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Born in one of music's traditional centers, Chicago, on September 20, 1956, Coleman grew up on the South Side, within walking distance of the gamut of musical traditions, from blues to jazz to R & B, that the Windy City has fostered. By accident, he found himself playing violin in the high-school orchestra, in his freshman year at the age of 13. He switched to alto sax about six months later. His father, according to Coleman, "a Charlie Parker nut", urged his son in that direction, but the young player had already picked out a model for himself - James Brown's towering alto saxophonist, Maceo Parker - and hooked himself up with a funk band. In 1974, at the age of 18, around the time he got to Illinois Wesleyan University, the other Parker came back into his musical view. Later hanging out at various hot spots around 75th Street to watch masters like Von Freeman navigate gnarled changes triggered in Coleman a desire to re-think his father's points about Bird -- which he began by listening to a boot-legged Charlie Parker LP his dad had slipped into his suitcase. By the time he left Chicago in May 1978, he was holding down a decent gig leading a band at the New Apartment Lounge, writing music, playing Parker classics, and getting increasingly dissatisfied with what he felt was a creative dead end in the Chicago scene.
After hearing groups from New York like Max Roach, Art Blakey, Woody Shaw, The Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Orchestra and Sonny Rollins come through town with bands that featured players of superior ability and advanced musical conceptions, Steve knew where he wanted to go next. Hitchhiking to New York and staying at a YMCA in Manhattan for a few months, he scuffled until he picked up a gig with the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Big Band, which led to stints with the Sam Rivers Big Band, Cecil Taylor's Big Band and others. Soon he begun cutting records as a sideman with those leaders as well as pivotal figures like David Murray, Doug Hammond, Dave Holland, Mike Brecker and Abbey Lincoln. However it was really the influence of Von Freeman and Bunky Green in Chicago and Thad Jones, Sam Rivers, Doug Hammond in New York and listening to recordings of music from West Africa that got Coleman turned around musically. The most important influences on his music at this time was listening to tenor saxophonist Von Freeman (who primarily influenced Coleman as an improviser), saxophonist Sam Rivers (who influenced Steve compositionally) and drummer/composer Doug Hammond (who was especially important in Steve's conceptual thinking). Even playing with these masters only went part of the way toward paying the rent, and so for the next four years. Coleman spent a good deal of time playing in New York City's streets for small amounts of money with a street band that he put together with trumpeter Graham Haynes, the group that would evolve into the ensemble Steve Coleman and Five Elements. It is this group that would serve as the flagship ensemble for most of Steve's activities.
After some personnel shifts, the group began finding a niche in tiny, out-of-the-way clubs in Harlem and Brooklyn where they continued to hone their developing concept of improvisation within nested looping structures, the foundation upon which Coleman and friends call the M-Base concept. Hooking up with the West German JMT label in 1985, he and his co- conspirators got their chance to document their emergent ideas on early Coleman-led recordings like Motherland Pulse, On The Edge Of Tomorrow, and World Expansion. The late 1980s found Coleman working to codify his early ideas using the group Steve Coleman and Five Elements and working with a collective of musicians called the M-Base Collective. As his ideas grew, Steve also learned to program computers to be used as tools to further develop his conception. He developed a program which he called The Improviser which was able to develop improvisations and drum rhythms using artificial intelligence based on certain musical theories that Steve had developed over the years. It was also during this time that Coleman came into contact with the study of the philosophy of ancient cultures. This began in the late 1970s with his listening to the music from West Africa but in the 1980s Steve began to study and read about the ideas behind the music. He began to see that there was a sensibility that connected what he was interested in today with the ancient cultures of the past.
Not satisfied with reading and listening to recordings led Coleman to embark on a research trip to Ghana in December 1993 to January 1994 to study the relationship of language to music. One of the places that he traveled to was a small village called Yendi to check out the Dagbon people who have a tradition of speaking through their music using a drum language that still survives today. Steve had certain ideas about the role of music and the transmission of information in ancient times and he wanted to verify his speculations. This trip had a profound effect on Coleman's music and philosophy. Upon returning to the United States, Steve recorded Def Trance Beat and A Tale of 3 Cities, however, the impact of the ideas that he was introduced to in Ghana would not be fully expressed in his work until late in 1994 after meeting the Kemetic philosopher Thomas Goodwin.
In June 1994, Steve formed the group Renegade Way which consisted of Steve Coleman and Greg Osby on alto saxophones, Joe Lovano and Craig Handy on tenor saxophones, Kenny Davis on bass and Yoron Isreal on drums. This group played its first gig on that day at the Zanzibar club in New York City. This group also did its first tour of Europe in late august 1995 (with Bunky Green on alto taking Greg's place and Ralph Peterson on drums instead of Yoron). The current version of this group has Steve Coleman and Greg Osby on alto saxophones, Gary Thomas and Ravi Coltrane on tenor saxophones. Together with an experimental ensemble put together called Steve Coleman and The Secret Doctrine, that brought the total number of group projects that Steve was involved in to five. The fall of 1994 also saw Coleman begin to organize what he calls 'Grass Roots Tours' (a concept that he first thought about while in Ghana earlier that year), the fist tour being a self organized tour of the west coast in the United States (using his own money and the then new technology of the Internet). Subsequent trips to the west coast were funded in part by grants from the NEA (1995) and the Lila Wallace Fund (1996).
