by Nate Chinen
As he expanded his purview, Coleman was rendering obsolete some of the old presumptions about his music: that it amounted to a metaphysical upgrade of jazz-funk, for instance. His work began to take on a more polyglot, chamberlike quality with an edition of Five Elements that featured the brilliant vocalist Jen Shyu, the precise, inquisitive trumpeter Jonathan Finlayson, and the subtly expressive drummer Marcus Gilmore. This group released its first scintillating album, Harvesting Semblances and Affinities, on Pi Recordings in 2010. At the time, it was Coleman’s first release on an American label in almost a decade.
His incorporation of non-Western musical influence had come rooted in firsthand research, as he devoted an increasing proportion of his time and energy to traveling around the world: places including Ghana, Senegal, Egypt, India, Cuba, and Brazil.8 He formalized his exploration into a regular sabbatical—usually a month long, and unrelated to any bookings or professional obligations. This custom of international travel, neither for vacation nor for business purposes, served a different purpose altogether: a peripatetic artist retreat, a freeform research trip, a recharging of the creative batteries. As Coleman explained:
Why I do sabbaticals every year is I’m trying to force myself to spend a certain part of the year where I concentrate almost completely on creative things. And keep the other shit at bay. You’re trying to keep all this other stuff that’s encroaching, keep it back. This is why composers go away to compose. All the noise—they’re trying to block that away. So I try to do that every year, and I just have one simple thing. Because it’s really hard to judge your own progress. It’s really difficult. You can’t go by press, you can’t go by what people are saying about you, awards. All this kind of stuff, it means nothing. Absolutely nothing. There’s no award that ever created any music. The only thing that means anything, to me, is: What do I know this year that’s different than what I knew two years ago? And am I doing something about it? Not just as trivia, but as information that I’m actually working with.
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Coleman lives in Allentown, Pennsylvania, an hour’s drive from Philadelphia and under two hours from New York. He moved there in 1991, after Eubanks extolled its virtues as a place with enough space to create, while still within range of the city. Coleman fully embraced the prospect of peace and quiet: he hadn’t given a single public performance in the Lehigh Valley before 2016, when he headlined a concert at the Allentown JazzFest.9
One afternoon the previous spring, I met him in Philadelphia to discuss an upcoming project and a recent cavalcade of honors. After decades of influential yet scrappy work on the margins, acclaim was finally catching up to him: he’d become a MacArthur Fellow, joining some exalted company, including just a handful of jazz artists—several of whom considered him a mentor—over the roughly three-decade history of the award. He had also received a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation and two awards from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. The month that we spoke, he was on the cover of DownBeat magazine.
We convened at Bartram’s Garden, a botanical garden established in the eighteenth century, near the southernmost bend of the Schuylkill River. Coleman was contemplating a pair of concerts commissioned by the avant-garde presenting organization Ars Nova Workshop, to be held outdoors on the summer solstice and the fall equinox. He was dressed in what amounted to a uniform: backwards ball cap and an open robe resembling a karate gi, over a T-shirt from the Oakland metaphysical supply store Ancient Ways. During a stroll through the grounds, scouting locations for his performances, he seemed relaxed yet alert. “If you just look around, and look deep inside yourself, there’s endless inspiration,” he said, after pausing to admire North America’s oldest ginkgo tree. “So I don’t have to force that. The things that I’m interested in, they’re all around me.”10
Coleman’s creative process had always been concept-driven, but he was refining his thematic approach into ever more graspable units. A 2013 album with Five Elements, Functional Arrhythmias, had been inspired by irregularities of the human heartbeat. He made his 2015 release, Synovial Joints, with the Council of Balance, which brought together a colloquy of percussion, woodwinds, and strings. At the heart of that album is a four-part suite of the same name, its inner dynamics meant to evoke the flexion and extension of joints—saddle, pivot, ball and socket—in the human body. Coleman’s subsequent album, Morphogenesis, released in 2017, would explore a variation on the same idea: most of its pieces, including “Shoulder Roll” and “Dancing and Jabbing,” were musical translations of boxing maneuvers, for a chamber ensemble called Natal Eclipse, with Shyu, Finlayson, and others, including a violinist and a clarinetist.
