Steve Coleman & Five Elements + Kurt Elling and Yellowjackets Celebrate Weather Report
Steve Coleman & Five Elements
Steve Coleman (alto sax), Jonathan Finlayson (trumpet), Rich Brown (bass), Sean Rickman (drums)
Saxophonist Steve Coleman is a true genius who has become an inspiration for a whole generation of the Jazz world. He was one of the first to see the possibilities in rap and DJs, and out of that became a master for many musicians outside of the realms of Jazz as well. Furthermore, Steve Coleman, forever in the avant-garde of contemporary Jazz, is also a keen student of the origins of Jazz, and has delved deeply into Caribbean music, mainly Cuban music, as well as African music, where he found inspiration in the numerology of Ancient Egypt and Orishas…All of this, coupled with the influences from the great masters of Jazz, pop, rap and James Brown style groove funk, have shaped a work that has a language which is unique, and has marked the history of Jazz forever.
Since the late 1980s, he has been exploring with his emblematic Five Elements ensemble new territory with regard to the use of non-lineal practices of interpretation. Coleman uses spontaneous, pre-composed modules that can be played in any order. This allows each musician to jump spontaneously forwards or backwards, to different sections, even between compositions, revealing different layers of the music and reinventing the final result in a completely interactive way. This is what can be called improvisation in classical structures, an idea that Coleman and his friends called M-Base and which also served to provide a name for a group and a movement.
Steve Coleman’s music with Five Elements has been put together in several extraordinary albums: The Sonic Language of Myth (1999), The Ascension to Light (2000), Alternate Dimension Series I (2002), Harvesting Semblances and Affinities (2010), Functional Arrhythmias (2013) and the last one, recorded live, Live at the Village Vanguard Volume I (2018) and Volume II (2021).
Kurt Elling and Yellowjackets Celebrate Weather Report
Kurt Elling (vocals), Russell Ferrante (piano, keyboards), Bob Mintzer (tenor sax, soprano sax, EWI), Dane Alderson (electric bass), William Kennedy (drums, keyboards)
The masterful Jazz singer, Kurt Elling, and the legendary Jazz fusion group, Yellowjackets, will pay tribute to the signature super-group, Weather Report. We will be able to enjoy a concert in which the original lyrics of Kurt Elling will be adapted to the timeless music of Weather Report.
Kurt Elling, one of the most influential, most decorated (2 Grammys to his name) most dynamic, most innovative jazz singers around, and also one with the greatest capacity for adapting to different genres, is one of the best voices in world of Jazz today. He also is a musician who is constantly moving between styles and projects: swing, bossa nova, improvisation, funk, ballad, spoken word, poetry, scatting…His baritone voice, easily recognisable, warm and captivating; his technical mastery, his broad variety of tones and styles, his elegance, his ability to fuse music and poetry; his marvellous capacity for improvisation, his gift for telling stories in a convincing way, his creative spirit, his authenticity, his elastic rhythm, his unmistakeable vocal skill… Elling has been placed in the avant-garde of Jazz today and, is, at the same time, considered a worthy successor to the great voices of the history of Jazz.
Apart from interpreting the works of others, Elling composes his own songs and writes his own lyrics, and has worked with musicians like Brandford Marsalis, with whom he performed in Jazzaldia in 2016, Herbie Hancock, Dave Brubeck, Danilo Pérez, Stefon Harris and Fred Hersch. He often incorporates literary references from authors like Rilke, Proust and Neruda, into his songs. He writes powerful texts, with a powerful poetic spirit and creates new compositions, adding words to themes by Pat Metheny, John Coltrane, Keith Jarrett, Jaco Pastorius and Wayne Shorter. On this occasion, he will put his original words to themes by Weather Report, performed by the Yellowjackets.
In its over 40 years as a group, Yellowjackets has recorded 27 albums, given hundreds of concerts, received innumerable awards and honours, among them two Grammys, and has been well received by critics, in addition to enjoying great commercial success.
Throughout all its years, the band has never ceased to evolve, and has always been one of the most influential Jazz fusion groups, managing to maintain and even take its extraordinary musical levels to new heights and explore a singular universe, steeped in innovative and challenging soundscapes that are unique to its style as a group.
