12° Of Freedom
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12° Of Freedom
''12° of Freedom'' (also listed as ''12 Degrees of Freedom'') is the debut album by the Chicago Underground Duo, featuring multi-instrumentalists Rob Mazurek and Chad Taylor. It was recorded during January and June 1997 at three different locations, and was released in 1998 by the Thrill Jockey label. Guitarist Jeff Parker also appears on three tracks. In an interview, Mazurek stated that his music is "a protest against anything or anybody that wants to put up some kind of barrier between total creativity," and remarked: "The first Chicago Underground record is called ''12 Degrees of Freedom''. It has those same precepts, not just in music but dealing with psychology, spirituality, the whole thing." Reception The editors of ''The Wire'' included the album in their 1998 Rewind, listing the year's 50 best albums. Monica Kendrick of the ''Chicago Reader'' stated that "Mazurek and... Taylor use vibes, piano, and bamboo flute along with their primary instruments to construct subtle ...
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Chicago Underground Duo
Chicago Underground is an avant-garde jazz ensemble formed in Chicago in 1997 based around the core duo of cornetist Rob Mazurek and drummer/percussionist Chad Taylor. They have recorded and performed as the Chicago Underground Duo, Trio, Quartet or Orchestra depending on how many additional musicians are included. The ensemble which has released numerous recordings on the Thrill Jockey and Delmark labels. __TOC__ Rob Mazurek / Chad Taylor Rob Mazurek was born in Jersey City, New Jersey in 1965, and played trumpet and cornet in high school. After high school he attended the Bloom School of Jazz in Chicago, and began playing gigs with local jazz musicians. In 1996, Mazurek founded a workshop at Chicago jazz club The Green Mill called Chicago Underground for the performance of avant-garde, improvisatory jazz. By 1998, a new ensemble had formed around this idea, featuring guitarist Jeff Parker, drummer Chad Taylor, bassist Noel Kupersmith, and trombonist Sara Smith. After t ...
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Free Jazz
Free jazz is an experimental approach to jazz improvisation that developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s when musicians attempted to change or break down jazz conventions, such as regular tempos, tones, and chord changes. Musicians during this period believed that the bebop, hard bop, and modal jazz that had been played before them was too limiting. They became preoccupied with creating something new and exploring new directions. The term "free jazz" has often been combined with or substituted for the term "avant-garde jazz". Europeans tend to favor the term "free improvisation". Others have used "modern jazz", "creative music", and "art music". The ambiguity of free jazz presents problems of definition. Although it is usually played by small groups or individuals, free jazz big bands have existed. Although musicians and critics claim it is innovative and forward-looking, it draws on early styles of jazz and has been described as an attempt to return to primitive, often re ...
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Thrill Jockey
Thrill Jockey is an American independent record label established by former Atlantic Records A&R representative Bettina Richards and based in Chicago. History Richards started the label in 1992 with $35,000 of family and personal capital, while working at a Hoboken, New Jersey, record store, and ran the label from her apartment in New York City.Pareles, JonIt's Her Label and She'll Sign Who She Wants To New York Times September 23, 1998 accessdate = 2007-05-09 In 1995, she moved the label to Chicago, where "rent and taxes are considerably cheaper" according to Richards, and the independent label found some larger success. Thrill Jockey offers full-length streaming of every song on every release in its catalog. "I believe if people can listen to the albums, they tend to buy them," Richards said in a 2006 interview with ''Chicago Reader''. Artists who have recorded on the label include Double Dagger, Future Islands, Tortoise, The Sea and Cake, Bummer, High Places, Trans Am, Mous ...
