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Steve Coleman and Five Elements - Weaving Symbolics
Another sprawling album (two CDs, each with a video on the flip side, lots of different musicians and ensembles), but still feels more focussed and unified than its predecessor, "Lucidarium." The quasi-systematic complaint ("Could have been cut down to one CD") isn't totally avoided, but I enjoy the challenge this double album poses.
WS starts out with a saxophone solo version of "Ritual." This composition reappears four more times, each time in a different orchestration: alto-voice, alto-trumpet-trombone, alto-bass-drums (with Eric Revis and Jeff Watts, which inevitably turns into a straight-ahead post-bop romp) and finally in a so-called septet (if you count the three percussionists as one person). This inter-weaving of themes is common to the whole album, as other compositions appear in several guises, though sometimes redundantly ("Triad Mutations" is wonderful, but the three versions add little).
One of the major features is Jen Shyu's voice. She mostly sings wordlessly and is used as another instrument, although there are lyrics to "Circle Weaving" (which appears twice) and she scats on "Glyphs In Motion," which is fitting, given its boppish main motif. I'm not usually a big fan of vocals like this, but really like them here. In fact, Shyu is key to my two favourite tracks: "Triad Mutations II" and "Li Bai / Astrology II." The former has beautiful vocal harmonies and an almost tropical feel to it, the latter takes on an unexpected Chinese accent that is cleverly extended by Malik Mezzadri's flute. Another favourite is "Gregorian," which is unexpectedly fun.
Most of the time, the rhythm section is drums + three percussionists, and has a loose, clanky sound quite unlike the more mechanical, funk-derived sound Coleman usually uses. Nelson Veras (a Brazilian guitarist based in France) adds welcome acoustic guitar parts that add a bit of lightness and breathing space to often dense - yet rarely dissonant - horn arrangements.
There's a more American side to the album, too. The aforementioned Coleman/Revis/Watts trio makes two appearances, with the first one, the slow "Unction," being the more interesting: it allows Coleman to use the warmer, breathier tone he tends to reserve for standards, as opposed to the more metallic and tense one he generally has on his own compositions.
The second American trio is Coleman/Jason Moran/Marcus Gilmore. "Tehu Seven" is pretty extraordinary: very dark, dissonant and unsettling. BTW, Gilmore is Roy Haynes's grandson and Graham Haynes's nephew.
Overall, an excellent album, a sign that Coleman still has fresh ideas after all this time. There's a sense of pushing the settings for more-or-less post-bop improvisation (solo or collective) to their very limits.
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Linear Mode
