Steve Coleman and Five Elements: Live at the Village Vanguard vol. 1 (The Embedded Sets)
Pi Recordings

Live at the Village Vanguard, Vol. I (The Embedded Sets) is Steve Coleman's first live release in over fifteen years, a somewhat puzzling fact considering how ideally the live forum suits his music in terms of presentation and development. For Coleman the stage is like a lab setting where experimentation can be conducted freely and boldly, a place where constraints associated with in-studio performing don't apply. With both of the evening's sets included, the exhaustive two-CD release plays like a full night at the beloved New York venue, the alto saxophonist joined by long-time partners Jonathan Finlayson on trumpet, Miles Okazaki on guitar, Anthony Tidd on bass, and Sean Rickman on drums.

If their playing sounds particularly telepathic, there's good reason: the musicians' experience performing Coleman's music totals more than eighty years, which helps explain how they're able to execute his stunningly complex material with such consummate skill. Each of the players assumes a particular role: Tidd's the ever-reliable foundation whose unwavering pulse keeps everyone on track; liberated by the bassist's anchoring, Rickman plays with furious, incessant invention; front-line soloists Coleman and Finlayson consistently stun, never more so than when they tear through impossibly complex unison lines. Okazaki's spidery patterns are integral to the music, though they're often overshadowed by the high-volume expressions of the others. To these ears the guitarist is underutilized; though a number of solos by him do appear, his playing's less prominently featured than the front-liners.

Coleman's history with the Vanguard extends to the late ‘70s when he first performed as a twenty-one-year-old member of the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra and then with singer Abbey Lincoln in 1984. Three decades would pass before Coleman's next visit, this time as a leader with Five Elements in 2015, and the band's appeared every year since. Its tightness is in part attributable to the frequency with which the band plays: week-long residencies in cities such as Chicago, Los Angeles, Detroit, Philadelphia and New York naturally have established an advanced level of connectivity that in-studio rehearsals can't equal.

In contrast to Coleman's heavily through-composed 2017 release Morphogenesis (credited to his Natal Eclipse outfit), the live recording favours spontaneous composition and improvisation (some pieces apparently were hatched live on stage at the Vanguard earlier in the week), with new material coupled with live Coleman staples such as Doug Hammond's “Figit Time” and Bunky Green's “Little Girl I'll Miss You.” Much of the new stuff's rooted in a concept Coleman's been working on that strings pairs of notes together to create embedded melodic structures. Yet while that's no doubt the case the listener's attention is more likely to fix on the dazzling interactions of the musicians and the staggeringly high level at which they operate, never more so than when all five roar collectively through one of the leader's prototypically intricate charts (the roiling “twf,” “Djw,” and “Nfr,” to cite three examples). At such moments, the band becomes a perpetual motion machine whose playing provides one exhilarating and thrilling moment after another.

The saxophonist's playing is at its customary high level, whether it be the wistful emoting heard in “Little Girl I'll Miss You” or the scorching runs, leaps, and volleys endlessly careening through “Figit Time.” For his part, Finlayson deserves some kind of medal for being able to not only execute so commandingly the saxophonist's charts but to be as forceful a lead presence. The trumpeter rolls out one compelling solo after another (see his thoughtful, mellifluous turn at the start of the second set's “mT | Figit Time”), his indefatigable energy and imagination evident throughout.

September 2018