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Synesthesia (Chicago Underground Duo Album)
''Synesthesia '' is an album by Chicago Underground Duo which was recorded in 1999 and released on the Delmark label the following year. Reception In his review for AllMusic, Ken Taylor states: "Though the Chicago Underground Duo is hypnotically minimal in its aesthetic, Rob Mazurek and Chad Taylor still make a lot of noise. On ''Synesthesia'', the duo combines elements of Miles Davis' ''Bitches Brew''-era fusion with a futuristic, technological sensibility that could only come out of Chicago. ... ''Synesthesia'' brings out the brilliance of Taylor and Mazurek's sparse instrumentation as, for the most part, they use only a cornet, a keyboard, and drums to weave their plaintive and complex compositions. Mazurek's trumpeting skill is impeccable and his experimentation with ''Synesthesias rhythm structures is mindblowing as he switches from totally free jazz, to hard bop, to acid jazz at the drop of a hat. Certainly, the lack of other instruments in the mix makes for a grand space t ...
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Rob Mazurek
Rob Mazurek (born 1965) is an American composer, cornetist, improviser and visual artist living in Chicago, Illinois. Biography Rob Mazurek is an American electro-acoustic composer, cornetist, improviser and visual artist living in Chicago, Illinois. Mazurek was born in 1965 in Jersey City, New Jersey, and played trumpet and cornet in high school in Naperville, Illinois. He first learned the foundations of improvised music while studying jazz theory and practice with David Bloom at the Bloom School of Jazz in Chicago, eventually working with other Chicago musicians like Kenny Prince, Robert Barry, Jodie Christian, Lin Halliday and Earma Thompson. In 1996, Mazurek formed the longstanding Chicago Underground Collective with guitarist Jeff Parker and drummer Chad Taylor, a unit that ranges in size from duo to orchestra. The Collective earned Mazurek the attention of Chicago's underground community at the beginning of the 21st century, resulting in high-profile collaborations wi ...
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Chad Taylor (drummer)
Chad Taylor (born March 19, 1973) is an American drummer, percussionist, and composer. Taylor leads both the Chad Taylor Trio with Brian Settles and Neil Podgurski and Circle Down with Angelica Sanchez and Chris Lightcap. He is a founding member of the Chicago Underground along with Jeff Parker and Rob Mazurek. Early life Taylor was born in Tempe, Arizona and was brought up in a musical household. His father, once an aspiring concert pianist, exposed his young son to Duke Ellington, Bach, Thelonious Monk, and Mozart. By age 8, Taylor started taking guitar lessons. At 10, he relocated with his mother and sister to Chicago where he continued his studies on guitar as well as starting snare drum lessons. In 1988 Taylor began studying jazz drumming and classical percussion in High School and took ensemble classes at The Bloom School of Jazz. Through the help and encouragement of bassist Dennis Carrol, Taylor started performing in Chicago with Rob Mazurek. Upon graduating from Lan ...
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Jeff Parker (musician)
Jeff Parker (born April 4, 1967) is an American guitarist and composer based in Los Angeles. Born in Connecticut and raised in Hampton, Virginia, Parker is best known as an experimental musician, working with jazz, electronic, rock, and improvisational groups. Parker studied at Berklee College of Music and then moved to Chicago in 1991. Also a multi-instrumentalist, Parker has been a member of the post-rock group Tortoise since 1996, and was a founding member of Isotope 217 and the Chicago Underground Trio in the 1990s and early 2000s. He is a member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians ( AACM) and has worked with George Lewis, Ernest Dawkins, Brian Blade, Joshua Redman, Fred Anderson, Meshell Ndegeocello, Joey DeFrancesco, Smog (aka Bill Callahan), Carmen Lundy and Jason Moran. A prolific sideman, he has also released seven albums as a solo artist: ''Like-Coping'', ''The Relatives'', ''Bright Light in Winter'', ''The New Breed,'' ''Slight Freedo ...
