Experimental jazz is not a stadium-packing pop genre. But you wouldn’t know that from the enthusiasm of the shoulder-to-shoulder capacity crowd stuffed into the narrow space along the bar at Dorian’s on a Sunday earlier this month. Programming director Joe Bryl spun a set of classic spiritual jazz from the likes of Brother Ah and Infinite Spirit Music, and then the crowd cheered as Jeff Parker‘s New Breed Band took the stage. Parker is something of a legend, not just in the jazz world but beyond; he’s a key member of postrock collective Tortoise, and he’s worked with the likes of Joshua Redman and Meshell Ndegeocello. But rather than taking the spotlight, he seated himself in the most poorly lit spot. He wasn’t much more than a shadow as his guitar released languidly spiky notes from the dark like magic.
Parker first came to town in 1991, after dropping out of music school in Boston in his mid-20s and getting a job at Tower Records on Clark and Belden just as it opened. His parents wanted him to complete his degree, but he wanted to try to make a career as a working musician. “I knew that if I’d finished, I would just end up being a music teacher, and I didn’t want that,” he says ruefully. “I know myself, and I know I would’ve thought, ‘I don’t have any gigs. I’ll go and be a substitute teacher.’ And then the next thing, it’s 20 years later. That definitely would have happened, if I had finished school.”
For a while Taylor tried to hold down a day job while playing gigs at night; in the mornings he was a lifeguard for the indoor pool at the Standard Club downtown. His roommate, bassist Joshua Abrams, would look over at him and see him literally frowning in his sleep. “Josh told me, ‘Chad, you just can’t do this anymore.’ And of course I was scared. How am I going to make a living. But he said, ‘Just quit the job and put all your energy into music. The music will support you.’ And sure enough, that’s happened.”
New Breed Band keyboardist and saxophonist Josh Johnson, a Chicago native and Los Angeles resident, says the record was one of his early loves, as a fan and as a musician—he first heard it as a teen in the mid-2000s. “I hadn’t really heard anything like the Chicago Underground Quartet, that combined a lot of the elements that I hear in jazz. It had so many things I was interested in, so many disparate interests, but musically all combined in a way that feels very effortless.”
“I was like, what? Um . . . maybe?” Taylor says, his voice rising incredulously. “To be honest, I thought Jeff was not going to be into it. But he was. And we made it happen.”
The last song on Chicago Underground Quartet is a Mazurek composition called “Nostalgia.” At first, it sounds about like what you’d expect from a piece called “Nostalgia”—slow, ambient, romantic, with some cheesy synth warbling. Then, after about a minute and a half, Taylor drops in a crisp transition on the drums, seemingly setting a new beat but actually transitioning the track into disintegrating, chaotic spasms—drums, guitar, and horn chitter across empty space at one another until the nostalgia overtakes them again. The track goes back and forth like that—romantic evocations of a lost past alternating with fragmented cries to the future—until the music fades out altogether.
