by Nate Chinen
I used to tell my friends that, and just like you, they said, “What do you mean? You mean being inspired by the mountain?” I said, “No, not just inspired. Of course I’m inspired by it, but I want to play the mountain, literally, play the mountain.” They said, “Well, what do you mean by that?” I said, “I want to look at the mountain and see something like notation and be able to play it.” They thought I was crazy. They would just dismiss what I was saying. But I was serious. I wanted to be able to look at the flight pattern of a bee, the flight pattern of a bird, and play that. Or have that directly influence my music, so almost be able to look at nature as one big gesture. You can call it notation. I mean, what is notation? It’s a bunch of symbols that tell you, don’t do this, do this. But I wanted to be able to look at life with my eyes as well as with my ears and be able to translate that into sound. That was, and still is, one of my biggest things.3
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The fact that Coleman came up in Chicago is critical. Then as now, the city was a home to restless experimentation as well as a living and breathing tradition. The blues exerted a powerful presence there. So did a strain of African-American aesthetic agency famously embodied by, but by no means limited to, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians.
One evening in his late teens, Coleman and some friends went to a club to hear the legendary bebop terror Sonny Stitt, who was passing through town. The bill had been split with another saxophonist, Chicago veteran Von Freeman, who was born within a year of Stitt but had an altogether burlier, woolier, less linear style.
“We were actually pissed that Von was there,” Coleman later recalled, with a laugh.
We wanted to see Stitt, and they’ve got this other guy up there. And I didn’t like his playing at the time. But Von was real nice; he understood that we were ignorant. And he saw that we wanted to play. So he said, “I have this set on the South Side, you guys should bring your horns down and come play.” He didn’t say “Come listen to us.” He knew what would attract us. I found out it was right around the corner from my house. So I would go to this place, and Von and all these older guys who were born around the same time, they would play first.4
Coleman and his peers would reluctantly sit through the old-timers’ gig, itching to get their turn on the bandstand. But because he had a habit of taping his outings, Coleman sometimes went home with documentation of Freeman and the other seasoned heads. “It didn’t take long, maybe three or four months, to realize that they were really, really playing,” Coleman said. “And then it took a little bit longer and I realized: these guys are on a totally different level than where I’m at. It’s not even close. What they were doing was much more sophisticated than what I could hear, at the time.” He apprenticed himself to Freeman, an experience that had a profound effect on his cultivation as a jazz musician.
The ongoing practice of an informal, hands-on, intensive workshop, unaffiliated with any formal institution, has been vitally important for Coleman. Over the years he has led such residencies in Chicago, sometimes in collaboration with the artist and activist Theaster Gates, who turns urban revitalization into an act of radical engagement. Coleman has also set up workshops in New York and other American cities, and in locales abroad. Those residencies have often led to new musical affiliations as well as new music. “Almost everybody I’m playing with now, I met them in workshops,” he said. Looking back on the legacy of Freeman, who died in 2012 at eighty-eight, Coleman drew an obvious connection with himself: “Von’s thing on the South Side, letting guys sit in and everything, it was sort of like a residency that lasted forever.”5
Coleman moved to New York in 1978 and quickly found himself straddling a divide. On the one hand, he fell in with established jazz elders like the trumpeter and composer Thad Jones, joining the pacesetting big band that Jones led with the drummer Mel Lewis. On the other hand, Coleman became a fixture at Studio Rivbea, the downtown loft run by the avant-garde saxophonist Sam Rivers with his wife, Beatrice. He also worked with both the magisterial singer-songwriter Abbey Lincoln and the iconoclastic pianist Cecil Taylor.
But one of the most fruitful associations Coleman formed at the time was with the bassist Dave Holland, another Studio Rivbea regular. Holland was only a decade older, and another straddler: an alumnus of Miles Davis’s rockish late-sixties band, a former member of the tumultuous free-jazz collective Circle, and an anchor in the rough-and-tumble Sam Rivers Trio. His own albums—notably his momentous 1973 debut, Conference of the Birds, with Rivers and Anthony Braxton sharing a front line—had set a high bar for experimental maneuvers in a chamberlike and almost delicate setting.
