Steve Coleman and Five Elements — Live at the Village Vanguard, Vol.1 (The Embedded Sets) (Pi)
Live at the Village Vanguard, Vol. 1 (The Embedded Sets) by Steve Coleman
It’s a bit deceptive to state simply that Five Elements has been around for a few decades. While it’s true chronologically, the statement obscures the fact that 5E is constantly changing, the base workshop for altoist/composer Steve Coleman’s relentless conceptual and musical imagination. There are musical constants — intricacy, density, and tons of rhythmic momentum — and some longstanding personnel, too. But what makes Coleman’s music so vital is how he keeps turning over and reinventing his sound, even as his alto and compositional imprint are unmistakable.
For the group’s first live recording in 15 years, comprised of two sets at the Vanguard, Coleman is joined by trumpeter Jonathan Finlayson, guitarist Miles Okazaki, bassist Anthony Tidd and the outrageously good drummer Sean Rickman. It’s not just that Live at the Village Vanguard, Vol.1 (The Embedded Sets) contains over two and a half hours of music; listeners also get the opportunity to explore the group’s varied approaches to some of the same tunes from set to set. It’s something that we jazz nerds love to do, and there are riches here.
The first set pops up with the filthy mid-tempo funk of “Horda,” and just like that the group finds the sweet spot: a deeply organic groove that’s simultaneously the most ridiculously balanced complexity that you can’t quite count along with. This particular configuration of Five Elements has some serious chemistry built from many years of playing. That’s nowhere more evident than Coleman’s and Finlayson’s synergy, playing off each other or nailing the unisons. But it really is about the group sound in total. Things are always trailing off, overlapping someone else’s rhythm, shading bright or lurking just below. There is just so damn much going on in this music — so how does it sound so tight all the time?
One answer is that each player understands that they aren’t a typical soloist so much as a moving part in Coleman’s whole. Consider Okazaki (whose recent solo recording of the entire Thelonious Monk oeuvre is required listening, by the way). He’s got a real talent for finding nuggets of rhythm or melody at the heart of a large sound, turning them inside out and reinventing them. On “Djw,” for example, he locates a stuttering Jimmy Nolen figure that’s a bracing contrast to the Tidd-Rickman flow. Likewise, Okazaki bounces brilliantly through the circuitous, burbling post-bop funk of “twf.” Finlayson is just outrageously good, dialed in completely to what makes Coleman’s music work. On the whirligig “Figit Time” and on “Djw” he cranks out some simply bonkers improvising, growling lines, trading polyrhythms with Okazaki, playing so much trumpet that sometimes you feel as if you need to hold on for dear life.
And yet there’s a surprising amount of space for music so dense. Despite the complexity of the barnstorming “Change the Guard” or the tense, multi-tempo “rmT,” the structure isn’t a cage, but a framework for play. This is another benefit of the live versions: on many tunes, Coleman’s own a capella openings reveal how he hears the tempo and phrasing on deck. His alto sounds inquisitive to start “Little Girl I’ll Miss You/Embedded #1,” whose group performances takes the cues for some fairly chill counterpoint, tight harmony, and tasty brushwork. The slow, deliberate opening to “idHw” yields more spacious and free music than one often hears with this group. And the harmonic minor riffing that opens “Nfr” uncorks one of the finest neo-bop heads here.
The music resists closure or summation. But if one thing sums it up, it’s the sheer energy of it all. You know this from Coleman’s own vocalisms throughout, from his direction (“Open up! Open up!”) to his scatting duos with Tidd, to his end-of-set address to the audience (directing them to his website, he says “There’s lots of videos to teach people how to lose gigs”). Tight but loose, able to start and stop on a dime, this music is effervescent. Bring on Vol. 2!
