Steve Coleman

Time to understand Steve Coleman's music. Here's his site. I just can't tackle this before breakfast, but it's later in Boston so I figured I'd put this up now.

http://www.m-base.org
http://www.m-base.com/cnmat_ucb/Symmetry_Movement.html - check this out first.

Steve Lacy Tribute

I went to a concert last night that was a tribute for Steve Lacy held at New England Conservatory(where he tought). The fist half was alot of the top NEC jazz guys(some players you would have really been into, Dan) but the second half was different arrangements of the following: Dave Leibman, George Garzone, Danilo Perez, Bob Moses, Ran Blake and a few others that i was unfamiliar with(including Lacy's wife who is a singer). It was a really amazing night of music. Ran Blake(who, when on stage, prefers all the lights off) played 'Round Midnight in such an ingenious and extremely, extremely advanced way that the only real way to tell it wasn't Scriabn or someone was the fact that he still played the melody strongly(a rarity in this sort of setting). Leib blew is ass off. Perez is a comper to rival Herbie. Garz on soprano is unreal. Things like that.

Steve Coleman, Roswell Rudd

Alot has been goin on here recently. Last night i saw berklee's Ornette Coleman ensemble with Roswell Rudd. Rudd has recently been to West Africa studying the culure and music and overall sounds. He said the town he was in was very acoustically homogeneous and he brought back the overall sounds. From the little i've heard of him before, i dismissed him as being to blatt-y, which at times he is, but last night he played some trully masterful music. It's the closest an instrumentalist has come speaking in words that i've heard in a while.
Then today i saw a clinic over at New England Conservatory of Steve Coleman, who, after recieving visions of ancient egyptian symbols when he listened to trane and bird went to egypt and has apparently been studying some extremely advanced theoretical concepts since. His main point was basically illustrating how duality exists in music. He showed how we hear music as going up(typified by the authentic cadence(G7-CMaj7)) and that there is a whole other side of harmony going down. He referred to these things as Terrestrial Gravity and Concentric Gravity, and started using the term of 'negative keys.' It was all very fast and very unique, but what i saw it as(without giving much of the extremely in depth logic to explain it) is this.

C Maj
(neg) G
-G in terrestrial terms is F-6(D-7(b5))
the resolution of this is now F-6 to CMaj reversing the typical direction in which we hear on the level of the root.

there is alot more, including the logic of the concentric gravity voice leading and big diagrams of frequency ratios and yadayadayada. It was such a different world, but it made a deep kind of sense. This was the first time i've been actually engaged by a theoretical discussion since i got here. people are typically such theory idiots that normal college level theory is really suited to an 8th grade level mind and that's where it stops. it's pathetic. But this stuff really requires some thought, just like the other stuff did when i was a kid. I'm excited. I'll try to get a hold on it better and explain it a little more.