Hermeto Pascoal and Steve Coleman Brought Their Musical Vernaculars to Internationalist Dialogues Mediated by Jazz

Introduction

The musicians Hermeto Pascoal and Steve Coleman, on the face of it, are very different people with distinct backgrounds and distinctive music. Pascoal was born in 1936 in a tiny rural settlement called Olho d’Agua in the Brazilian state of Alagoas.^[1] As an albino child, Hermeto stayed away from the sun and practiced every instrument he could get his hands on: his father’s accordion, pipes which he fashioned from local reeds as a child, and even scrap metal at his grandfather’s blacksmith’s workshop that he beat like drums.^[2] When Hermeto was 14, his family moved to Recife, the capital of the state of Pernambuco, and Hermeto began playing for Rádio Tamandaré.^[3] For the next 15 years working in local radio, Pascoal taught himself to read and write music, play accordion, piano, flute, sax, bass, and guitar, and professionally perform jazz, Brazilian traditional, and club music alike.^[4] Pascoal’s multi-instrumental mastery and multicultural influences led him to compose for European symphony orchestras just as much as he recorded eccentric duets with chickens, dogs, and pigs.^[5]

Meanwhile, Steve Coleman, born on the south side of Chicago in 1956, picked up the alto saxophone in his first year of high school.^[6] After two years at Illinois Wesleyan University, he transferred to Chicago Music College at Roosevelt University to focus on downtown Chicago’s musical nightlife, hanging out with and learning from premier saxophone improvisers like Von Freeman, Bunky Green, and Sonny Greer.^[7] Enthralled with conceptually advanced performances by New York bands passing through Chicago, led by the likes of Max Roach, Art Blakey, and Sonny Rollins, a 22-year-old Coleman hitchhiked to Manhattan.^[8] After surviving for a few months in a YMCA, Coleman picked up a gig with the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Big Band, and then more gigs with the Sam Rivers and Cecil Taylor Big Bands.^[9]

Coleman also played at this time with a small street band that evolved into the Five Elements, where Coleman developed his M-Base philosophical concept of extemporaneous improvisation and experimented with nested looping structures.^[10] Coleman’s combination of a liberal arts background and full immersion into innovative African-American musical spaces manifested into many eclectic projects, including artificially intelligent music software called The Improviser, research trips to West Africa and Cuba that expanded his understanding of African diasporic music, and cultural exchange between the members of the Five Elements and Indian Carnatic musicians.^[11]

What Coleman and Pascoal share is a central pursuit of exploration, experimentation, and innovation that is held in conversation with their unequivocal rejection of the “jazz” label.

A Brief History of Rejecting the “Jazz” Label, from Ellington to Coleman

Coleman and Pascoal reject “jazz” in favor of terms that are less limiting or more inclusive, and they are not the first to do this. Duke Ellington famously resisted the term “jazz” for several reasons. For one, as Ethan Hein writes, he did not want to be “boxed into a category,” stating the following in a 1930 interview: “I am not playing jazz. I am trying to play the natural feelings of a people.” Ellington saw no contradiction between “dance” and “serious” music, but his often very demeaning critics refused to take his “jazz” seriously.^[12] White classical critics and even middle-class black listeners alike associated jazz with the “vulgar” and lowbrow.^[13] Ellington’s rejection of the jazz term, along with his elegant dress, his dignified public persona, and his suave speaking style, all aimed to present a dignified vision of black culture as the “true creative voice of the United States”.^[14]

Max Roach also firmly rejected the “jazz” term. Taking a more outspoken approach than Ellington, Roach decries “jazz” as a “racist and prurient” label created by white Americans to describe black music.^[15] He traces its etymology to the sexual epithet “jass” that was applied to Congo dances in New Orleans and argues that black musicians were sought out as a kind of “sexual totem” by swinging white listeners of the Jazz Age.^[16] To Roach, jazz means “the abuse and exploitation of black musicians… cultural prejudice and condescension”: from the detestable working conditions of the dingy clubs to the unspeakably dismal salaries of black musicians in particular, to the white control of production, recording, and managing.^[17] Roach stresses this last point, noting that the way a black musician is categorized by the industry can lead to financial success or failure.^[18] To him, a black musician in America “boiled down” is simply “a black musician playing black music.” If we are to “decolonize our minds and re-name and re-define ourselves,” argues Roach, we must “cleanse our minds of false categories” imposed on black music: “jazz music, rhythm and blues, rock and roll, gospel, spirituals, blues, folk music.”^[19]

Today, over fifty years since Roach’s essay was published, Coleman and Pascoal continue the legacy of resistance to the “jazz” moniker. They echo Roach and Ellington’s arguments, particularly the notion that jazz is a limiting category that can have severe financial and artistic consequences for musicians in particular. At the same time, Coleman and Pascoal notably focus less on the American political conflicts surrounding the term “jazz”—perhaps taking them as an obvious given—and focus more on advancing artistic and even spiritual notions of the oneness of human creativity.