During our two-hour conversation in the Bartram’s Garden administrative offices, Coleman characterized his obsessive research—in Egyptology, astrophysics, the I Ching, whatever else—not as phases that come and go but rather as part of a larger path of discovery. He compared his accumulation of information to geological strata, with the topmost layer representing just the most recent and readily accessible. Synovial Joints was a case in point, containing fresh ideas but also echoes of previous work, on recordings like The Sonic Language of Myth, from 1999.
One track on Synovial Joints, “Eye of Haru,” features a technique he called “camouflage orchestration,” inspired by his experience with the dimensions of natural sound in the Amazon rain forest. A section of the piece involving two woodwinds and a piccolo trumpet was his effort to evoke the wild chatter and commotion of monkeys raiding a bird’s nest in the arboreal canopy. “If you look up in the trees, it’s dense but not solid,” he said. “So to me, there’s kind of an opaqueness. I tried to create textures like that.”
Just then he stopped talking and pointed to an open window.
“So this bee just flew in here,” he said. “That was the first original idea I ever had, was about bees, and the motion of bees flying around. So you have all these kind of things that inspire different kind of movements, different kind of textures, different kind of motions, and things like this. If you’re successful, even if somebody doesn’t know the inspiration, they can still feel these things.”11
The intensity of Coleman’s focus, self-evident in so much of his music, has always rendered his circumstances—institutional or critical acclaim, ballooning stature, material gains, even the prospect of his influence among grateful younger musicians—more or less irrelevant to him. Maybe a better way to put it would be to say that he’s careful to maintain a big perspective.
“I went through some bad years right before this recent spate of good stuff,” he said. “I went through one of the worst periods, in terms of surviving. It wasn’t so bad that I couldn’t eat, but there was definitely a dip in activity. So, okay, fine. When that happens, you just increase the study end. You take that opportunity to study.”12
Geri Allen, Open on All Sides in the Middle (Minor Music)
Steve Coleman and the Council of Balance, Synovial Joints (Pi)
Steve Coleman and Five Elements, Harvesting Semblances and Affinities (Pi)
Dave Holland Quintet, Jumpin’ In (ECM)
Cassandra Wilson, Blue Light ’Til Dawn (Blue Note)
5
The New Elders
Danilo Pérez was thirty-five, a well-regarded Panamanian jazz pianist on the verge of a popular breakthrough as a bandleader, when he decided instead to open Door Number 2. The choice came in the form of a coveted invitation: he was asked by Wayne Shorter, the eminent saxophonist and composer, to join a new quartet alongside the bassist John Patitucci and the drummer Brian Blade. There was no question that the group would be received with rapt attention, given Shorter’s luminous stature and the fact that he hadn’t led a working band fitting this description—an acoustic quartet, as in his storied postbop output of the sixties—at any point in recent memory.
Still, Pérez had to give the matter
some thought. This was in 2000, just as his own career was hitting a beautiful stride. He’d released several acclaimed albums in the nineties, including The Journey, a brilliant Latin-jazz tapestry, and Panamonk, a clever dalliance with Thelonious Monk. But his heroically ambitious new album, Motherland, represented a major leap forward. Offering an audacious, sophisticated vision of pan-American musical dialogue, it featured no fewer than seventeen contributors in the mix—most of whom joined Pérez for a statement booking at the Bowery Ballroom that fall, which registered on every level as a triumph. Sharpening the issue, the album was widely acclaimed, appearing at the top of a year-end list in The New York Times. For Pérez and many of the musicians in his circle, there was nothing but promise in the notion of taking Motherland farther, expanding its footprint in the world. The road looked wide and inviting, the destination clear.
And besides, Pérez had already put in the apprenticeship time that would seem necessary for his development as a jazz musician. During his early twenties, he’d worked extensively with the bebop patriarch Dizzy Gillespie—first in his United Nation Orchestra, and then in the smaller combos with which the trumpeter made his final recordings. Gillespie was a humanist with a message of cultural oneness, which Pérez took to heart. But he was also, to a large degree, a mentor and role model of the old school, intent on passing on guildlike knowledge of a practical sort.