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The Penguin Guide To Jazz
''The Penguin Guide to Jazz'' is a reference work containing an encyclopedic directory of jazz recordings on CD which were (at the time of publication) currently available in Europe or the United States. The first nine editions were compiled by Richard Cook and Brian Morton, two chroniclers of jazz resident in the United Kingdom. History The first edition was published in Britain by Penguin Books in 1992. Every subsequent two years, through 2010, a new edition was published with updated entries. The eighth and ninth editions, published in 2006 and 2008, respectively, each included 2,000 new CD listings. The title took on different forms over the lifetime of the work, as audio technology changed. The seventh edition was known as ''The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD'' while subsequent editions were titled ''The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings''. The earliest edition had the title ''The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, LP and Cassette''. Richard Cook died in 2007, prior to the comp ...
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The Virgin Encyclopedia Of Jazz
''The Encyclopedia of Popular Music'' is an encyclopedia created in 1989 by Colin Larkin. It is the "modern man's" equivalent of the '' Grove Dictionary of Music'', which Larkin describes in less than flattering terms.''The Times'', ''The Knowledge'', Christmas edition, 22 December 2007- 4 January 2008. It was described by ''The Times'' as "the standard against which all others must be judged". History of the encyclopedia Larkin believed that rock music and popular music were at least as significant historically as classical music, and as such, should be given definitive treatment and properly documented. ''The Encyclopedia of Popular Music'' is the result. In 1989, Larkin sold his half of the publishing company Scorpion Books to finance his ambition to publish an encyclopedia of popular music. Aided by a team of initially 70 contributors, he set about compiling the data in a pre-internet age, "relying instead on information gleaned from music magazines, individual expertise a ...
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The Wire (magazine)
''The Wire'' (or simply ''Wire'') is a British music magazine publishing out of London, which has been issued monthly in print since 1982. Its website launched in 1997, and an online archive of its entire back catalog became available to subscribers in 2013. Since 1985, the magazine's annual year-in-review issue, Rewind, has named an album or release of the year based on critics' ballots. Originally, ''The Wire'' covered the British jazz scene with an emphasis on avant-garde and free jazz. It was marketed as a more adventurous alternative to its conservative competitor ''Jazz Journal'', and targeted younger readers at a time when ''Melody Maker'' had abandoned jazz coverage. In the late 1980s and 1990s, the magazine expanded its scope until it included a broad range of musical genres under the umbrella of non-mainstream or experimental music. Since then, ''The Wire''s coverage has included experimental rock, electronica, alternative hip hop, modern classical, free improvisat ...
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Chicago Reader
The ''Chicago Reader'', or ''Reader'' (stylized as ЯEADER), is an American alternative weekly newspaper in Chicago, Illinois, noted for its literary style of journalism and coverage of the arts, particularly film and theater. It was founded by a group of friends from Carleton College. The ''Reader'' is recognized as a pioneer among alternative weeklies for both its creative nonfiction and its commercial scheme. Richard Karpel, then-executive director of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, wrote: e most significant historical event in the creation of the modern alt-weekly occurred in Chicago in 1971, when the ''Chicago Reader'' pioneered the practice of free circulation, a cornerstone of today's alternative papers. The ''Reader'' also developed a new kind of journalism, ignoring the news and focusing on everyday life and ordinary people. After being owned by same four founders since 1971, by the early 2000s profits and readership of the ''Reader'' were dropping, and o ...
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CMJ New Music Monthly
CMJ Holdings Corp. is a music events and online media company, originally founded in 1978, which ran a website, hosted an annual festival in New York City, and published two magazines, ''CMJ New Music Monthly'' and ''CMJ New Music Report''. The company folded around 2017, but was bought by Amazing Radio in 2019 who will bring back the CMJ Music Marathon in New York, along with other new live and live-streamed offerings. The letters CMJ originally stood for ''College Media Journal'' but was also often considered short for ''College Music Journal''. History and operations The company was started by Robert Haber in 1978 as the ''College Media Journal'', a bi-weekly trade magazine aimed at college radio programmers in Great Neck, NY. The first issue was published on March 1, 1979, and featured Elvis Costello on the cover. Staff would often describe these early issues as "a bunch of photocopies stapled together." A year and a half later, the magazine was able to create the first a ...
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