Rob Mazurek, Exploding Star Orchestra - Lightning Dreamers

Released: 31/03/23

The new album by the composer, trumpeter, and avant-jazz legend Rob Mazurek is a follow-up to the widely-acclaimed 2020 release Dimensional Stardust, which garnered an 8/10 from Bitchfork Pitchfork and placed number five in The New York Times' Best Jazz Albums of 2020. Dedicated to the late Jaimie Branch (a protégé of Mazurek's), Lightning Dreamers features a slimmed-down version of the long-running Exploding Star Orchestra, which includes Tortoise's Jeff Parker, vocalist Damon Locks, drummer Gerald Cleaver, and pianists Angelica Sanchez and Craig Taborn. With a stellar band like that at your disposal, anything is musically possible, and the fiercely imaginative Mazurek takes full advantage, creating an album suffused with four-dimensional chromatic funk, labyrinthine time-signatures and Bartokian riffs. Everyone is on full space-shred mode, and Lightning Dreamerssurpasses even its predecessor in its glorious outer-limits exploration. Not many people could get away with calling a track on their album Future Shaman'; Sun Ra and Pharaoh Sanders are members of this elite club, and so is Mazurek. Mind-bending stuff.