Although Coleman readily acknowledges jazz as his “most important musical reference,” he refuses the name and concept of jazz as applied to his music.^[20] In his 2007 essay “The ‘Nexus’ of a Musical Language and Jazz,” Coleman writes, “I NEVER think about ‘Jazz’ and I NEVER worry about what others expect me to play or expect my style to be.” He explains that as a performing musician, it is much more important for him to think about form, structure, and what he is trying to say than it is to use styles or labels. Styles and labels draw him into the fatal trap (“one of the biggest traps a musician can fall into”) of thinking about the expectations of anyone besides his fellow band members.^[21] Moreover, he refuses to “accept that ‘Jazz’ exists”; he has never considered Coltrane, Ellington, Tatum, etc. to be “jazz” musicians, because he thinks “jazz” evokes the “not-so-creative” quality that people seek from “forms from the past.”^[22] Thus he is also concerned with the way labels shape audiences; as soon as the music industry places the “jazz expectation” onto an artist, their audiences will be determined and limited in a very particular way.^[23]

Coleman argues that audience members suffer too, trapped in their “a priori and preconceived expectations” of his so-called “jazz” music and thus incapable of open and objective listening. He points out the irony in the conservative attitudes of many jazz listeners who find themselves unprepared for surprises in what is supposed to be inherently improvisatory and surprising music.^[24] Coleman has never offered a label to his own music; his biography states that critics who have labeled his music “M-Base” are mistaken: “This concept was philosophical, [and] Coleman did not call the music itself M-Base.”^[25] To Coleman, his music and the long musical tradition to which it belongs are not automatically classifiable as “jazz,” or as anything; Coleman dismisses a name like “Great Black Music” as generic, and would probably say the same of Roach’s suggestion of “black music.”^[26] Coleman seems to wish he lived in a world where this tradition is nameless.^[27]

Like Coleman, Pascoal feels that labels like “jazz” would do a disservice to his music by pigeonholing his boundless and eclectic creativity. Pascoal rejects terms like jazz, Brazilian popular music or MPB, bossa nova, chorinho, and forro.^[28] But Pascoal is slightly less polemical than Coleman, and since he dislikes labels rather than refusing to believe in them, he is able to pull a different rhetorical move: assigning his own music his own label.^[29] Pascoal gives his own music the only label he can accept: musica universal, meaning that his music’s dynamic energy comes from the universe.^[30] To Pascoal, this label appeals to the universality, creativity, and versatility of Brazilian culture. Brazil, according to Pascoal, is the most multicultural country in the world, and therefore the “world is Brazil” and all the world’s music is in Brazil.^[31] Musica universal also encourages the creative license to use any stylistic materials at hand. Just as Hermeto uses any physical materials at his disposal to forge new instruments, he uses diverse musical styles to forge his own universal sound. Finally, musica universal, to Pascoal, is simply more interesting than the tedium of playing only jazz, or only classical music, on just one or two instruments. Like Coleman, Hermeto finds labels uninteresting and unhelpful because he is much more interested in the boundless possibilities for the human creative spirit untethered from the limitations of expected styles, instruments, instrumentations, and so on.

You Implicitly Reference the Thing You Consciously Distance Yourself From: Jazz Edition

Pascoal and Coleman choose not to label their music as “jazz” or pigeonhole it to any one genre. However, it is hard not to hear the jazz (and other musical influences) in their music. For one, the spirit of musicians associated with jazz tends to be innovative, eclectic, open-minded, spontaneous, improvisation-oriented, creative, and adaptive—all qualities that Pascoal and Coleman undoubtedly embody. Now, Coleman would probably argue that this is a meaningless tautology, since “jazz” musicians embody such a creative spirit that derives from a far deeper humanity. But Coleman is so devoted to making the case that he doesn’t see any jazz in anything that he’s almost silently screaming the word “jazz” in his writing. He is like Shakespeare’s lady who doth protest too much, he is the guy trying so hard not to think of a polar bear that he is helplessly thinking about a polar bear. As arts philosopher Frederico Lyra de Carvalho writes, Coleman, in rejecting jazz, cannot discard it; in criticizing the concept of jazz, one must make use of it.^[32] Coleman, simultaneously situating himself “inside and outside of his artistic object,” embodies dissonances with the norms of the jazz world and contradictions within himself that create a rich artistic experience for the listeners of his music.^[33] Jazz and other styles, in being rejected, have made themselves manifest in new ways in Coleman and Pascoal’s music.

