For the last two decades, Chicago's music scene has been one of the most unique in the U.S., not so much for the music it's produced as for the way the city's various scenes are integrated. In Chicago, the lines between the experimental electronic scene, jazz scene, and rock scene aren't just blurred-- they're practically invisible. The free movement of ideas and musicians between these worlds ideally wouldn't be so rare, but I can't think of another city where jazz and rock musicians have so much currency with each other and play so often in each other's bands and ensembles.
Rob Mazurek has long been one of the key musicians keeping the scene integrated. His projects, including Brokeback, Isotope 217, Tortoise, his own solo albums, and Exploding Star Orchestra, are aggressive about keeping the assumed lines between genres there from solidifying. Exploding Star Orchestra is a six-year-old project led by the trumpeter and cornetist, who now makes his full-time home in São Paulo, Brazil, but is still very much a part of the scene he made his name in. ESO began as a sort of all-star jazz band organized for a concert in Chicago's Millennium Park but eventually became a recording project that made one album of its own and another with the late, great Bill Dixon, to whom this new LP is dedicated. A second dedication is made to the late saxophonist Fred Anderson, who also was an associate of ESO.
Stars Have Shapes is therefore an appropriately contemplative record, and very much a Mazurek project in the way it brings together strains of cool jazz with free jazz, ambient electronics, and musique concrète into a seamless whole. The sounds of insects, rain, and bicycles are used as accent textures, and Mazurek has his way with tone generators and effects pedals as well, setting a surreal backdrop for the group's improvisations. The album is structured as two long tracks, each followed by a short, more traditional one. The sprawling opener, "Ascension Ghosts Impression No. 2", is a stitched-together opus in the Bitches Brew tradition, beginning with thick drones and working its way through squawking free jazz, yet at its center is a gorgeous, fleeting passage of slow, swinging cool jazz that gives the piece a human heart. The other sprawler, "Three Blocks of Light", expends more energy on textural playing among the horns and has the effect of being alone in a room full of people engaged in conversation-- chatter everywhere, but nothing directed at you. It eventually resolves to a luminous drone.
The two shorter pieces are far more focused and melodic than their titanic counterparts and are overall the most satisfying tracks on the record. Here, the 13-piece band plays more developed compositions with greater rhythmic drive-- Jason Adasiewicz's clouds of vibraphone provide a sort of through-line to the more ambient pieces. Just as importantly, the short pieces help the album feel balanced by pulling the band back from the margins and anchoring it to its roots. ESO is the type of project that could only really come from its city, and Stars Have Shapes finds the group ably carrying forward the unique modern Chicago jazz aesthetic.
