Music Education Monday: Workshops with saxophonist Steve Coleman

Though he doesn't categorize his music as "jazz," Steve Coleman has been a significant player on the contemporary improvised music scene since the 1980s as a saxophonist, composer, bandleader, and educator.

A 2014 recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship (aka "the genius grant"), Coleman (pictured) is a 59-year-old Chicago native who's been called "one of the most rigorously conceptual thinkers in improvised music" by the New York Times.

He's noted particularly as one of the originators and chief promulgator of M-BASE, an acronym for "Macro–Basic Array of Structured Extemporizations." As explained by Coleman, it's not a musical style, but rather a conceptual approach - "a way of thinking about creating music."

Without getting too much more into the specifics, suffice it to say that Coleman has a lot of interesting ideas, and today for Music Education Monday, you can get a sampling of some of them by checking out videos from a series of workshops that he conducted from May through October of 2013 at Seeds, a performance space and gallery in the NYC borough of Brooklyn.

There are five videos in total, each including a combination of performance, lecture, and discussion, adding up to nearly fifteen hours worth of content.

You can see the videos after the jump...