A quartet in name and in fact, The Chicago Underground Quartet turns out a quiet album of interludes, fusing free improv with cinematic miniatures and traces of its musicians’ myriad electronic-music collaborations and side projects. This self-titled recording is on the short side at just under 40 minutes, but the Quartet maintains a faceted beauty from one end to the other, a fragile soundscape of noirish themes touched with free gestures and subtle electronics. It may be the best thing they’ve yet recorded.
The main element here is guitarist Jeff Parker, whose looped and heavily reverbed guitar give the music its backbone. More often than not, Parker will also slowly solo over his own playing, or rework a simple, chilly theme. Cornetist Rob Mazurek likes to hover in the background, playing fluttering, breathy lines over Parker’s guitar, and only occasionally swooping in to double a theme with him or carry it himself.
The Quartet seems most interested in the shape of the songs, which build up in layers, such as percussionist Chad Taylor’s quietly crashing cymbals or bassist Noel Kupersmith’s patient, sinewy bass lines, which pass like mileage markers on a dark highway.
Praise to engineer John McEntire (of Tortoise), who gets a terrific and apposite sound for the guys.
Related Posts
Sonny Terry/Brownie McGhee: Backwater Blues
Start Your Free Trial to Continue Reading
Become a JazzTimes member to explore our complete archive of interviews, profiles, columns, and reviews written by music’s best journalists and critics.
Jonathan Butler: The Simple Life
Jonathan Butler’s optimistic music belies a dirt-poor childhood growing up in a South Africa segregated by apartheid. Live in South Africa, a new CD and DVD package, presents a sense of the resulting inner turmoil, mixed with dogged resolve, that paved the way to his status as an icon in his country and successful musician outside of it. Looking back, the 46-year-old Butler says today, the driving forces that led to his overcoming apartheid-the formal policy of racial separation and economic discrimination finally dismantled in 1993-were family, faith and abundant talent.
“When we were kids, our parents never talked about the ANC [African National Congress] or Nelson Mandela,” he says. Butler was raised as the youngest child in a large family. They lived in a house patched together by corrugated tin and cardboard, in the “coloreds only” township of Athlone near Cape Town. “They never talked about struggles so we never knew what was happening.”
Start Your Free Trial to Continue Reading
Become a JazzTimes member to explore our complete archive of interviews, profiles, columns, and reviews written by music’s best journalists and critics.
Harry Connick, Jr.: Direct Hits
Two decades after his commercial breakthrough, Harry Connick Jr. taps legendary producer Clive Davis for an album of crooner roots and beloved tunes
Scott LaFaro
Previously unavailable recordings and a new bio illuminate the legend of bassist Scott LaFaro