US jazz trumpeter Rob Mazurek in portrait: Hear galactic waves of love in wild colors

A character can be written and interpreted in different ways. As a glyph, like ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs in the burial chambers of the pyramids - or as the idea behind the symbol, as an expanded complex idea: as a "hyperglyph". This is the name of the current album by Chicago Underground Duo, a project by US trumpeter Rob Mazurek with drummer and mbira player Chad Taylor, which was released in 2025 on the US label International Anthem.

As if they were a multi-member band, the two artists seemingly effortlessly create a sound collage of free rhythms, modular synthesizer sounds, field recordings and electronics, to which Mazurek plays a special three-valve piccolo trumpet. Taylor builds an architecture of pulse and silence - a sound cosmos that combines centuries-old ancestral tradition with Afrofuturistic time reversal and jazz sophistication.

Rob Mazurek joins the Zoom interview from a hotel room in Croatia wearing dark sunglasses. It's early morning and the night before was long. He is currently on tour through Europe with the Chicago Underground Duo. It is a formation that he founded with Taylor in the 1990s, but which other artists also join as guests from time to time.

Chicago Underground Duo live, concert on October 31, 2026 at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele as part of the Jazzfest Berlin

At that time, Chad Taylor was already active in the Chicago circle of the AACM - the “Association of the Advancement of Creative Musicians”. A free union of black artists that, in the wake of the US civil rights movement from the mid-1960s, developed its own music and life philosophies outside of jazz norms and provides legal, economic and social advice to its members.

AACM's ideas combined ideas from contemporary composers such as Edgar Varese with free improvisation, rhythmically offset layering and polyphonic abstraction, meditation and mindfulness. One of the AACM's preferred performance venues in Chicago was the “Velvet Lounge” club run by AACM co-founder Fred Anderson. Chad Taylor was already on stage there regularly at the age of 15 and it was there that the drummer met Mazurek for the first time at a concert.

The album title “Hyperglyph” means “deciphering sounds and channeling them into something that sheds light and hopefully leads to a more utopian future,” explains Mazurek.

The artist, born in Jersey City in 1965, grew up in Chicago and studied at the Bloom School of Jazz. He was influenced early on by the hard bop aesthetic of Lee Morgan and the tone of Freddie Hubbard. As a result of intensive study of the composition techniques of Morton Feldman and Iannis Xenakis, with works by trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith and New York trumpeter Bill Dixon, Mazurek founded the Chicago Underground Duo with Taylor in 1997.

He soon had bigger things in mind: in 2005, Mazurek formed the Exploding Star Orchestra, in which up to 17 musicians from the Chicago post-rock and jazz scene took part, including members of the AACM, and trumpeter Jamie Branch also took part. Of central importance for Mazurek is a concert by the pianist and bandleader Sun Ra and his combination of colors, shapes, freely played, overblown instruments and traditional jazz elements.

On Thursday, October 29th The Berlin Jazz Festival begins in 2026 and runs until November 1st, 2026. This time, jazz will also be taken to other districts and places beyond the festival center at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele. There are “neighborhood concerts” at eight locations and “jazz city tours”.

In addition to prominent US voices such as Anthony Braxton, the next generation will be given a stage, such as the young guitarist Wendy Eisenberg. Individual gigs take place in smaller clubs such as A-Trane and Quasimodo. There is also a film program running as part of the Jazz Festival.

Further information: https://www.berlinerfestspiele.de/jazzfest-berlin/programm/2026/kalender

Also important is a painting by Mark Rothko on display at the Art Institute of Chicago. There Mazurek trains his own synesthetic perception to hear colors as sounds and see sounds as colors. A longer stay in Manaus, in the Brazilian Amazon region, where his wife Britt, a biologist, researched electric eels, also broadened his horizons.

Water, waves, movement. Can be seen in Mazurek's early paintings, which adorn covers for the Chicago underground duo, for example for the album “Synesthesia”. In a commissioned composition for the Berlin Jazz Festival, Mazurek appeared on stage for the first time in 2018 with musicians from the Berlin improvisation scene.

On the current album “Hyperglyph” Mazurek composed a three-part “Egyptian Suite” as a tribute to his friend and mentor, the trumpeter Bill Dixon. The music is an “architecture of time,” explains Mazurek: “We work with an abstract approach: it’s about conveying a feeling of how sounds work together.”

Mazurek describes himself as an “abstractionist”. It is a combination of Bill Dixon's idea of ​​abstraction and its activist continuation. Rob Mazurek says of his mentor: "Bill Dixon thought in both sounds and visual forms. What if this approach - getting to the core, the very essence of something - transitioned into a conscious attitude? This question led me to think more intensively about the creative process, but also about life concepts such as community, love and happiness."

For several years, Mazurek has lived with his wife in the artist town of Marfa, Texas, where he paints large-format pictures in a studio. He uses them to explore the visual implications of love, light, resonance and beauty. As a “projection instrument for the exchange of galactic, ecstatic waves of love”. Mazurek also creates unique, resonant ideas with the Chicago Underground Duo.