Steve Coleman’s Complicated Soul

“If you don’t keep learning, your mind slows down,” Coleman says. “Use it or lose it.”

(Photo: Dimitri Louis)

PolyTropos/Of Many Turns — the title for Steve Coleman’s latest recording on Pi and his 33rd album overall — aptly describes the vertiginous erudition of the music contained therein. It documents two concerts, one in Paris, one in Villon, recorded four days apart during a March 2024 tour by the most recent iteration of Five Elements, his primary unit since 1981.

Each is a virtuoso endeavor, brainy and primal, impeccably tight and alive, extending modern vernaculars with a clear historical scope. Following Coleman’s long-standing performance practice, the band assembles the music in real time, aggregating small rhythmic units that whirl through interlocking cycles into cohesive collective declamations.

Coleman and trumpeter Jonathan Finlayson, a bandmate since 2000, evoke the one-sound legacy of Bird and Diz, Ornette and Don Cherry, executing warp-speed unisons on the intervals conjured from Coleman’s brain-twisting drum chants, spinning off on a dime into contrapuntal dialogue and lucid solos. Drummer Sean Rickman, whose relationship with Coleman dates to 1996, and bassist Rich Brown, a bandmember since early 2023, mold the rhythmic shapes into constantly shifting grooves.

The album dropped in November, a few weeks after the end of Five Elements’ second 2024 European tour. “I prefer the spontaneous energy and interactivity of recording live,” Coleman said from his Allentown, Pennsylvania, home two days after returning as he was seated before a packed, well-organized bookshelf. “I brought in Rich because Anthony Tidd had a baby after the pandemic, and the high expense of child care keeps him from touring. A lot of reactive, in-the-moment things we do aren’t written, so he needed time to catch up. By March, he’d gotten into gear. We make multitrack recordings of each concert, and these two came out so well, I decided to put them out.”

PolyTropos arrives three years after Pi released Live At The Village Vanguard Volume II (MDW NTR), which snapshotted a week from 2018 in the hallowed basement, with bassist Anthony Tidd, who first contributed to Five Elements in 1992, and Kokayi, the sui generis freestyling “wordsmith” who has toured and recorded with several Coleman configurations since 1994. Live At The Village Vanguard, Vol. 1 (The Embedded Sets), also issued in 2018, captures Five Elements’ 2017 residence there with Coleman, Finlayson, Tidd, Rickman and guitarist Miles Okazaki.

“Every year I take a sabbatical to pursue new information,” said Coleman, who recently turned 68. “I ask myself if I’m internalizing and dealing with something musically I didn’t know two years ago. If the answer is no, I’m not progressing. If you don’t keep learning, your mind slows down. Use it or lose it. That’s why you see all these books — a very small percentage of what I have — behind me. But it does no good unless I find musical analogies. That’s the hard part.”

Coleman’s relentless investigations over the last three decades include fieldwork-driven encounters with master practitioners from West and North Africa, Cuba and the Caribbean, Brazil and the Indian subcontinent. He refracts the information into a highly personal argot informed by his 1970s experiences on Chicago’s South Side. His albums reference Chinese I Ching hexagrams, Yoruban Ifá patterns and the Hebrew Bible as coded sets of musical symbols. They mimic the procession of interlocking planetary and astral cycles and postulate rhythmic equivalents to the mathematical structure of pi.

On both Vanguard albums, Coleman presents his sonic representations of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, which he first addressed on The Sonic Language Of Myth in 1998. The 2018 set springboards from his discovery earlier that year of the hieroglyph for man. “I had an epiphany of a musical shape that resembled the way this figure held his arms,” Coleman said. “I associated it with a figure Woody Shaw played on a location recording of ‘Ginseng People’ and started developing it in different directions.”

A similar process of visualization informs the pieces on PolyTropos, on which Coleman — who aspired to be a comic book illustrator before devoting himself to music — translates the biochemical reactions of amino acids into shapes consisting of pitches and rhythms. The songs manifested as Coleman cogitated during January 2023 and January 2024 sabbaticals at his home in Bahia. On the March tour, he showed the ideas to Finlayson, whose approach in the dialogical flow onstage “fit the music like a glove.” He continued “to push the process” on the October tour.

“I started traveling around the world to places that still had living traditions where music is conversation,” Coleman said. “It was most obvious in the village I went to in Ghana, where every day the drummers got up and beat out the story of their tribe. Since I play mostly non-verbal music, I was looking for hints on how humans have communicated ideas with musical sounds, though of course I wouldn’t do it the same way. I knew how to communicate sensations, like play a soft song that sounds like love, or play a grating song that sounds angry. But I was interested in much more sophisticated information. When I listened to Von Freeman playing ‘Body And Soul,’ the different passages brought to mind all kinds of images — not just emotions. Why did I perceive these images?”

Coltrane’s musings about “creating a song in the moment and never playing it again” inspired Coleman’s instant composition modus operandi. “I was on the road playing trio with Reggie Washington and Gene Lake, and made a different song for us to play each night, using Kabbalah, and calculating astrology charts, where the ascendant was, and so on. Some songs never left our repertoire, like ‘Wheel Of Nature,’ on the second half of PolyTropos. Now I’ve internalized all the research, like being in Egypt for six weeks, going into the tombs and looking at the ancient decans, and I do it spontaneously.”

The amino acids project gestated in the early 2000s, when Coleman read DNA And The I Ching: The Tao Of Life.