The jazz tradition is an appropriate and exciting analytical lens for the music of Pascoal and Coleman. Appropriate, because these musicians grew up steeped in jazz and have strong (even if negative) opinions about it that informed their creative choices. And exciting, because they brought their respective vernacular musical languages—Brazilian and funk—in conversation with the widely-recognized language of jazz, to innovative new ends. (I am taking “jazz” broadly: I mean that bebop, improvisation, swing, groove, etc. are being referenced.) In other words, the use of jazz vocabulary in their fusion music ironically contributes heavily to its accessible and appealing novelty. Jazz provides an often crucial entry point to analyzing Pascoal and Coleman’s music. My argument is not that jazz is essential or primary in either of these musicians’ work; after all, another scholar could insist on the primacy of the Brazilian vernacular in Pascoal’s music (which is so evident that it wouldn’t be a very interesting argument). I am instead saying that these musicians’ active opposition to labels invites investigation of their interactions with labels. Jazz is the one label that Coleman and Pascoal happen to both oppose. Pascoal’s tracks “Little Cry for him (Chorinho pra ele)” (1977) and “Quiabo” (1987), and Coleman’s tracks “The Tao of Mad Phat” (1993) and “Rumble Young Man, Rumble” (2021), when analyzed with an eye for the influence of the jazz tradition, reveal which elements of jazz Coleman and Pascoal embraced and which they departed from.

Little Cry for Him (Chorinho pra ele)

“Little Cry for Him (Chorinho pra ele)” was first released on the LP Slaves Mass (1977). Pascoal’s instrumental forces include Brazilian jazz percussionist Airto Moreira, who had worked not just with Pascoal but in jazz fusion with Miles Davis and Return to Forever in the U.S.,^[34] and American jazz double bassist Ron Carter, the most-recorded jazz bassist in history and the bassist of the second great Miles Davis Quintet.^[35]

The connection between Pascoal and Davis and his personnel began in 1970 when Airto Moreira invited Pascoal to New York and introduced him to Davis.^[36] Davis, impressed, recorded three of Pascoal’s songs on Live-Evil (1972), but CBS credited all three to Davis.^[37] Pascoal brought a lawsuit against CBS that was only partially resolved—the 1997 CD reissue only gave Pascoal composition credit for one track, “Little Church.”^[38] Although Pascoal’s work with Davis automatically conferred him with a “cultural seal of approval” in the U.S.,^[39] it also gave him a sense of American cultural imperialism as borne out through the recording industry’s use of labels. The original 1971 release is labeled just “jazz fusion,” with no mention of “Hermeto Pascoal” beyond his voice,^[40] and so it is no wonder that this blatant erasure must have helped Pascoal grow a sense of protective pride in his contributions to music as a Brazilian and an individual, not just another “jazz” player.

In stark contrast to Live-Evil, Slave Mass credits Pascoal amply with an almost absurdly varied list of contributions: composer, arranger, flute, acoustic guitar, soprano saxophone, piano, Fender Rhodes, recorder, and clavinet.^[41] Using his fresh instrumentation and an energetic ensemble, Pascoal reinvents the Brazilian choro,^[42] an instrumental genre of Brazilian popular music originating from Rio de Janiero in the late 1800s, when the new influence of the European polka on Brazilian musicians blended with a previous cultural import, the Afro-Brazilian Lundu rhythm.^[43] The choro generally is based on a vibrant, cheerful, and rhythmically-oriented 2/4 rondo form and showcases the virtuosity and improvisation of the players.^[44]

Pascoal grounds the listener with elements that are typical to jazz and the choro alike: bass, rhythm-keeper, harmony parts, and the group of solo instruments, called the “chorão” (literally “weeper”).^[45] He refreshes the traditional Brazilian instrumentation with substitutions such as a Fender Rhodes instead of the cavaquinho (guitar) and recorder, piano, and clavinet instead of flute and mandolin as solo instruments. And over the course of his composition, Pascoal treats his beautiful, moderately-paced melody with a progressive increase in slight insanity, bringing up the pace from eighth note, to triplet eighth, to triplet sixteenth, to thirty-second note at the end, at which point the ensemble plays the melody faster than a bebop tune, so fast it can barely stay together. And he harmonizes his melody with bebop staples, from chains of ii V I’s to other chord progressions that rotate and zig-zag surprisingly (but seemingly inevitably) via subtle alterations and diminishments around the circle of fifths. “Chorinho” has a delightfully playful feel—even featuring someone making subtle “water drop” sounds at 0:16”—that seems distinct from the generally more serious bebop sound.

