual schedules. The Duo is also, arguably, the most musically adventurous of the Chicago Underground incarnations. Performances are based on both notated compositions, composed by both artists, and on pure improvisation.

Splitting his time between Chicago and São Paulo, Brazil, composer and cornetist Rob Mazurek is the quintessential international artist. A prolific and magnanimous collaborator, Mazurek leads numerous ensembles (Exploding Star Orchestra, Rob Mazurek's Sound Is Quintet, Chicago Underground, São Paulo Underground, Tigersmilk and Mandarin Movie), all of which possess their own distinct identity.

Mazurek continues to expand his reach as a solo and multi-media artist with performance exhibitions and artist residencies, most notably at the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas, the Abbey Royal de Fontevrau, France and Galleria Coletivo in São Paulo, Brazil.

Mazurek's musical career spans over twenty-five years, with over 200 published compositions and recordings with Thrill Jockey, Delmark, Aesthetics and Submarine records, as well as other labels. His vibrant sonic palettes defy categorization. This has allowed him to collaborate with icons of varied genres including Tortoise, Bill Dixon, Roscoe Mitchell, Fred Anderson, Jim O'Rourke, Mike Ladd, Fred Hopkins, Luc Ferrari, Gastr del Sol, Noamnesia, Nana Vasconcellos, and Marcelo Camelo, among many others.

Chad Taylor performs regularly with Sam Prekop and Sticks and Stones. Recent performances and recordings have included collaborations with Marc Ribot, Charles Gayle, Jemeel Moondoc, Fred Anderson, Andrew Lamb, Assif Tsahar, Roy Campbell, Sabir Mateen, Henry Grimes, Steve Swell, William Parker, Jeff Parker and Abraham Burton. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

CHICAGO UNDERGROUND DUO
“Boca Negra”
(Thrill Jockey)
- NY Times / BEN RATLIFF

The Chicago Underground Duo is two jazz musicians, Chad Taylor and Rob Mazurek, a drummer and a cornetist. They don’t only play in jazz groups; Mr. Taylor tours with the singer-songwriter Sam Beam, known as Iron and Wine, and Mr. Mazurek has a rugged, noisy, pop-leaning band called Mandarin Movie. Together they play a lot of semifree improvisation and electronics, shaping their music further in postproduction.

Do all the electronics, and all the after-the-fact shaping, disqualify “Boca Negra” as a jazz record? Do they tip it over into some other zone, like composed music, or some kind of boundaryless netherworld?

No. “Boca Negra” — produced by Matthew Lux, a Chicago musician from the same circle — is the rare jazz album that gets deep into the possibilities of the recording studio. It doesn’t sound expensively made, but it accomplishes a great deal. Each track has a different sonic personality from the last; sometimes different personalities lie sandwiched into the same track.

Mr. Taylor and Mr. Mazurek are picking up on some of the ideas that Miles Davis and his producer Teo Macero worked with in the early 1970s. They’re making the listener aware of aural space, and — through the mixture of real-time playing and postproduction — of temporality. They’ve been doing this kind of thing for more than a decade in their duo and in various Chicago Underground Trios and Quartets, with the bassists Noel Kupersmith and Jason Ajemian and the guitarist Jeff Parker.

Besides drums, Mr. Taylor also plays vibraphone and mbira, the African thumb piano. “Laughing With the Sun” puts distortion and delay on the mbira’s quiet chiming, making it a kind of dirty ancient synthesizer, with Mr. Mazurek’s cornet improvising in warm long-tones and clean melodic shapes over its groove.

In “Quantum Eye” the cornet is distant, as if heard from another room, and heavy with echo. “Confliction” begins with bright foreground piano chords and deep-background cornet, suddenly joined by drums and a keyboard bass line coming in through a side door, outlining yet another kind of aural space, with a different echo and set of sound filters.

Mr. Taylor plays a parade rhythm over a bass vamp, with improvising on top, going on for several mesmerizing minutes; suddenly the drums stop cold in a hard digital edit, cutting off in the middle of the first cymbal crash. The space looms for four bars, then the drums resume. Even on the second listen, it’s startling. It isn’t necessarily more startling than something they could do in real time; it’s a different kind of startling.

Except for a version of Ornette Coleman’s “Broken Shadows,” these 10 tracks are the duo’s own songs, and most do qualify as songs, with cohesion and development. This isn’t just sonic research; it’s a real album, paced and considered. It feels good.

http://www.thrilljockey.com/artists/?id=10011
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Underground_Duo