PolyTropos / Of Many Turns

Track List

Spontaneous Pi

  14:21

Spontaneous One

  10:43

Spontaneous All

  9:02

Mdw Ntr

  5:04

Spontaneous Drum

  8:36

Multiplicity of Approaches

  5:50

9 to 5

  7:52

Of Many Turns

  8:01

Lush Life cadenza / Pi

  11:43

Spontaneous One

  17:59

Mdw Ntr

  7:59

Round Midnight

  8:17

Pad Thai / Of Many Turns

  16:16

Wheel of Nature / Fire Revisited

  13:03

PolyTropos / Of Many Turns is the highly-anticipated new release from influential alto saxophonist / composer Steve Coleman. Comprised of two sets recorded live during a March, 2024 tour in France, it features his band Five Elements, with long-running partners Jonathan Finlayson on trumpet and Sean Rickman on drums, with new addition Rich Brown on bass. Popmatters said of his prior release, 2021’s Live at the Village Vanguard, Volume II (Mdw Ntr): “The tides of his creativity continue to swell, change, surge… It is, actually, a refraction of culture and tradition that includes James Brown and Public Enemy, Jimi Hendrix and Duke Ellington, and Louis Armstrong…. It is art infused with all that information, and it challenges us simultaneously.”

Since his 2018 release Live at the Village Vanguard, Vol. I (The Embedded Sets), Coleman has focused on releasing live recordings, which he believes to be the only true representation of the risk-taking nature of his music. These two sets, recorded in Paris and Voiron, France, document the continued refinement of the inimitable Five Elements musical lingo. It’s a free-flowing music that mixes predetermined and spontaneous figures and compositions into continuous movements characterized by swift twists and turns that depends completely on a constant, extrasensory level of communication gained from thousands of hours of collective performance. The collaboration is democratic, with every instrument simultaneously contributing rhythmically and tonally. Their unique interaction is facilitated by their unusual stage arrangement in a semicircle, which – much like a drum circle – allows for eye contact and other unspoken cues that can instantaneously redirect the music in a completely different direction. The music is mostly played in long, staccato lines, furthering the impression that each instrument is a pitched drum, reinforcing the notion that this is unmistakably music born from the African diaspora.

Throughout his almost half-century long career, Coleman has drawn inspiration from concepts outside of music. For example, on his various Pi releases he has found musical insight from Ifá, the Yoruba divination system (The Mancy of Sound), the human heartbeat (Functional Arrhythmias), human joints (Synovial Joints), boxing moves (Morphogenesis), and ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs (the two Live at the Village Vanguard sets). More recently, Coleman has studied the structural chains of amino acid molecules, inventively using them as blueprints for making melodic and rhythmic connections. According to Coleman: “Amino acid synthesis can occur in a variety of ways, so in my musical re-imagining of the biochemical reactions, the melodic cells are formed through many different pathways, or ‘of many turns’ based on these patterns. The music could be called polytonal, in that intervals continuously bond in specific ways to form various tonal molecules, which take the place of traditional harmonies.” These new compositions are often distilled down to short phrases that are interwoven with existing compositions and improvisation into the group’s spontaneous interplay. The music has long-ago moved away from the stilted head-solo-head format into a free-flowing, highly sophisticated conversation guided by a complex system of call and response that magically creates form and structure on the fly. The band’s virtuosity is astounding, with Brown and Rickman providing an endless groove, deceptive with its constant changes in color and rhythmic variation. Coleman and Finlayson banter back and forth with agreements and disagreements, interjections and exclamations.

The Greek words PolyTropos (πολuτροπον), which means “many” or “multiple” and “turns,” is famously used by Homer to describe Odysseus in the first sentence of the Odyssey. Its meaning in that context has been widely debated, ranging from “much-traveled,” “complicated,” “multi-layered,” and “of many ways.” Each of these definitions can be used to aptly describe Coleman and his music. Matt Mitchell who recently performed with the band at The Stone in New York said of his experience: “No matter how much a musician has listened to Five Elements, and no matter how much advance notice a musician might have for a Five Elements gig, little can prepare one for the experience of performing with an improvising band that has 25-plus years of experience playing together. Hair-trigger cues can send the band off into a spontaneous arrangement of a piece that has mutated to a state nearly unrecognizable from the original recording. Setlists are rarely made or discussed. New music is presented that builds upon and extends the base concepts. Completely spur-of-the-moment compositions can emerge on any given night, soon to be merged with an older piece or never to be heard again. It’s an ever-expanding network of spontaneous concepts, continually expanding and mutating.” Acting on their collective, mysterious whim, the band takes the audience through exhilarating pivots and swerves based on some secret, enigmatic internal logic. It is collective improvisation of the highest order.