Pérez had more recently come into contact with other important survivors of the bebop era: he and Patitucci made up two-thirds of the Roy Haynes Trio, whose indefatigable leader was a drummer of Gillespie’s generation and stature. A live album by this band was released on Verve only months before Motherland, and hailed as both a power move for Haynes and a vibrant example of intergenerational exchange. But as far as Pérez was concerned, it was more of a blowing session than a body-and-mind immersion, not on the order of commitment that the Shorter gig would require.
So the decision to join the Wayne Shorter Quartet, as Pérez later described it, represented a crossroads. And once he headed down that path, reassurances were slow in coming despite the bond he had with Patitucci and Blade, who’d both appeared on Motherland. The concept that Shorter had for his quartet was related to the language of free improvisation but not entirely aligned with its objectives. The band would take well-known compositions from Shorter’s back catalog, like “Footprints” and “JuJu,” and often abstract them almost to the point of unrecognizability through a process of hair-trigger interplay. Nothing about a given piece could be taken for granted; with every footfall there was a chance of stepping on quicksand. Tempos and tonal centers were endlessly subject to flux, and discursive volatility was the rule.
Pérez initially felt thrown into the deep end, as he recalled a decade into his tenure with the band:
It was scary, to be honest, to live out all these new ideas. And it was a shock, because with Motherland I remember the standing ovations, and the three encores. Then to put myself into a situation where I had no idea what was happening. It felt like a dictation and ear-training class; I couldn’t really judge it. Even when I listened back to a recording, I felt like an outsider: “What is that? What key are we in?”1
Shorter’s affinity for elliptical whimsy was genuine, and Pérez quickly realized that his usual practice regimen no longer made much sense. He took down a list of movies Shorter had recommended, some of them terrible sci-fi entertainments that he’d endure for the sake of one throwaway moment in a single scene. Pérez also came up with his own version of Wayne Shorter wilderness training, gathering a stack of old Tom and Jerry cartoons and playing them in his study with the sound muted. He’d improvise to the antics onscreen, like a silent-movie accompanist, for two or three hours at a stretch. The idea was to learn how to twitch and pounce while still making sense at the piano, connecting one spasm of movement, with graceful haste, to the next.
The band’s first album was released in 2002, to clamorous acclaim. But the album—Footprints Live!—was a highlight reel, weaving together material from three different concerts the previous summer. In real-time performance, the band could be a bit more of a gamble. It held to a rigorously thorough standard of discovery, welcoming not only flashes of inspiration but also irresolute pauses, stubborn quandaries, and heady longueurs. At its best the band made this process feel intuitive, creating cycles of action and implication; at other times, it could seem like a plane circling endlessly overhead, waiting for a landing signal from air traffic control.
There was a learning curve for audiences as well as for the members of the band. One of the quartet’s first concerts, at the Spoleto Festival in Italy, met with a conspicuous dearth of applause. Shaken by the response, Pérez brought it up with Shorter after the show. “Well, that used to happen with Miles,” the boss replied brightly. “I take it as a good sign.”
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Jazz has always relied, more than many other forms of music, on the wisdom of its elders. To put a finer point on it, the art form thrives best when there’s a healthy line of communication across established and oncoming generations. The reasons are manifold, but for one thing, this is a tradition with just over a century of precedent, imperfectly captured on record and poorly served by written notation. Its lifeblood is the direct transmission of a vast, intangible body of knowledge, and so the influence of mentor-bandleaders has always been key.
For a long time, the situation adhered to conventional models of authority. A bandleader hired a younger musician for his developing potential, for his fire, for his availability and willingness to work—but also for the ability to conform to the band’s metabolism. If the younger musician brought new information to the table, as Shorter did during his tenure with Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, it was usually expected to sound like an extension, rather than a reinvention, of an existing sound. Such was the case with Gillespie, up to and during the years when Pérez came under his wing.
