Synovial Joints by Steve Coleman and the Council of Balance now has a late-April release date, the alto saxophonist-composer explaining more about the project on the New Music USA website.
“My general goal is to create music that in some way alters the underlying structure of spontaneous music, the most important being its flow, i.e., the type of propulsion that drives musical motion. Flow is one of the primary temporal qualities that provoke a physical response from the musicians, as well as a visceral response from the listeners.”
He says his secondary goal is “to introduce a different concept of how tonal magnetism is achieved through musical composition. By using the analogy of biological neural networks, spontaneous melodies traveling along tonal pathways can function in ways that reveal novel tonal qualia, perhaps experienced differently by the musician and the listener.”
Structurally, the MBASE innovator, whose most recent previous release for Pi, Functional Arrhythmias, the US label on which this latest album is also issued, explains: “This suite will be developed on ideas that reflect the processes, functions and rhythms of the human body. My intention is to model individual elements of the musical composition on the physiological movements within the nervous, respiratory, cardiovascular, lymphatic, endocrine, and exocrine systems of the human body. Many of these systems are cyclical, involving the circulation of fluids, gases, and electrochemical signals throughout the body, by using various methods of rhythmic contraction and relaxation. The overall musical structure of the composition will be held together based on the musculoskeletal system, hence the title Synovial Joints Suite.”
The concept for orchestrating this suite, inspired by listening to natural sounds recorded in the Amazon Rainforest, Coleman calls “concept camouflage orchestration... an idea that distributes instrumental sounds so that they are perceived as being heard in foreground, middleground, and background relationships.”
Coleman composed the majority of this suite during a two-month sabbatical from performing and instrumentation on this project includes his ensemble Five Elements, with guests from the world of new music and also percussionists from Cuba and Brazil.
Steve Coleman, top, photo: Wikipedia. The album cover of Synovial Joints is above