Program Notes for EXPLODING STAR ORCHESTRA
Exploding Star Orchestra
December 5, 2025
McGuire Theater
Exploding Star Orchestra
Featuring:
Mikel Patrick Avery — drums
Damon Locks — voice, samplers
Rob Mazurek — director, compositions, trumpets, voice, bells, video
Nicole Mitchell — flutes, electronics
Tomeka Reid — cello, electronics
Angelica Sanchez — piano
Luke Stewart — bass
Craig Taborn — piano/synth
Chad Taylor — drums
Victor Vieira-Branco — vibraphone
Tonight’s performance runs approximately 90 minutes with no intermission.
Please join us before and after the performance in the Walker’s Cityview Bar.
Accessibility Notes
Sensory note: This performance contains prolonged sequences of flashing video.
For more information about accessibility, visit our Access page.
For questions on accessibility, content and sensory notes or to request additional accommodations, call 612-253-3556 or email access@walkerart.org.
About Exploding Star Orchestra
Originally inspired by a joint commission from the Chicago Cultural Center and Jazz Institute of Chicago, Rob Mazurek founded the Exploding Star Orchestra in 2005 to investigate the city’s avant-garde musical traditions. He brought together a group representing the diversity of the city’s contemporary music scene including musicians from Chicago’s North, West, and South-sides, from the burgeoning post rock scene to the highly influential AACM and Northside Improvisation Scene.
The Orchestra has since included musicians from around the world and has premiered 12 extended suites since its inception. The latest release “Live at the Adler Planetarium” on International Anthem Recording Co., was released September of 2024. The group has featured a multitude of leading figures in creative music, including Bill Dixon, Roscoe Mitchell, Fred Anderson, Nicole Mitchell, Craig Taborn, Tomeka Reid, Jeff Parker, Damon Locks, Angelica Sanchez, Chad Taylor, Gerald Cleaver, Mikel Patrick Avery and many more.
2025 is the 20th anniversary of this shape shifting visionary ensemble.
About the Artists
Rob Mazurek is an interdisciplinary artist & abstractivist, with a focus on electro-acoustic composition, improvisation, performance, painting, sculpture, video, film, and installation, who spent much of his creative life in Chicago, and then Brazil. He currently lives and works in Marfa, Texas.
As a composer Mazurek has written over 500 compositions over the past 30 years and has released 80+ recordings on various labels including International Anthem, Nonesuch, Astral Spirits, Corbett vs Dempsey, Cuneiform, CleanFeed, Delmark, Mego, Northern Spy, Rogue Art, Submarine, and Thrill Jockey. He has led/co-led many ensembles of various sizes and shapes including Chicago Underground (Duo, Trio, Quartet, and Orchestra), Isotope 217, Alternate Moon Cycles, Alien Flower Sutra, Pharoah and the Underground (featuring Pharoah Sanders), Jeff Parker Duo, São Paulo Underground, New Future City Radio (with Damon Locks) and Exploding Star Orchestra. He has presented his sonic, and visual work around the world and continues to project resonant energy towards a more Utopian Future. In 2013 he received the Meier Achievement Award from the Helen and Tim Meier Foundation Chicago.
Nicole M. Mitchell is an award-winning creative flutist, composer, bandleader and educator. She is perhaps best known for her work as a flutist, having developed a unique improvisational language and having been repeatedly awarded “Top Flutist of the Year” by Downbeat Magazine Critics Poll and the Jazz Journalists Association (2010-2024). Mitchell initially emerged from Chicago’s innovative music scene in the late 90s. She started with Maia and Shanta Nurullah in Samana (the AACM’s first all-woman ensemble) and as a member of the David Boykin EXPANSE. Her music celebrates contemporary African American culture. She is the founder of Black Earth Ensemble, Black Earth Strings, Sonic Projections and Ice Crystal, and she composes for contemporary ensembles of varied instrumentation and size, while incorporating improvisation and a wide aesthetic expression. The former first woman president of Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, Mitchell celebrates endless possibility by “creating visionary worlds through music that bridge the familiar with the unknown.”
Born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Craig Taborn has been performing piano and electronic music in the jazz, improvisational, and creative music scene for over twenty five years. He has experience composing for and performing in a wide variety of situations including jazz, new music, electronic, rock, noise and avant garde contexts.
Taborn has played and recorded with many luminaries in the fields of jazz, improvised, new music and electronic music including Roscoe Mitchell, Wadada Leo Smith, Lester Bowie, Dave Holland, Tim Berne, John Zorn, Evan Parker, Steve Coleman, David Torn, Chris Potter, William Parker, Vijay Iyer, Kris Davis, Nicole Mitchell, Susie Ibarra, Ikue Mori, Carl Craig, Dave Douglas, Meat Beat Manifesto, Dan Weiss, Chris Lightcap, Gerald Cleaver, and Rudresh Manhathappa.
Luke Stewart is a musician, performer, improviser-composer, organizer, and writer-researcher whose work represents a deep reverence for the history and tradition of Creative Music: a tradition which encompasses the diverse styles of expression within the body of Black Music in the United States, Africa, and throughout the world. Stewart’s regular ensembles include Irreversible Entanglements, SILT Trio, Exposure Quintet, and the experimental rock duo Blacks’ Myths; he also performs regularly in numerous collaborations.