Carl Brauer, a reviewer from 1977, questions some of Pascoal’s bolder ideas, ridiculing the pig sounds on “Slaves Mass” and the “cartoon-mice-sounding” vocals on “Cannon,” but generally praises Pascoal’s inventiveness with instrumentation and imaginative sounds.^[46] Unlike the other “hackneyed, programmed, and predictable” music released by Warner Bros., Brauer finds Pascoal’s music to be “brimming with vitality.”^[47] In fact, Brauer finds that Slaves Mass satisfies his own definition of good jazz—“improvised music that is inventive, creative, with a distinctive personality”^[48]—demonstrating that the labeling of Pascoal’s music as jazz directly influenced its reception by critics. This critic’s assessment of Slaves Mass, mediated through the jazz label, matched Pascoal’s intended vision. Brauer’s jazz expectations perhaps did not prepare him well for Pascoal’s “Tudo e som” philosophy, where “everything is sound” and thus any “found” sound/noise can be just as instrumental as a clarinet.^[49] But Brauer’s jazz expectations opened a door to Pascoal’s music for him and certainly did not stop him from understanding it as Brazilian or unconventional (in other words, bigger than just “jazz”), especially since he was in a cultural moment where jazz was being fused with many genres around the world.^[50]

Quiabo

If “Chorinho pra ele” was cute and a little eccentric, “Quiabo,” a track from Pascoal’s album Só Não Toca Quem Não Quer^[51] is unrestrained, slightly unhinged, and full of unbridled joie de vivre. “Quiabo” is a maracatu,^[52] a musical form originating with carnival groups from Pernambuco (the state that Pascoal’s family moved to).^[53] This tradition was born as Maracatu Naçao (National Maracatu) among Afro-Brazilian slaves and ex-slaves who sought to maintain their national identity by holding dance parades where a community member would be crowned as a king or queen.^[54] The rhythm central to these parades, Baque Virado, means “turned-around beat,”^[55] referring to the strong emphasis of drums, agogô, and rattles that interact to produce a fast-paced and complex collective rhythm.^[56]

In “Quiabo,” Pascoal takes maracatu, a tradition that is already very energetic, intoxicating, nationalistic, and liberatory, and imbues it with a refreshed flavor. Pascoal, in a 2022 interview with Philip Freeman, offers insight into his compositional and conceptual process for enlivening and innovating on such forms by offering the analogy of a road:

When you’re driving somewhere on a road, very rarely the road is as straight as an arrow, absolutely straight. The road has curves and sometimes when you’re driving, you feel like getting off the road and going to a shortcut through the woods. It’s not a boring road that stays in one direction. The road meanders; it goes up the hill and down the hill and curves and goes right and left.

Pascoal’s analogy of the road, used here to explain Hermeto Pascoal E Grupo,^[57] is equally applicable to Só Não Toca Quem Não Quer, which features the same Grupo personnel. The ensemble is decidedly Brazilian: Carlos Malta on flute and sax, Itiberê Zwarg on double bass, Jovino Santos Neto on piano, Marcio Bahia, on percussion, Silvana Malta on voice, and Pascoal, as usual, on everything imaginable.^[58] As this Brazilian musical group is recording for a Brazilian musical label, the “jazziness” of a track like “Quiabo” is less readily apparent. However, expanding on Pascoal’s road analogy, if the maracatu is the vehicle of this piece, the woods in which Pascoal meanders are full of contemporary jazz fusion pathways: atonal keyboard solos rivaling Herbie Hancock, punchy and funky basslines reminiscent of Jaco Pastorius, and a freewheeling, spacious, slightly imbalanced percussion landscape in the vein of Tony Williams. In other words, Pascoal has taken the maracatu on a visit to 70’s jazz fusion in order to see what happens.

Reviewer and jazz vibraphonist Erik Charlston notes that Pascoal simultaneously “[takes] on a traditional Brazilian rhythm in a very uncompromising way” and makes it “grooving,” “gnarly,” and “dissonant.” Even if Pascoal would probably refuse to label this track jazz, he makes jazz his own on this record. He uses jazz fusion as an intermediary to introduce wide international audiences to the deliciously delirious and feverish feeling of the maracatu. As the maracatu stems from Afro-Brazilian slaves proclaiming their humanity, so too does jazz undeniably have comparable origins in enslaved Black Americans asserting their dignity.^[59] Thus the merging of these Africanist-derived genres is an appropriate means of expressing international solidarity, joy, and celebration for oppressed people in the Americas. If the American underbelly of imperialism manifested in Pascoal’s early experiences with the U.S. jazz scene, he reclaims jazz for a more unifying internationalist aim in “Quiabo.”