Representing both a summation of the previous period and the beginning of another phase is the three CD box set entitled Steve Coleman's Music - Live at the Hot Brass. Each CD in the box set was recorded live in March 1995 in Paris and features one of Coleman's groups, Curves of Life by Steve Coleman and Five Elements, The Way of the Cipher by Steve Coleman and Metrics and Myths, Modes and Means by Steve Coleman and The Mystic Rhythm Society. This last CD was influenced by the trip to Ghana and philosophical studies; it points in the direction of Steve's investigations for the remainder of the 1990s.
The year 1995 was an important year for Steve Coleman but Steve was soon organizing a trip that would make a profound impact on his music. While pursuing his philosophical studies and learning more about the transmission of these ideas through music, Steve began to plan to investigate an idea that he had been thinking about for at least 7 years. In an effort to follow the development of certain philosophical and spiritual ideas obtained by studying ancient cultures (primarily ancient Egypt) and following up on the 1993-94 research trip to Ghana, Africa, Steve wanted to meet and collaborate in a creative way with musicians who were involved in certain ancient philosophical/musical traditions which come out of West Africa. One of his main interests was the Yoruba tradition (predominantly out of western Nigeria) which is the Ancient African Religion underlying Santeria (Cuba and Puerto Rico), Candomble (Bahia, Brazil) and Vodun (Haiti). Steve decided to go to these places and investigate the way the ideas these traditions were transmitted through music. First stop, Cuba!
In Cuba Steve found that the situation was more complex than he had imagined for the people had preserved more than one African culture and these were mixed together under the general title of Santeria. There are the Abakua societies (Ngbe) , the various Arara cults (Dahomey), the Congo traditions such as nganga, mayombe and palo monte as well as the Yoruba traditions. But he did find one group called AfroCuba de Matanzas who specialized in preserving all of the above traditions as well as various styles of Rumba.
It was to the town of Matanzas that Steve headed in January of 1996 in order to study the music and also contact AfroCuba de Matanzas and arrange a meeting with the leader of this group, Francisco Zamora Chirino (otherwise known as Minini). Minini was also excited about the project and so it was arranged that the collaboration would take place in February during the time of the Havana Jazz Festival in order to give the expanded group a chance to perform before the Cuban public.
In February of 1996 Steve rented a large house in Havana and along with a group of 10 musicians and dancers, a three person film crew and the group AfroCuba de Matanzas (who had been bused in from Matanzas) the collaboration was started. For 12 days the two groups hung out together, worked, practiced and conceptualized in order to realize their goal. After their performance at the Havana Jazz Festival the musicians went into a Egrem Studios in Havana and recorded the collaboration. The results of this effort are preserved on a recording made for the BMG France recording company called The Sign and The Seal by Steve Coleman and The Mystic Rhythm Society in collaboration with AfroCuba de Matanzas.
This project was the realization of an idea but only part of the vision of Steve Coleman. It did represent another step in the evolution of his music, exploring ways of communicating information through music. It also shows that there is a more obvious connection than is generally thought between the creative music of today and the dynamic musical traditions of African peoples living in various parts of the earth. The combined group of Steve Coleman and The Mystic Rhythm Society in collaboration with AfroCuba de Matanzas did a major tour of Europe in June-July of 1997. This year also saw Steve form a large group (big band) called Steve Coleman and The Council of Balance. This group recorded a CD called Genesis which was released as part of the two CD set; Genesis and The Opening of The Way (the second CD featuring Steve Coleman and Five Elements).
1997-1999 saw a continuation of the projects involving cultural exchange with musicians around the world. Partially funded by a grant from Arts International (1997), Steve took a group of musicians from America and Cuba to Senegal to collaborate and participate in musical and cultural exchanges with the musicians of the local Senegalese group Sing Sing Rhythm. Using his own funds he also led his group Five Elements to the south of India in January-February of 1998 to participate in cultural exchange there with different musicians in the Karnatic music tradition. Steve and his group also gave workshops in the Brahavadhi Center headed by the renown musicologist Dr. K. Subramanian. The trip to India (along with a research trip to Egypt the preceding month) helped to confirm the knowledge of the ancient systems that Steve had been studying. These trips have already been helpful in supplying the additional information necessary for Steve to continue his studies which he hopes to express in his own personal manner. Steve's latest Five Element's recordings, one entitled The Sonic Language of Myth (released in March 1999) and the other as yet untitled are a direct result of these studies.
Steve found that the ideas that he had worked on in the late 1970s and early 1980s were part of the information that he discovered in his later studies of ancient cultures. He could only explain this with the idea of ancestral memory. Coleman began working in 1998 to further develop the computer software ideas he began in the late 1980s using current technology. He hired two programmers to help him port his ideas over to the current generation of computers and then started to create computer models of the ideas that were based on the study of ancient cultures.
This work came to the attention of IRCAM (the world renown computer-music research center in Paris, France) and Coleman then received a major commission from IRCAM to further develop his ideas, in the form of interactive computer software, at the IRCAM facilities in Paris with the aid of IRCAM programmers and technology. This will culminate in a premier concert in June 1999 featuring Steve Coleman and Five Elements interacting with what Steve calls his Rameses Computer Program.
Most of these activities from January 1996 on have been preserved in the form of a documentary film shot by Eve-Marie Breglia based on Steve's music and the theme of cultural transference tentatively entitled Elements on One.
Courtesy from
Steve Coleman
Steve Coleman official web-site: http://www.m-base.com/resume1b.html
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