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Steve Coleman
to see how you can use these things, how they can
work out, what the differences are.”
On the two recent CDs, Coleman seems to
be consolidating, loosening forms, transmuting
cross-cultural correspondences gleaned from his
travels into musical shapes and inserting them
into an increasingly epic narrative. Tyshawn
Sorey, who plays drums on both recordings
(by himself on Harvesting and in tandem with
Gilmore on Mancy), pinpointed the interweaving quality to which Gilmore referred when
describing the evolution in Coleman’s rhythmic
language from his “much more sonically dense”
music of the ’90s. Sorey traced the transition to
“Ascending Numeration,” from the 2002 CD
Alternate Dimension Series I, on which “it takes
at least a minute” for all the different meters—
he calls them “time spans”—to align. “The structures are much more elaborate now,” Sorey said.
“The music breathes more. Vibrationally, it feels
different. I remember thinking in the ’90s that
the music was cold, that it was hyper-technical
but lacked emotional content. I played some of
that music when I first joined the group. In the
music he’s written since then, there’s a lot going
on, but it hits you emotionally in some way.”
The Pi sessions, recorded in 2006–’07, represent an early stage of this development. Lately,
Coleman said he’s been addressing “pre-composed material ever more spontaneously, using
compositions almost like cells of information
and recombining them in different ways,” trying to give his musicians “greater responsibility
for their part.” Toward this end, he toured Europe
last fall and this spring with no drums or bass,
presenting consequential challenges for trumpeter Jonathan Finlayson, guitarist Miles Okazaki,
pianist David Bryant and vocalist Jen Shyu.
“The music was written with bass and drums
in mind,” said Shyu, a Coleman regular since
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DOWNBEAT OCTOBER 2011
2003. “It’s not that hard to play each single part,
and it’s difficult but achievable to be able to clap
one part and sing another. The hardest thing is
to improvise and be free over that, and not be
locked into, ‘OK, I have to keep my place with
this line.’ Steve wants you to hear it as a gestalt—
all the parts together, internalizing how they fit,
and never lose your place. The compositions are
getting more difficult. They’re based on extramusical things, I think a cycle of Mercury, so the
progressions are unusual and harder to hear.”
Coleman described the effect of this drum-
“Almost everything I do
starts with some vague
interior, intuitive, spiritual
feeling, which I then
try to figure out how to
technically work with.”
merless experiment as akin to a colonic. “There
was stuff encrusted inside me for years, and when
that layer was stripped away, things became crystal clear,” he explained. The logical next step, he
continued, is to jettison the pre-composed fragments and move toward “creating spontaneous
forms on the spot for the first time.” He added:
“It’s not like free improvisation, where whatever
sound you make and whatever sound I make, it’s
cool. It’s having an intelligent conversation with
somebody on the street where you don’t know
what you’re going to say, but it makes linguistic
sense. It has to be as sophisticated as something
you might create if you composed it with pencil and paper, and you have to be able to retain
it so that you can repeat it, not verbatim, but as
you would a written compositional form. I never
write out set lists. We come out, and I blank out
my mind and feel what’s coming from the audience and what’s happening on stage. From that
comes my first impulse, and I make a sound.
Then I start developing and weave a thread.
“The temporal moment has a character, and
it imposes on us a certain vibe which we then
deal with. Place has something to do with it.
The land has an energy that affects us. When
I’m in central Java for three months, I create different shit than I would if I stayed here. I get different ideas in south India or Brazil. Usually the
effect on you is unconscious. I study all this esoteric stuff to try to figure out what it is. Almost
everything I do starts with some vague interior, intuitive, spiritual feeling, which I then try to
figure out how to technically work with. In the
end, I’m dealing with a craft. I’m dealing with
music, and something’s got to be developed out
of that music.”
Coleman traces this predisposition to investigate such feelings to his childhood. He grew up
near 68th Street and Cregier Avenue on Chicago’s
South Side, where a local gang dominated street
life. “They were recruiting cats my age, but I
didn’t want to run with that kind of element,” he
says. “They preyed on people with maybe weaker minds. I was the kind of kid that if a cat called
me a chicken, I’d be like, ‘Well, that’s your opinion.’ I wouldn’t get mad, just indifferent. Before
he died, my father told me, ‘What you’re doing
musically and the way you are, I saw it in you
early. You were a hard-headed baby who wanted
to go your own way, and could sit in the corner
by yourself and play your own game for hours.’”
Initially attracted to Charlie Parker through
his father’s record collection, Coleman received
subsequent hands-on mentoring from saxophonists Von Freeman, Bunky Green and Sonny Stitt,
each a regular presence in neighborhood clubs
like the Apartment Lounge and Cadillac Bob’s.
He traced the origin of his rhythmic explorations
to a realization that the quality he most appreciated in Parker and his teachers was “their identity,
a strong vibe that told you this was their thing.”
“The main element of their rhythmic base
stemmed from the dance music of the time, and
I realized that I’d have to look for something different,” Coleman said. “I started to think about
Motown, James Brown, the Meters—which I
heard as a folk music—and how to do something
more sophisticated with it. It wasn’t an intellectual exercise. I feel soul and funk more than what
Charlie Parker and Max Roach and those cats
did, because it’s what I grew up on. In blues, you
have the sophisticated line, the less sophisticated line and the stuff in the middle, a breadth of
feelings, everything from Ma Rainey to Coltrane
and in between. I didn’t feel that breadth existed
with this music. I thought it could be wide-open.
I felt you could take it as far as what Trane was
doing with ‘Expression’ and ‘Transition,’ and I
was determined to do it.”
After relocating to New York in 1978,
Coleman took gigs with the Thad Jones/Mel
Lewis Orchestra, drummer Doug Hammond’s