Little Girl on Fire

“Little Girl on Fire,” a track in the Steve Coleman and Five Elements album The Tao of Mad Phat (1993), explores Five Elements’ concept of collective meditation, a rhythm-oriented means of live musical communication.^[60] As Coleman describes on the liner notes to the album:

This concept involves restructuring either our own music or that of others by changing basic rhythmic, melodic, and emotional aspects using intuitive-logic, then spontaneously merging the altered music with other music which has been similarly restructured.^[61]

“Little Girl on Fire” aptly demonstrates the collective meditation concept. For the first twelve minutes, the collective meditation lives in a laid-back, atmospheric world colored with sweeping cymbals. Under the steady 66 BPM heartbeat of the drums and bass, Coleman, his mentor Bunky Green, and the pianist Andy Milne take meandering but very rhythmically-locked-in solos. Suddenly, at 11:54”, Coleman decides to restructure the paradigm, and the group locks into a funky half-time (120 BPM) groove harkening to James Brown and the like. The feeling of spontaneous collective transformation is exhilarating. Just like Pascoal, Coleman’s elaborate concepts and frameworks provide a language of communication that allows his ensemble to make such spontaneous choices with high precision.^[62]

Having thus restructured the paradigm of the groove, Coleman and Five Elements employ another jazz-derived technique to restructure this restructuring. Doug Hammond, a jazz drummer whom Coleman describes as one of the most important mentors, taught a young Coleman how to displace elements from the rhythm to other musicians without these rhythmic elements disappearing.^[63] At about 14:08”, Coleman begins a gesture on the sax that begins on aggressive repeated sixteenth notes that warp into a slower pulse that feels out-of-time with the rest of the ensemble. But as if by magic, Coleman turns this seemingly “wrong” gesture into a clear cue for the ensemble to metrically modulate with an approximately 5:4 ratio, turning down the tempo from about 128 BPM to 100 BPM. It takes everyone a moment to catch up, with drummer Oliver Gene Lake, Jr. staying steadfast to the original beat until 14:16” when guitarist David Gilmore had already caught on.

This kind of moment is what gives Coleman’s complex music a humanistic, and arguably jazzy, element in contrast to a more pre-composed and laser-precise genre like, say, math rock. In this moment of metric modulation, the players do not bend immediately to Steve Coleman’s leadership like puppets of an authoritarian; instead, they move and adapt at their own pace, adding additional individual nuance to the collectivity. The most obvious analogy for this Black American tradition of the sophisticated interplay of the individual and collective among agreed terms is the jazz tradition. Scholar Scott Saul identifies the connection between such interplay among jazz musicians with their connection to the Civil Rights struggles of the 60s, offering another Coleman, Ornette Coleman, as an example:

Free jazz pioneer Ornette Coleman typified this tendency when he asserted, “I let everyone express himself just as he wants to. The musicians have complete freedom”—and then went on to praise how his collaborators, while free, resisted the urge to grandstand and cultivate a “star-complex,” and how their music was “at all times a group effort.”^[64]

Regardless of Coleman’s renunciation of the “jazz” term, an understanding of this jazz tradition elucidates what Coleman is contributing to this lineage. Why doesn’t Coleman explore the possibility of reclaiming “jazz” or any term as a unifying label? An example of this phenomenon is when “hard bop” became associated with black greats like Ornette, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, and Sunny Murray, who were unified by common principles of freedom and communal resistance. But Coleman prefers, as always, to appeal to the universality of his concepts among all humans, quoting Bartók in the liner notes:

On the other hand, the composer himself, when he is the performer of his own composition, does not always perform his work in exactly the same way. Why? Because he lives; because perpetual variability is a trait of a living creature’s character.^[65]

