Making Beautiful Music Together
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Taylor and Mazurek first met in 1990, but half a decade passed before they would work together seriously. Taylor was playing jazz with local legend Lin Halliday, but he still considered drumming a hobby. Mazurek, now 33, was earning his meager bread playing in clubs like Faces and the Get Me High six nights a week. Mazurek had moved to the city from Naperville in 1983, fresh out of high school. “I had to get out of the suburbs and I wanted to play jazz,” he says. Unfortunately his ambition outweighed his resources, and he spent a couple years sleeping on the floor at the Bloom School of Jazz, where he paid for classes by doing odd jobs, from cleaning to transcribing music. Though his education there was a good experience, he says, it closed his ears too: “We never did any free playing there. We just worked on stuff [David Bloom] liked, which was basically modal and Blue Note stuff.”
Mazurek’s lean years eventually paid off. His solid hard-bop quartet, with drummer George Fludas, secured a deal with the Scottish label Hep; the label issued three fine albums, two of which feature tenor whiz kid Eric Alexander. But in the winter of 1995–the year Hep released Mazurek’s second album, Badlands–he met guitarist Jeff Parker. They hit it off immediately, and Parker’s interest in free improvisation and experimentation–he played with AACM vets the New Horizons Ensemble and would later join the avant-rock group Tortoise–swiftly inspired Mazurek.
The duo’s involvement with rock musicians doesn’t mean that they’ve given up on jazz–their work together is unquestionably jazz based and Taylor continues to play regularly with Ernest Dawkins and Fred Anderson–but they’ve rejected what they perceive as artificial boundaries between the genres. “I saw Johnny [Herndon], a rock drummer, playing jazz gigs and sounding just as good as the so-called free-jazz drummers,” says Taylor. “I started hanging out with him and discovered that he had all this knowledge, and it knocked down a lot of barriers I had about jazz musicians and rock musicians.”