“Although I knew nothing about the science, DNA codes looked very musical to me,” he said. His focus expanded after 2010, when Coleman started meeting frequently with drum shaman Milford Graves, who had exhaustively mapped the cycles of the human heartbeat. Coleman presented these investigations on the Pi albums Functional Arrhythmias (2013), inspired by the “rhythmic interaction between the circulatory, nervous, respiratory and other biological systems of the human body,” and Synovial Joints (2017), representing the movements of the wrist, elbow, knee, hip, shoulder, ankle and thumb.

“I was riding high from 2014 to 2018,” said Coleman, noting his receipt of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Doris Duke Artist Award and a MacArthur Fellowship, productive and well-publicized residencies in Detroit and Chicago, and four consecutive annual appearances at the Village Vanguard.

His prestige stemmed not only from the singular music he’d consistently generated since the mid-1980s, when Coleman worked closely with mid-Boomer contemporaries like Geri Allen (his first wife), Cassandra Wilson, Greg Osby, Marvin “Smitty” Smith, Robin Eubanks and James Weidman, but also the well-acknowledged impact of his fieldwork, cross-cultural rhythmic ideas and career advice on next-generation A-listers Vijay Iyer, Tyshawn Sorey, Dafnis Prieto, Marcus Gilmore, Jason Moran, Yosvany Terry, Miguel Zenón, Craig Taborn, David Virelles, Miles Okazaki, Shane Endsley and Jen Shyu.

“Steve most directly impacts people through what can only be called generosity,” Iyer affirmed in a DownBeat profile of Coleman in 2011. “He’ll speak with you for hours, sharing information from his omnivorous mind, while also picking your brain, learning from what you have to say. He believes in building a collective body of knowledge, modeling himself on what Bird and Monk and the ancients did. He does the work to connect systems of thought, to connect ideas. His music does that work, too.”

It’s unclear whether Coleman intended the title PolyTropos to hint at the turn in his fortunes after October 2018. Eleven months earlier, Maria Grand, another Coleman mentee, who plays tenor saxophone on Synovial Joints and Morphogenesis, circulated an email to an audience that included Coleman’s colleagues, music journalists and concert promoters, stating that she and Coleman (referenced as “X”) had an off-and-on sexual relationship from 2011 to 2016. She was 35 years his junior and alleged that during this time Coleman often extorted sex as a precondition for continued employment and lessons. She concluded with a demand “to make it impossible for predators to exist, period, in the scene.” Soon thereafter, she identified Coleman by name in a letter to members of the We Have Voice Collective, a group she’d co-launched with 13 sister musicians inspired by the contemporaneous #MeToo movement to focus on issues of harassment and gender equity.

On May 5, 2018, Coleman, openly polyamorous since the 1980s, mass-emailed an unapologetic denial of Grand’s accusation of harassment. He portrayed the relationship as consensual throughout, buttressing his contention with a tranche of texts and emails, some quite racy, that he and Grand had exchanged. In October 2018, Coleman filed a defamation claim against Grand, requesting extensive damages. A month later, Grand filed counterclaims alleging libel and intentional infliction of emotional distress. In 2021, a lower court judge denied the claims of both parties. Coleman immediately appealed, and awaits a decision.

The backlash was immediate. Several musicians left Coleman’s band. Friends and strangers denounced him as a predator. He lost work from the get-go. The Jazz Gallery, where he’d performed and held regular public workshops for two decades, peremptorily terminated the association at the end of 2018. There followed a disastrous 2019, as the Vanguard canceled a scheduled week, the Newport Jazz Festival kiboshed a concert and promoters in Chile reneged on a tour. The drought continued during the COVID year of 2020, as several livestream presenters excluded him from playing. His bands resumed international touring in 2021. However, Coleman said, “I can count our gigs in the United States since 2018 on one hand,” with brief hits at a short-lived Brooklyn club and John Zorn’s The Stone, and a scheduled appearance at the 2025 Big Ears Festival.

“We had agreements, people backtracked, and musicians suddenly didn’t have work,” Coleman said. “I showed everyone the evidence, and they chose to ignore it. If I tell musicians I’m going to pay them, and then a promoter stiffs me, I pay out of my pocket. I have my own code of ethics. It involves truthfulness. It doesn’t involve hurting people; if you do hurt somebody, try to rectify it. It certainly doesn’t involve forcing women to have sex.”

True to form, Coleman found a musical analogy for his code of ethics. “Coltrane, Bird and Duke Ellington contain certain truths that you can choose to ignore or look at,” he said. “Was ‘A Love Supreme’ just a title Coltrane felt good about, or does something in the music, structurally and emotionally, pertain to what the words mean? ‘Leo’ is one note jumping around octaves. What does that note have to do with the constellation in the zodiac? Duke’s suites impressed Wynton Marsalis so much that he tried to emulate them with Blood On The Fields and things like this. That’s what he’s supposed to do. Whoever you are, regardless of style, you still have to take care of the music’s inner workings — the nuts and bolts. I can throw up some random notes and then tell people it’s about DNA and amino acids. How will you refute me? You don’t know shit about it. Or I can really do it, and then it’s at another level.

“I agree with Wynton, Barry Harris and Lou Donaldson that there needs to be a certain standard of excellence. If you tell people something’s great when it isn’t, you’re not helping them. I’m not just pulling my opinions out of my ass. When I teach, I may mention Bach or Palestrina in passing, or touch on the music of Cuba and Africa and Brazil and the other places I went to, but I can never tell you I’m an expert in any of them. I’m relating it to what I personally know well, which is the music of African-Americans and the tradition that extends from the great cats who preceded us. Of course, I see some similarities between what African-Americans did and Afro-Cubans did. I see similarities in everything.” DB

from https://downbeat.com