Rumble Young Man, Rumble

Through his commitment to repudiating overcommitment to labels such as “jazz,” Steve Coleman redefined and innovated his music in opposition to these limitations. In “Rumble Young Man, Rumble” from Steve Coleman and Five Elements’ album Live at the Village Vanguard Volume II (MDW NTR), Coleman brings together elements of his own vernacular from Chicago and New York streetlife and nightlife: spoken word, hip hop, and of course, jazz. This track also features a distinctive element key to Coleman’s work: “nested looping structures,” meaning multiple rhythmic patterns that begin on the same downbeat but then diverge in ways that reinforce each other and create strong forward momentum until they reconverge.^[66] Within the cyclic repetition of nested looping structures, rhythmic dissonance emerges that creates both tension and the expectation of release through reconvergence. Since the ’80s, Coleman’s compositions tended to be “structured through the relation of two or more superimposed cycles of different lengths.”^[67] In an effort to justify nested looping structures as a conceptualization that can universally explain the interlocking rhythmic patterns of the African diaspora, starting in 1993 Coleman went on research trips to Ghana, Senegal, and Côte d’Ivoire.^[68] Carvalho argues that this African association allowed Coleman “greater distance from European conceptions of rhythm.”^[69] To be more specific, Coleman was able to avoid the American manifestations of simple European triple and especially duple meters that predominated jazz and other American popular genres of the late 20th century. In his opposition to just belonging to American jazz or hip hop, he was driven to explore broader African diasporic traditions.

This exploration deeply informed Coleman’s approach to nested looping structures in collaborations such as Live at the Village Vanguard with the wordsmith Kokayi. The intermeshed rhythmic cycles in “Rumble Young Man, Rumble,” not to mention the spoken word poetry, are certainly hard to pin down as “jazz.” While the bass remains locked into a swirling motif in 7, the horns give an urgent declamation in 5. The drums are, unexpectedly, one of the least predictable instruments, usually swearing allegiance to the pulse in 5 of the horns but sometimes suddenly modulating into 7 to accentuate the rhythm in the bass (for example, see 1:45”). And somehow, Kokayi’s extemporization flows with seeming ease through these treacherous currents. The effect produced is a cognitively demanding but hypnotic groove that seems incapable of running out of energy.

Coleman’s rhythmical innovations undoubtedly appeal to many loyal jazz listeners. I intentionally say “jazz” because his primary audience is, for better or worse, jazz listeners. One of the gnarliest contradictions embedded in Coleman’s refusal of “jazz” is that he “participates actively in its world”—that he “records, gives interviews and tours all over the world under the jazz label.^[70] Carvalho doubts that Coleman’s experience would have been possible under another label, or no label at all. Coleman believes that the way to develop the jazz sound tradition is to “engage in a simultaneous continuation and negation of it.”^[71] “Rumble Young Man, Rumble” is both brazenly innovative and transparent about its musical roots. Jazz syncopation is itself a product of a long evolution from the “complex, multilayered, polyrhythmic, and polymetric designs indigenous to all kinds of West African ritual dance and ensemble music”^[72]—the same “source” from which Coleman sought refreshed inspiration. Thus, by looking outside of jazz, Coleman contributed, in the form of explicit Africanist nested looping structures, an element of jazz that was already there. Carvalho argues that Coleman does not make a “radical rupture” from jazz and remains in the jazz world.^[73] In his opposition to the music industry, to certain types of audience members, to jazz tropes, he is dependent on them.^[74]

Conclusion

Steve Coleman and Hermeto Pascoal have rejected the term “jazz” even as their music is heavily steeped in jazz practice discourse, among many other practices and discourses. Their justifications for doing so are similar: they seek to open up creative possibilities, break out of the overbearing expectations of audiences and industry people, and promote a universal humanistic vision of the musical nature inherent to all human beings. However, their inevitable interaction with jazz as a label through their discursive rejection of it causes complex tensions and contradictions that Coleman and Pascoal seem to welcome as fuel for their creative aims. When Pascoal justified musica universal, he pointed to Brazil’s multiculturalism.^[75] The composer encountered the reality of American cultural imperialism and found a way to reclaim American jazz fusion in a project celebrating the universalist spirit of his Brazilian national identity. As Coleman tried to stand simultaneously inside and outside of jazz, he found elements beyond jazz (or hidden deep within it) that he could then ultimately bring back in a continuation of the existing jazz tradition.

These figures both revere the traditions they belong to but refuse to pigeonhole their music as “jazz,” a loaded term that to them implies the old-fashioned and nostalgic vantage point of the largely white American recording industry. They did not rid themselves of this ever-powerful industry, as evidenced by Brauer’s review of Pascoal’s music or the consistent mislabeling of Coleman’s musical style as “jazz” or “M-Base,” but they successfully opened the door to innovative roads and pathways for their listeners. In denying the jazz label, Pascoal and Coleman were not trying to sanitize their music of its complex racial/political/cultural/economic history, but only to broaden the scope of these issues to an international and less U.S.-centric scale.

