Welcome to the New York Times Popcast, your Secret Society of Music News and Cultural

Entertainment. I'm your host Ben Ratliff. You're listening to Abakwa Obatala from the sign and the seal transmissions of the metaphysics of a culture,

by Steve Coleman from 1996. Subject of this pop cast is Steve Coleman who last

week became a MacArthur fellow which is to say the recipient of the so-called Genius Grant.

And we've got Nate Chinin, Jazz Critic from The Times, on the phone with us. Hi, Nate.

Hi, Ben.

So, Nate, Steve Coleman, we might say deserved this, at least by the logic of MacArthur awards given to improvisers in the recent past.

Do you think that's right?

Yeah, there was a certain amount of foreshadowing here.

Right. Okay, why don't you line that out for us?

Well, within the last, I guess, decade decade there have been you know a handful of MacArthur

fellowships handed out to jazz musicians and almost all of them have been to musicians who consider Steve Coleman a great influence

and in some ways a mentor.

So we're talking about going back to 2008 and there was a string of them not in perfectly

sequential years but there was Miguel Xen, there was Jason Moran, there was Daphne's Prieto, and there was

Vije Ier. Yeah, so that's what what four? That's four. The interesting thing is that those

four musicians I don't think that you'd mistake any one of them for another. Their outputs are pretty distinct. Right. And yet there is a pretty

strong line that you can draw from each of those artists to Steve Coleman.

And so, you know, what that says about him and his living legacy is interesting.

The music of some of those people might remind you of Steve Coleman's music more than more than others.

Right, right?

So Steve Coleman's music tends to be precise, sort of like the rhythm comes first, it's polyrhythmic, it's polyrhythmic, and yet if you really, really do the hard work and try to count it, it often comes down to odd numbers.

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