On Jumpin’ In, released on ECM in 1984, Holland introduced a new group with Coleman on alto saxophone and flute, Kenny Wheeler on trumpet, Julian Priester on trombone, and Steve Ellington on drums. Coleman thrived in this setting, blending with and brushing against the other horns, and pouncing on Holland’s open-ended compositional forms. He also contributed the only non-Holland tune on Jumpin’ In, a groove-meets-gnarl concoction titled “The Dragon and the Samurai.” Coleman would bring more new music to two subsequent albums by the Dave Holland Quintet—Seeds of Time (1985) and The Razor’s Edge (1987), both featuring the drummer Marvin “Smitty” Smith in place of Ellington, and both charting an ever-deeper band cohesion.
Coleman continued his work with Holland after the quintet disbanded, notably in a blue-chip trio featuring Jack DeJohnette on drums. Their sole album, Triplicate, was released under Holland’s name in 1988. (Among other things, it’s worth seeking out for Coleman’s fluent yet divergent take on “Segment,” the Charlie Parker tune.) Extensions, released in 1990, featured an intriguing and expressive new lineup with Holland, Coleman, Smith, and a virtuoso young guitarist, Kevin Eubanks.
By that time, Coleman was an established solo artist himself, decidedly past what you might call his journeyman phase but still very much embarked on a journey.
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M-Base, a term of art that Coleman introduced near the start of his solo career, stands for “Macro-Basic Array of Structured Extemporizations.” Beyond that, saying what it stands for can get a little complicated. A system of creative expression rooted in improvisation within a form, striving toward the goal of transmuting human experience into sound, M-Base could be described as the logical outcome of Coleman’s longstanding preoccupations. But from the jump it also described the work of a cohort: the M-Base Collective, whose early members included the cornetist Graham Haynes, the alto saxophonist Greg Osby, and the pianist Geri Allen.
In the late 1980s and early ’90s, these and a handful of other artists effectively made M-Base feel like a dawning movement. The extravagantly gifted singer Cassandra Wilson had her first notable recording credit on Coleman’s debut album, Motherland Pulse (1985), and then featured him and other charter members on her own debut, Point of View (1986).
At a time when the larger jazz ecology was so concerned with an evocation of historical norms, M-Base suggested a dispatch from the young black vanguard: formally inventive, aesthetically progressive, culturally forward. There was plenty of off-kilter funk and looping structure in the music of this peer group, which led many observers to associate M-Base with a particular sound. Coleman bristled against such essentialism, but the music was fairly easy to typecast at the time. A 1993 album called Anatomy of a Groove (DIW), credited to the M-Base Collective, was presented as a mission statement—and like most of the other work in Coleman’s camp, it featured jangly harmonic angularities over elliptical but in-the-pocket rhythm. Some critics pegged this approach as an intelligent and principled alternative to fusion, while others compared it to the harmolodic ecstasies of Ornette Coleman’s Prime Time. Almost everyone began to use M-Base as a shorthand, as much for the music as for its musicians.
Coleman eventually clarified his intentions with M-Base, which have nothi
ng to do with the proprietary refinement of a style. “One of the main ideas in M-Base is growth through creativity,” reads an explainer on the official website, m-base.com. “As we learn through our experiences then the music will change and grow to reflect that. The idea is not to develop some musical style and to play that forever.”
Perhaps the best indication of Coleman’s struggle to resist outside misperceptions is a bulleted list on the same page of the website, which amusingly resembles an exasperated variation on “Frequently Asked Questions,” otherwise known as FAQs.
WHAT M-BASE IS NOT:
An acronym for some kind of computer language or computer talk.
A musical style.
A name made up to fool critics into writing about musicians who claim to “play” M-Base.
A card carrying society with members who pay dues.
An excuse to claim that you are different than other musicians.