What makes jazz “jazz”? To Pascoal and Coleman, the resounding answer is that the essence of humanity gives jazz, like all other music, its characteristics (rather than jazz representing something new that wasn’t already there). Yet these musicians are clear that humanity is all one, not all the same, and thus an individual musician is permitted to make a bold, maybe even iconoclastic, contribution to the human collective. I’ll be darned if this coherent contradiction isn’t at the heart of the music of Hermeto Pascoal, Steve Coleman, and of course, American “jazz.”

Jump to full bibliography.

1. Phillips ↑

2. Phillips; Neto, 122 ↑

3. Neto, 122 ↑

4. Ibid ↑

5. Ibid, 120 ↑

6. Larkin, The Guinness Who’s Who of Jazz, 98 ↑

7. “Biography | Steve Coleman” ↑

8. “Biography | Steve Coleman”; Jung ↑

9. “Biography | Steve Coleman” ↑

10. Ibid. ↑

11. Ibid. ↑

12. Hein ↑

13. Ibid ↑

14. Ibid ↑

15. Roach 305-6 ↑

16. Roach 306 ↑

17. Ibid ↑

18. Ibid ↑

19. Roach 309 ↑

20. Carvalho, 6 ↑

21. “The ‘Nexus’ of a Musical Language and Jazz” ↑

22. Ibid. ↑

23. Carvalho, 7 ↑

24. Ibid. ↑

25. “Biography | Steve Coleman” ↑

26. Carvalho, 6-7 ↑

27. Carvalho, 7 ↑

28. Phillips ↑

29. Ibid ↑

30. Ibid ↑

31. Ibid ↑

32. Carvalho, 5 ↑

33. Carvalho, 4 ↑

34. Larkin, The Guinness Encyclopedia of Popular Music, 1749 ↑

35. Swatman ↑

36. Far Out Recordings ↑

37. Ibid. ↑

38. Ibid. ↑

39. Ibid. ↑

40. Miles Davis – Live-Evil ↑

41. Hermeto Pascoal – Slaves Mass ↑

42. Charlston 2019 ↑

43. “Choro Music – What Is It?” ↑

44. Ibid. ↑

45. “Choro Music – What Is It?” ↑

46. Brauer, 46 ↑

47. Ibid. ↑

48. Brauer 45 ↑

49. Freeman ↑

50. Not the hugest Brauer fan after noting his description of an Alice Coltrane album as “amateurish” and “aimless” (46). Grain of salt… ↑

51. Som Da Gente ↑

52. Charlston ↑

53. “Brazilian Dramatic Dances: Maracatu” ↑

54. “Brazilian Dramatic Dances: Maracatu”; “What Is Maracatu?” ↑

55. Vita and Whelden ↑

56. “What Is Maracatu?”; “Híbridos – Maracatu Nação” ↑

57. Som Da Gente ↑

58. Hermeto Pascoal & Grupo – Só Não Toca Quem Não Quer ↑

59. “Jazz | Britannica” ↑

60. “The Tao of Mad Phat” ↑

61. Ibid. ↑

62. Freeman; Carvalho, 3 ↑

63. Carvalho, 15 ↑

64. Saul 2003, 10-11 ↑

65. Bela Bartok: Mechanical Music; “The Tao of Mad Phat” ↑

66. Stewart ↑

67. Carvalho, 16 ↑

68. Ibid. ↑

69. Ibid. ↑

70. Carvalho, 8 ↑

71. Ibid. ↑

72. “Jazz | Britannica” ↑

73. Ibid. ↑

74. Ibid. ↑

75. Phillips ↑

Bibliography

Freeman, Philip. “Everything Is Sound: The Storied Career of Hermeto Pascoal.” Bandcamp Daily, March 11, 2022. https://daily.bandcamp.com/features/hermeto-pascoal-planetario-da-gavea-interview.

“Biography | Steve Coleman.” https://m-base.com/biography/.

Brauer, Carl. Review of 1977 Warners Bros. new releases, Cadence Vol. 2, no. 6 (1977): 45-6. https://jazz.ripmfulltext.org/RIPMJAZZ/Permalinks/1439615

“Brazilian Dramatic Dances: Maracatu.” http://www.maria-brazil.org/maracatu.htm.

Carvalho, Frederico Lyra de. (2021) 2021. “Improvisation and System from Inside and Outside: Steve Coleman’s Music through Adorno’s Critical Philosophy”. Música Popular Em Revista 8 (00). Campinas, SP:e021006. https://doi.org/10.20396/muspop.v8i00.14303.

Charlston, Erik. “Artist’s Choice: Erik Charlston Revisits Hermeto Pascoal.” JazzTimes, November 1, 2019. https://jazztimes.com/features/lists/artists-choice-erik-charlston-revisits-hermeto-pascoal/.

