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Steve Coleman & the Five Elements

b. 20 Sept 1956, Chicago, Illinois, USA. Developing up encircled by dance music – funk, rock and roll, spirit and blues – in Chicago’s south part offered Coleman a flavor for tempo he never dropped. He discovered violin in college, but deserted it for the alto saxophone at age 15, playing in Wayne Brown cover rings. At Illinois Wesleyan College or university he was the just dark person in the music division, quite a surprise for a person who says he ‘do not understand any white people until he was 17 or something’. Told to improvise in his jazz music group, he tested his record collection to discover that his dad – a ‘Parrot’ fanatic – got slipped inside a Charlie Parker recording. He discovered the solos, just like he previously Maceo Parker’s. Time for Chicago he installed with Von Freeman, the famous tenor participant and pedagogue, learning the rudiments of bebop for the bandstand. He shifted to NY in 1978 to become listed on the Mel Lewis – Thad Jones Big Music group, later on playing in the Cecil Taylor Orchestra and Sam Streams’ Winds Of Manhattan group. Dynamic and articulate, Coleman and kindred spirits – including vocalist Cassandra Wilson – shaped M-Base, a self-help corporation for dark musicians, wanting to integrate all types of dark music right into a fresh ecumenical design. M-Base refreshingly by-passed the John Coltrane / Michael Brecker design of the Berklee University Of Music mainstream for the quirky, electrical jazz/funk using a dash of Thelonious Monk and harmolodics as well. Coleman continues to be hailed as the successor to Charlie Parker and attacked being a self-hyped mediocrity. Critics possess favoured his use Dave Holland’s group, playing fairly straight forward bop, but Coleman promises to try out the same design in his group Five Components. He documented prolifically through the 90s and 00s along with his different ensembles, such as Renegade Method (with Greg Osby, Joe Lovano, Craig Convenient, Kenny Davis, and Yoron Israel), the Mystic Tempo Culture, the Metrics, as well as the big music group Council Of Stability, and became involved with musical exchanges with music artists from Cuba and Africa.

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