At the turn of the last decade, when the Chicago Underground collective was putting out a new record every year, they carved out their aesthetic by distancing themselves from existing styles and thought patterns. They absorbed a lot of influences — Ornette-flavored free-bop, electronica, classical-inspired minimalism, indie rock, etc. — but they didn’t chase after them; they adopted them, using them as topics for honest conversation rather than as dogma.
That era ended around 2003. These days, the distance in time between releases helps explain the group’s work, as does a more literal distance: drummer and percussionist Chad Taylor has left Chicago for New York, and trumpeter Rob Mazurek has deserted the United States entirely, for Brazil, the country where the two recorded Boca Negra.
To improvise is to speak about where you are and where you are going; when you take the Chicago Underground out of Chicago, you take the Chicago out of Chicago Underground. This group’s style and unique method of experimentation has always been linked to a way of living and playing music that is native to America’s second most important city, but here, that link has weakened. This record exists out on its own, in time as well as in space. It is no longer American, but not even remotely Brazilian; it lies somewhere in between a half-remembered past and a shadowy future.
Listening to Boca Negra is like following Taylor and Mazurek on a leisurely journey through the wilderness. After an introduction — the familiar-sounding and episodic jazz opener “Green Ants” — the sun goes down, and things start getting weird. The distant, whistling trumpet is your weary and unsteady sense of sanity; the kalimba running through a ring modulator (or whatever that sound is) is your sickening yet indefinite awareness of the passage of time. Especially evident in “Left Hand of Darkness” is the tendency of the duo’s more open-ended pieces to discover, here and there, an oasis of consonance. They linger a while, with childlike contentment in what they have found, imitating folk songs until the game grows stale, before wandering off somewhere else. They are in no rush to find peace, and even when they do find it, they don’t cling to it.
On a large scale, the album’s oasis of consonance is “Hermeto,” a near-perfect example of the duo’s hard-on for resigned minimalism. The song doesn’t go anywhere, really, but that’s a compliment. It is flanked on either side by more outspoken and structured compositions: “Confliction” and “Spy on the Floor.” “Confliction” is unique in its unapologetic complexity, giving Mazurek plenty of space to let loose over shifting time signatures and formal divisions that vary in length. However, like the album’s other full-bodied pieces, “Spy” and Ornette Coleman’s “Broken Shadows,” this track lacks some of the burning urgency that brightened the landscapes of previous records. The group used to flirt more often with jazz and electronica, but when those elements show up here, such as with the groove on “Spy” or the digital glitchy noodling on “Roots and Shooting Stars,” the flirtation falls flat; the thrill is gone. The elements that feel most familiar to the group’s past sound are the elements that matter the least.
I don’t know what Mazurek was looking for when he left the states, or what he left behind. People who are willing to give the name “home” to such faraway places are people who think of home in a relative sense. Their way of life may appear difficult or inhospitable, but only because the meaning is buried within. This album is sparse and nomadic, but it is, nevertheless, oriented toward a sense of home, even though that sense doesn’t show up conclusively in the music. “Green Ants” tries a lot of things, but, before long, abandons them all, eventually abandoning even the idea of a conclusion. It cuts off its discourse mid-sentence. The closer, “Vergence,” comes and goes without a fuss, achieving a unique, translucent beauty, but trying at the same time to make its success sound like an accident. It doesn’t push its weight off on familiar ideas of structure or resolution; its meaning lies somewhere closer to the heart, expressing itself in the journey, in the process of honest conversation.
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