Shorter presented a different breed of jazz elder. Rather than reinforcing roles (or rules), he urged his bandmates to engage in an unpredictable process. Instead of trusting musical verities, he encouraged a condition of blank-slate unknowingness. And he held few fixed ideas about what shape his art should take, or to which aesthetic parameters it belonged.
When he invoked an experience with Miles, he was referring of course to his time with Miles Davis, and in particular the mid-1960s quintet with Shorter, Ron Carter on bass, Herbie Hancock on piano, and Tony Williams on drums. (That personnel had taken a while to solidify; Shorter’s chair was originally held by George Coleman, then Sam Rivers.) By all accounts Davis, who was just entering his forties at the time, upheld a standard of terse and indirect guidance, pushing for constant discovery. He was also driven by the advances his younger bandmates were making on his watch, devising a slippery, open-ended approach to harmony and a magically elastic way with rhythm.
There’s a boxed set of unexpurgated studio recordings the band made from 1966 to 1968, including the complete session reels for the album Miles Smiles. The box, Freedom Jazz Dance: The Bootleg Series Vol. 5, offers a fly-on-the-wall glimpse into Davis’s method in the studio, testing out approaches and issuing instructions. He knew how far to push because he knew the capabilities of the band, which was pushing him in turn.
Hancock characterized the interpersonal dynamic in the group well:
Miles never said much about our playing. He just wasn’t the kind of leader who gave notes or made suggestions unless we asked him to. Even then, he usually responded with cryptic comments, almost like little puzzles we had to solve. And Miles never talked about the mechanics of music, the notes and keys and chords of it. He was more likely to talk about a color or a shape he wanted to create. Once, when he saw a woman stumble while walking down the street, he pointed at her and told us, “Play that.”2
That impressionistic dictum, and the set of sly practices behind it, form a recurring theme in the recoll
ections of Davis’s sidemen. Shorter and Hancock assumed chief stewardship of this mystique (it jibes with their Buddhist practice), but the Miles Davis alumni society includes many other influential artists besides: the pianists Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett, and Joe Zawinul; the drummers Jack DeJohnette, Al Foster, and Billy Hart; the bassists Dave Holland and Marcus Miller; the guitarists John McLaughlin, Pete Cosey, and John Scofield; the saxophonists Gary Bartz, Dave Liebman, and Kenny Garrett.
All of these musicians—and more; that list is hardly exhaustive—moved through Davis’s bands at some point during his wolfman transmogrification from a modern-jazz paragon to a gnarly funk shaman. Some of them formed important electric bands of their own, populating the first and second waves of what would come to be known as fusion. As a bloc, their understanding of jazz was untethered from “the tradition” as it’s often enshrined. That didn’t mean they had little respect for jazz history, just that they held to a broader holistic idea, with no real investment in a rhetoric of purity.
During the 1980s and ’90s, as the tide officially turned toward jazz conservation, these views faced a backlash. In 1986 Stanley Crouch wrote a scathing and widely read polemic, “On the Corner: The Sellout of Miles Davis,” that decried the trumpeter’s corruptive influence: “His pernicious effect on the music scene since he went rapaciously commercial reveals a great deal about the perdurability of Zip Coon and Jasper Jack in the worlds of jazz and rock, in the worlds of jazz and rock criticism, in Afro-American culture itself.”3
Almost a decade later but along similar lines, the New York Times jazz critic Peter Watrous took the occasion of a new album by Shorter—High Life, produced by Marcus Miller, with a chamber orchestra and a funk-fusion rhythm section—to publish an essay titled “A Jazz Generation and the Miles Davis Curse.” His pitch was simple: by following Davis down a fusion path (for crass commercial reasons, because what other motivation could there have been?), artists like Shorter, Hancock, and Corea had abdicated their place in the jazz pantheon, creating the vacuum that Wynton Marsalis had rushed in to fill. Watrous painted these musicians as pitiable prodigals, no longer possessed of even the ability to pick up where they left off. Shorter’s High Life was, he carped, “a pastel failure and a waste of his enormous talent; it is as if Picasso had given up painting to design greeting cards.”4