A name that you can call your music in order to get more gigs.
An excuse to play odd time signatures.
An indication that you do not like the music of Wynton Marsalis or musicians associated with Wynton.
An excuse to ignore chords or to think of chord progressions as irrelevant.
Coleman’s resistance to the idea of musical style, in particular, reflects a general skepticism about aesthetic labels. “Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie and those guys, when they found it useful to jump on the bebop bandwagon and talk about bebop from the standpoint of getting work and getting attention, they did it,” he said. “But if you talk to the musicians, and if you look at interviews and things that they did, it becomes clear that Bird did not think what he was doing was bebop or jazz or whatever. It’s clear that he was just looking at it as music.”6
On some level, Coleman’s articulation of an alternative was a show of self-determination, analogous to the impulse that led the early members of the AACM to drop “jazz” for the less rigid term “creative music.” Early in Iyer’s experience as an acolyte in Coleman’s circle, during the mid-1990s, he published an essay placing both movements within an African-American creative tradition of collectivism. Reflecting on the meaning of M-Base, Iyer proposed that instead of a “style,” it should be regarded as “a ‘stance’—an approach to creativity.”7
For some in the fold, that approach would remain a core conviction even after they were no longer producing music that fit any M-Base profile. Cassandra Wilson, to name the most prominent example, peeled off in the early nineties when she signed to Blue Note Records. “She had in mind to do something with her M-Base-type band,” Bruce Lundvall, Blue Note’s president at the time, later recalled. “I had sort of a disagreement with her and said, ‘Why don’t you make an acoustic record? Your downtown band is good, but we’re not looking for musical democracy; I really signed you as a solo artist and want to be able to hear you.’ I had seen her a couple nights before this meeting and didn’t feel that it was the best situation for her.”
The result of Lundvall’s intervention was Blue Light ’Til Dawn (1993), the acoustic mélange that, together with a follow-up, New Moon Daughter (1995), was Wilson’s commercial breakthrough. With a smoky blend of pop fare (U2’s “Love Is Blindness”) and roots-music touchstones (Robert Johnson’s “Come on in My Kitchen,” Hank Williams’s “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry”), the albums became cultural events of a sort. Both reached the top spot on Billboard’s Jazz Albums chart. The latter penetrated the Billboard 200 and won a Grammy for Best Jazz Vocal Album.
This enormous success ratified a notion, radical only in the context of the neoclassical nineties, that jazz repertory could come from the byways of American folk music (both the rustic and confessional varieties) as well as the standard songbook. A decade later, it was almost a given that any serious contemporary jazz singer might delve into rustic folk, world music, or adult pop and soul. It was also no longer so strange to hear a jazz singer backed by stringed instruments in addition to piano, bass, and drums. (When Blue Note ushered in its affiliation with Norah Jones, another Lundvall signing, in 2002, the unspoken in-house precedent was Blue Light ’Til Dawn.)
From the outside, then, it would seem that Wilson had left M-Base behind. This was maybe even true, to the extent that you fixated on the parameters of her sound. But Wilson had made clear that she shared Coleman’s conceptual basis, free of stylistic identifiers. “More and more I find it’s a way of life,” she wrote of M-Base, in the liner notes for Anatomy of a Groove. “It’s a way of living truth at the crossroads. A means by which we can develop our musical capabilities to their fullest, thereby expanding, redefining and propelling the music into the 21st century and beyond.” Well after she had become one of the most prominent jazz singers of her generation, Wilson was still a member in good standing of the M-Base Collective.
In 2007, she reunited with Coleman for a single night at the Stone, in an ensemble that also included the drummer Dafnis Prieto, the saxophonist Yosvany Terry, and the pianist Jason Moran. Rather than dusting off old music, the group had settled on a conceptual framework inspired by the Yoruban divination system known as Ifa. Next to the stage was a posterboard diagram depicting the system’s sixteen principal Odu, or stations of the human condition; Wilson announced that the group had conceived music for four of them. The ensuing performance was an intoxicating haze of gluey polyrhythm, with Wilson’s voice palpitating in the mix, not in the mode of a lead singer so much as that of an instigator, or a shaman.
