(Avant-Garde / Free / Modern Creative / Delmark) Chicago Underground Trio - Chronicle - 2007, FLAC (image+.cue), lossless

Filmed at Chicago's German Cultural center, Chronicle presents the Chicago Underground Trio in a new light, literally. Cornetist/composer Rob Mazurek and percussionist Chad Taylor have been releasing projects under the banner of the Chicago Underground for almost a decade. While the line-up tends to vary in size, the core duo always remains. Here they are augmented by one—bassist Jason Ajemian, making his first recorded appearance with the group in more than just a supporting role.
Blending live performance footage with studio overdubbing and an array of psychedelic video effects, Chronicle is part concert performance, part art film, and a long way from Delmark's usual style of video documentation.
Director Raymond Salvatore Harmon films the members of the trio (all wearing white) against stark white walls, fusing context and text, canvas and content in this meta-representational experiment. The filmmaker projects moving images and light patterns on the musicians as they play, using post-production techniques for further manipulation of image and sound. Accentuating the trio's vibrant performances with colorization, layered collages, dense textures and split-screen effects, he becomes a virtual fourth member of the ensemble.
Recalling the abstract color field paintings of Mark Rothko viewed through the fractured lens of seminal video artist Stan Brakhage, Harmon bathes the trio in swatches of color and textural patterns that betray a modernist painting sensibility. As the trio modulates from one mood to another, Harmon follows suit: washing cool pastel blues and greens over them during bluesy, noir-inflected sections, he slows down the video speed, closing up on the action. During agitated sections he over-drives the resolution into blinding white with hot red and yellow accents, splitting the screen for dramatic effect. As the musicians intensify their performance, Harmon ups the ante in sympathy. Culminating in the torrential electronic meltdown of "Power," the director matches the music's careening intensity with a screen overrun by a kaleidoscopic splattering of color that coincides with the trio's frenetic free-jazz drumming, oscillating electronic feedback and throttling palpitations.
The concert plays out as an epic suite, moving gradually through distinct movements that vary in dynamic level. Kinetic tribal rhythms intermittently yield to introspective passages of euphonious melody and subtle interaction as the trio plays with sensitivity and ferocity in equal measure. Genres are evoked and dispatched with regularity: noir-ish atmospherics, jittery free jazz, gamelan-influenced minimalism, boisterous post-bop, sultry blues, anthemic post-rock—all materialize over the course of the performance.
Ajemian plays his upright with focused drive and an exploratory edge, bowing with lyrical finesse one minute, looping his pizzicato phrases through distortion pedals the next. Taylor alternates among trap set, vibraphone, marimba and mbira, with his vibes and marimba work acting as recurring harmonic lynchpins. His lengthy mbira excursion on "Transformation" is hypnotic in intensity, recalling the minimalist futurism of early Steve Reich and Phillip Glass. Mazurek plays his cornet open and muted, varying his attack from plangent motifs to splintery sheets of sound. But as often as Mazurek plays his cornet, he also coaxes and hammers out fragments on electric celeste and Moog, veering from subtle background ostinatos to hysterical waves of pitch-bend distortion.
One of the many highlights of seeing a live jazz performance is bearing witness to the minutiae of interaction among the musicians. Foreclosing this intimate perspective, most of the shots are at medium range, and even the close-ups are often visually distorted beyond recognition. But what the filming lacks in traditional performance conventions it makes up for in stylized delivery. A truly unique audio-visual experience, Chronicle is an intriguing blend of contemporary improvisation, forward-thinking video documentation, and genre-defying art. ~ Troy Collins, AAJ

The Chicago Underground Duo/Trio/Quartet has two stable members : Rob Mazurek on cornet and Chad Taylor on percussion. Jeff Parker played guitar in previous configurations and Noel Kupersmith was the regular bass-player, but for this trio he is replaced by Jason Ajemian. This is not what you would call a real trumpet/bass/drums trio, because each musician has an assortment of additional instruments, from the very simple such as a bamboo flute, an mbira or a Chinese cymbal to the more complex electronics, computer of moogerfooerpedals. The album is the chronicle of a transformation in six steps : Initiation, Resistance, Power, Crisis, Transformation and Transcendence. And the music evolves along those steps. "Initiation" is a bass solo, on "Resistance" the percussion starts bringing counterweight to the bass, first with light percussion, then marimba, then electronics until the bass stops, followed by the percussion and only the electronics remain. "Power" begins with light arco bass, marimba and light percussion, rolling on to menacing drumming, first without apparent rhythm, then very rhythmically, with a hard pulsing bass adding power to the playing, offering a solid foundation for the muted cornet sounds of Mazurek, now light and sensitive, then chasing hard, evolving into a quiet bluesy melody, which in terms of trumpet style holds the middle between Lester Bowie and Don Cherry, moving on to light percussion again, an almost-lullaby like melody so fragile and joyful it sounds, soon to die in an electronic chaotic drone of about five minutes, and then you think "that's it, we've had it", but no, out of this chaos emerges a lightly dancing melody of trumpet, arco bass and mbira, the real finale of a track which lasts close to half an hour. And it goes on like that for the rest of the album. The band takes its time to discover the music, to transform it, to think of new angles, but the overall structure is essential, this is free improv along fixed paths. This is avant-garde jazz or experimental jazz, but then with soul. And you can hear this soul at best in the last piece "Transcendence", that unleashes all power with a manic repetitive rhythm, with Mazurek's cornet creating wonderful melodies above this hypnotic drone of bass and drums. This music is probably not to everyone's taste, but the way this band explores new musical avenues is really fantastic to hear and highly commendable. Mazurek suprised us earlier this year with his great album with The Exploding Star Orchestra, but this one is equally brilliant. ~ freejazz-stef.blogspot.com

Exact Audio Copy V0.99 prebeta 4 from 23. January 2008
EAC extraction logfile from 22. July 2009, 21:13
Chicago Underground Trio / Chronicle
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