Mind Maintenance
Joshua Abrams and Chad Taylor
Chicago mainstay Joshua Abrams is a celebrated bassist who fuses minimalist jazz with global rhythms and instrumentation in sublime rituals of improvisation, perhaps most prominently in his band Natural Information Society.
Though he is a native of Chicago, now percussionist Chad Taylor is based in Philadelphia, where Abrams got his start by busking with The Roots. A composer, a scholar, and an unlimited improviser, Taylor founded the Chicago Underground Duo with trumpeter Rob Mazurek and has worked closely with Jeff Parker, Marc Ribot, Eric Revis, and many others.
In the duo Mind Maintenance, the longtime collaborators enact the exfoliating entrancement found in Natural Information Society on an intimate scale—one of deceptive narrowness and unfathomable depth. On their debut album, which Drag City released in 2021, Abrams takes up the guembri, the three-stringed bass lute of the Gnawa people, while Taylor plays the mbira, a Zimbabwean thumb piano with two rows of plucked metal tines. “Though the former is low and resonant while the latter is bright and sharp, with quick-decaying tones, both instruments can articulate melodies and rhythms simultaneously,” The Chicago Reader noted. “The duo uses this commonality to spin catchy figures into mesmerizing patterns.”
Mind Maintenance – “Glow & Glimmer”