The idea that Wilson’s career is an M-Base success story, and not some prodigal parable, reflects the musically permissive dimensions of “the stance.” Other artists put that permissiveness to the test too, perhaps none more doggedly than Coleman himself.
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Steve Coleman and Five Elements made their major-label debut in 1992, on the Novus imprint of BMG, with the momentously titled Rhythm People (The Resurrection of Creative Black Civilization). The album cover featured a drawn illustration, by Malachi “Mike” Basden, that depicted figures from the past and the future—one in a zoot suit, another in a space suit—against a backdrop of urban surrealism, mixing street art with Salvador Dalí. The music enacted a similar temporal and textural whorl, with Coleman’s alto darting through the machinery. On “No Conscience” he even ventured some rapping, with complex flow patterns and internal rhyme: “Signs of an empire in decline / Stressing the bottom line / Without regard to time / Or the limits of mankind / Paying no attention to the laws / Of cause and effect / Advance and decline / The way of ancient biorhythmic science / No conscience.” But the synthesizers and electric slap-bass on the album would fix Rhythm People as an artifact of its era, valuable mainly as a status report from the center of a fast-charging artistic campaign.
That same year, Coleman released another, strikingly different album with “rhythm” in the title, as if to show another side of the coin. Rhythm in Mind was the by-product of a concert he’d put together for the centennial of Carnegie Hall. The loose premise was a generational exchange: Coleman featured his mentor, Von Freeman, along with the venerable pianist Tommy Flanagan and the masterly, free-thinking New Orleans drummer Ed Blackwell. The repertoire included another nod to the older jazz tradition, in the form of two compositions by Thad Jones.
Coleman also found a place on Rhythm in Mind for members of his peer group: Holland, Wheeler, Eubanks, Smitty Smith. And with his own compositions on the album, he mapped an M-Base trajectory more in line with the sound of jazz as it was already widely understood. A loping, coolly furtive theme called “Left of Center” captures the full potential of this tactic, with the two drummers laying down a wide swing beat. The solos are bracing across the board, culminating in an inspired round of friendly sparring between Eubanks and Coleman.
Through the remainder of the 1990s, Coleman broadened his scope and de
epened his inquiry, bringing more musicians and concepts into his orbit. M-Base, as a social unit, gradually dissolved around the edges: by the mid-nineties it was best understood as a radial extension of Coleman’s output rather than a true colloquy in which other charter members, like Allen or Osby, could have equal say.
One area of intense focus during this time was hip-hop—notably in a project called Metrics, which amounted to Five Elements augmented with rappers. Coleman was especially taken with the hip-hop convention of the cipher, a circular confab of rappers, beatboxers, and break-dancers locked in a freestyle battle of wits. (The improvisational essence of a cipher was one obvious part of the appeal for him; another probably had to do with the name, and its implications of code and encryption.) After an EP called Tale of 3 Cities, which featured rappers like Sub-Zero and Black Thought of the Roots, Coleman and Metrics released one emblematic album, The Way of the Cipher: Live in Paris. This arrived in 1995 as the second volume in a trilogy, the other two being Curves of Life, documenting a Five Elements performance, and Myths, Modes and Means, featuring the worldly ensemble called the Mystic Rhythm Society, which included Iyer on keyboards, Miya Masaoka on Japanese koto, and Ramesh Shotham on Indian hand percussion.
The album trilogy—which was released on BMG as a boxed set titled Live at the Hot Brass, and reissued for a twentieth-anniversary edition as Steve Coleman’s Music Live in Paris—caught up with Coleman at a key moment of multidimensional expansion. As always, he was self-conscious about it, and eager to situate his growth on a cultural-historical axis: Curves of Life opened with a piece called “Multiplicity of Approaches (The African Way of Knowing).”