Pitchfork

Exploding Star Orchestra was assembled in 2005 by Chicago Underground veteran Rob Mazurek, after the cornetist and composer was enlisted by the Chicago Cultural Center and the Jazz Institute to stage a concert. We Are All From Somewhere Else, the 14-piece group's first album, comes fully equipped with a complex conceptual narrative involving sting rays, electric eels, exploding stars and various cosmic transformations. Even without a firm grasp on this elaborate plotline, however, listeners should still be able to find abundant drama within the Orchestra's inventive stylings. Drawing upon big-band traditions-- think Quincy Jones or late-period Ellington as well as the Sun Ra Arkestra-- the expanded Orchestra serves to frame one of Mazurek's most exuberant and ambitious works to date.

For the album, Mazurek has gathered a top-notch roster of veteran Chicago musicians and improvisers, including flutist Nicole Mitchell, pianist Jim Baker, and Tortoise's John McEntire, Jeff Parker, and John Herndon. [Full disclosure: Among the other players is drummer Mike Reed, who books and manages the Pitchfork Music Festival-- Ed.] The set-up here typically employs two basses, two drummers, two mallets, ARP synthesizer, and multiple brass instruments and reeds. Composed and developed over the course of a dozen international performances, the album was ultimately recorded by McEntire at his Soma Studios, and reveals several of his distinctive post-production fingerprints. And though much on the album is improvised-- or at least appears to be-- there is little focus given to extensive soloing or even necessarily to individual performances.

The album is divided into three distinct sections, each of which takes cues from organic sound recordings related to Mazurek's nebulous storyline. On the mesmerizing "Psycho-Tropic Electric Eel Dream", part of the album's opening four-song suite "Sting Ray and the Beginning of Time", the orchestra improvises upon tapes of electric eels recorded by Mazurek at a research laboratory in Brazil. Although unless you've got keen ears and a degree in marine biology you'll probably just have to take their word for it. Elsewhere on this evocative suite the group schools together at high velocity, their spirited vamps elevated in particular by Jeb Bishop's trombone and Corey Wilkes' flugelhorn, while Mitchell's exotic flute can lend the proceedings a brightened, almost Henry Mancini-like seabreeze.

Even more impressive is the album's second extended song suite, the five-part "Cosmic Tomes for Sleep-Walking Lovers". Opening with a doctored recording of an Amazon rainstorm, the piece's first section bursts quickly into an ecstatic full-group improvisation, with Mazurek's central cornet buffeted by squalls from every direction. These disparate voices then converge with dazzling precision on the piece's second section, with McEntire deftly sculpting the music's layered, pointillist harmonic patterns.

Following the brief segue "15 Ways Towards a Finite Universe", Mitchell's flute leads We Are All From Somewhere Else to a dreamy landing, cushioned by Matt Bauder's luxurious bass clarinet and languid flourishes of Martin Denny exotica. By this point, if you've been following along with Mazurek's text, the eels and sting rays have all apparently been transformed into flying birds and eventually into burning, new-born stars. And though its unlikely that there's anything in this predominantly instrumental music that'll actually clue you in to these fine points, the Exploding Star Orchestra have provided enough space to allow the imagination to begin filling in the details.