Cellist and composer Tomeka Reid has emerged as one of the most original, versatile, and curious musicians in Chicago’s bustling jazz and improvised music community. A 2022 MacArthur and Herb Alpert awardee, 2021 USA Fellow, 2019 Foundation of the Arts and 2016 3Arts recipient, Reid received her doctorate in music from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 2017. From 2019-2021 Tomeka Reid received a teaching appointment at Mills College as the Darius Milhaud chair in composition. Reid has been a key member of ensembles led by legendary reedists like Anthony Braxton (ZIM SEXTET) and Roscoe Mitchell (ROSCOE MITCHELL QUARTET, ART ENSEMBLE OF CHICAGO), as well as a younger generation of visionaries including flutist Nicole Mitchell(BLACK EARTH ENSEMBLE, ARTIFACTS), vocalist Dee Alexander(EVOLUTION ENSEMBLE), and drummer Mike Reed (LOOSE ASSEMBLY, LIVING BY LANTERNS, ARTIFACTS). She co-leads the adventurous string trio HEAR IN NOW, with violinist Mazz Swift and bassist Silvia Bolognesi, and in 2013 launched the first Chicago JazzString Summit, a semi-annual three-day international festival of cutting edge string players held in Chicago.
Damon Locks is a Chicago-based visual artist, educator, vocalist/musician. He attended the Art Institute of Chicago where he received his BFA in fine arts. Since 2014 he has been working with the Prisons and Neighborhood Arts Project at Stateville Correctional Center teaching art. He is a 2025 recipient of the Creative Capital Award. In 2017 he became a Soros Justice Media Fellow. He received the Helen Coburn Meier and Tim Meier Achievement Award in the Arts in 2015. In 2019, he became a 3Arts Awardee. He spent 4 years as an artist in residence as a part of the Museum of Contemporary Arts’ SPACE Program, introducing civically engaged art into the curriculum at Sarah E. Goode STEM Academy High School. He teaches Improvisation in the Sound Department at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Damon leads the Black Monument Ensemble, is a member of New Future City Radio, Exploding Star Orchestra and co-founded the band The Eternals.
Chad Taylor is a percussionist, composer, scholar and educator. Taylor leads the Chad Taylor Trio, Circle down, and the Chad Taylor Quintet. He is a member of the Chicago Underground along with Jeff Parker and Rob Mazurek. A prolific sideman, Taylor has performed on over 130 recordings with musicians such as Pharoah Sanders, Marc Ribot, Nicole Mitchell, Matana Roberts, Eric Revis, Jaimie Branch, James Brandon Lewis, Fred Anderson, Roscoe Mitchell, Darius Jones amongst many others. In 2024, he was selected to lead the University of Pittsburgh’s Jazz Studies Program while holding the William S. Dietrich II Endowed Chair in Jazz Studies.
Victor Vieira-Branco is a vibraphonist, composer, and improviser based in Philadelphia, PA after spending much of his life in and around São Paulo, Brazil.
Currently, he leads and writes for Bark Culture, a trio featuring bassist John Moran and drummer Joey Sullivan. The trio has since received acclaim for it’s debut Warm Wisdom by Hank Shteamer, listing it as the debut release of 2024, as well as landing a spot on Best Jazz on Bandcamp September 2024. In support of the release, the trio performed over 20 shows across the United States in the Fall of then same year.
While Bark Culture is his main vehicle as a composer, his performance work includes working with Rob Mazurek’s Exploding Star Orchestra, Chad Taylor Quintet and Daniel Villarreal Trio among others. He is also a member of Philadelphia’s longest-standing artist-run gallery, Vox Populi, where he curates and presents an improvised music series World Again.
Pianist/Composer/Educator Angelica Sanchez moved to New York from Arizona in 1994. Since moving to the East Coast Sanchez has collaborated with such notable artists as Wadada Leo Smith, Paul Motian, Richard Davis, Jamaladeen Tacuma, Nicole Mitchell, Rob Mazurek, Tim Berne, Mario Pavone, Ben Monder amongst others. Sanchez leads numerous groups, the most recent being her Trio which features Michael Formanek and Billy Hart.
Her music has been recognized in national and international publications including Jazz Times, The New York Times, Chicago Tribune amongst others. She was also the 2008 recipient of a French/American Chamber Music America grant, the 2011, 2024 Rockefeller Brothers Pocantico artist residency, and the 2022 Civitella Fellowship, Italy.
Now residing in Philadelphia, multidisciplinary artist Mikel Patrick Avery had been actively working out of Chicago and New Orleans for the past 17 years. Established as a jazz drummer, he is commonly recognized for his orchestral and melodic style of drumming that often involves the use of unconventional “non-musical” objects. Adjacent to being a performing musician, Avery is a dedicated filmmaker, composer, photographer, designer, and educator, whose body of work invariably draws upon ideas of ‘unstructured-play’ commonly applied to learning environments found in early education.
Living Land Acknowledgment
The McGuire Theater and Walker Art Center are located on the contemporary, traditional, and ancestral homelands of the Dakota people. Situated near Bde Maka Ska and Wíta Tópa Bde, or Lake of the Isles, on what was once an expanse of marshland and meadow, this site holds meaning for Dakota, Ojibwe, and Indigenous people from other Native nations, who still live in the community today.
We acknowledge the discrimination and violence inflicted on Indigenous peoples in Minnesota and the Americas, including forced removal from ancestral lands, the deliberate destruction of communities and culture, deceptive treaties, war, and genocide. We recognize that, as a museum in the United States, we have a colonial history and are beneficiaries of this land and its resources. We acknowledge the history of Native displacement that allowed for the founding of the Walker. By remembering this dark past, we recognize its continuing harm in the present and resolve to work toward reconciliation, systemic change, and healing in support of Dakota people and the land itself.
We honor Native people and their relatives, past, present, and future. As a cultural organization, the Walker works toward building relationships with Native communities through artistic and educational programs, curatorial and community partnerships, and the presentation of new work.
Acknowledgments
To learn more about upcoming performances, visit 2025/26 Walker Performing Arts Season.