“Choro Music – What Is It?” https://www.choromusic.com/o-que-e-o-choro/o-que-e.html#.ZFgbb-zMKLu.

Hein, Ethan. “Duke Ellington, Percy Grainger, and the Status of Jazz in the Music Academy.” The Ethan Hein Blog (blog), December 17, 2017. https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2017/duke-ellington-percy-grainger-and-the-status-of-jazz-in-the-academy/.

“Híbridos – Maracatu Nação.” Accessed May 7, 2023. https://hibridos.cc/en/rituals/maracatu-nacao/.

Far Out Recordings. “Hermeto Pascoal, Universal Musician/Page6.” https://www.faroutrecordings.com/pages/hermeto-pascoal-universal-musician-page6.

Guinness World Records. “Ron Carter Earns World Record as the Most Recorded Jazz Bassist in History,” January 7, 2016. https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/news/2016/1/ron-carter-earns-world-record-as-the-most-recorded-jazz-bassist-in-history-411828.

“Jazz | Britannica,” May 4, 2023. https://www.britannica.com/art/jazz.Jung, Fred. “My Conversation With Steve Coleman.” m-base.com, 1999. http://m-base.com/interviews/my-conversation-with-steve-coleman/.

Larkin, Colin. The Guinness Who’s Who of Jazz. Guinness Publishing, 1992. https://books.google.com/books?id=m5Q7AQAAIAAJ, cited in “Airto Moreira” in Wikipedia, April 13, 2023, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Airto_Moreira&oldid=1149614485.

Larkin, Colin. The Guinness Encyclopedia of Popular Music: Mercer, Johnny to Tillman, Floyd. Guinness Pub., 1992. https://books.google.com/books?id=at43AAAAMAAJ, cited in “Steve Coleman” in Wikipedia, January 4, 2023, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Steve_Coleman&oldid=1131585735.

Luiz Costa Lima Neto. “The Experimental Music of Hermeto Paschoal e Grupo (1981-93): A Musical System in the Making.” British Journal of Ethnomusicology 9, no. 1 (2000): 119–42.

Phillips, Tom. “Hermeto Pascoal: The Whole World in His Hands.” The Guardian, November 17, 2011, sec. Music. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2011/nov/17/hermeto-pascoal.

Roach, Max. “What ‘Jazz’ Means to Me,” The Black Scholar, Summer 1972, 3–6, reprinted in Chapter 48 of Keeping Time: Readings in Jazz History, by Robert Walser, 305–10. Oxford University Press, 2014. https://books.google.com/books?id=ChgungEACAAJ.

Saul, Scott. Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t : Jazz and the Making of the Sixties, Harvard University Press, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/yale-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3300359.

Stewart, Jesse. “Articulating the African Diaspora through Rhythm: Diatonic Patterns, Nested Looping Structures, and the Music of Steve Coleman.” Intermédialités / Intermediality, no. 16 (2010): 167–84. https://doi.org/10.7202/1001961ar.

The M-BASE blog. “The ‘Nexus’ of a Musical Language and Jazz,” August 4, 2007. https://mbase.wordpress.com/2007/08/04/the-nexus-of-a-musical-language-and-jazz/.

“The Tao of Mad Phat | Steve Coleman.” https://m-base.com/recordings/the-tao-of-mad-phat/.

Vita, Cantarelli Juliana and Schuyler Whelden. “5. Maracatu de Baque Virado.” https://massapodcast.org/episodes/5-maracatu-de-baque-virado.

“What Is Maracatu?” http://jubadoleao.com/2/geek-out/what-is-maracatu/.

Discography

Hermeto Pascoal – Slaves Mass, 1977. https://www.discogs.com/release/424742-Hermeto-Pascoal-Slaves-Mass.

Hermeto Pascoal & Grupo – Só Não Toca Quem Não Quer, 1987. https://www.discogs.com/release/2755733-Hermeto-Pascoal-Grupo-Só-Não-Toca-Quem-Não-Quer.

Miles Davis – Live-Evil, 1971. https://www.discogs.com/master/62392-Miles-Davis-Live-Evil.

Steve Coleman And Five Elements – The Tao Of Mad Phat < Fringe Zones >, 1993. https://www.discogs.com/release/978979-Steve-Coleman-And-Five-Elements-The-Tao-Of-Mad-Phat-.

Steve Coleman – Live at the Village Vanguard Volume II (MDW NTR), 2021. https://stevecoleman.bandcamp.com/album/live-at-the-village-vanguard-volume-ii-mdw-ntr.