Steve Coleman - Ritual

An interesting display of the jazz process at work from NPR. Present is a trumpeter, saxophonist and vocalist. Coleman says that as the vocalist learned their language, she began to adapt what she did to their style.

Coleman describes the process as a symbiotic connection of music. "It's a lot of different influences, coming from different places — plus, whatever's coming from inside you, which is the main thing."

He describes "invisible paths". After listening the first and second time, I found the music discordant and had difficulty locating the paths of harmonic convergence. After sitting with it for a time, it became clear. In terms of literary analogy, I was reminded of James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake with its stream of consciousness style. I would not describe this work as stream of consciousness as there is a structured coherence to each component part. If you listen, you can hear the sharing of each component part which leads me to hear this as a pleasant afternoon conversation; each with their own influences and perspectives but all coming together to share in a mutual conversation through the idiom of musicality.