About the Artist

Steve Coleman sees his music as a sonic symbolic form of communication describing the nature of the universe. A passionate researcher, as well as an improviser/composer, Coleman has traveled to Egypt, India, Ghana, Senegal, and Cuba in search of the cultural contexts that have produced the civilizations preserving highly developed and expressive forms of modulated vibration. Whether he's creating computer models based on the precession of the equinoxes, the motion of clouds, the flight pattern of honeybees or amplifying such disparate sources as Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Santería, and Kemetic cosmology, he is assuredly moving forward the sonic science and spiritual practice of the African Diaspora.

 "There have been at least two major streams of thought in this music that many people want to call 'Jazz.' There are those artists who seek to define their work in terms of a particular aesthetic that is already in existence. And there are others who are involved in an activity which, by its very nature, involves pushing a given form of expression beyond accepted limits. I call this latter position the 'creative path' or 'creative extreme' because this path is followed by very few, and is an extreme position. The creative extreme is also a tradition–and in the so-called Western nations this position has been occupied by people as diverse as Beethoven, Bartok, Parker and Coltrane. It is this tradition of the creative extreme that I choose to align myself with and, doing so, define this music as a living and growing form of expression."