(Meilleures liner notes du monde.)

"In 1981, Steve Coleman and Five Elements was conceived with a desire to play unrestricted, creative music based on the living experiences of African-American people and the African Diaspora. The band began by rehearsing in basements in neighbourhoods such as New York City's Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant, attempting to capture the musical ideas gathered from dreams of futuristic musicals landscapes.

Earlier Five Elements explorations were concentrated on developing a distinct rhythmic base on which to build the band's musical structures. The rhythms were drawn from the music we heard while growing up and also what we were exposed to later as musicians studying and trying to perfect our craft. We then used imagination to adapt these rhythms to fit our experiences. The two previous albums, Black Science and Drop Kick take the concept a step further in expanding the unique melodic and voice leading aspects in music. This results from studies conducted in the way sound progresses and expands organically. Having the material unfold in this manner can give the soloists more material to draw from when building improvisations. Solos can be built using each song's rhythmic melodic and voice leading properties paralleling developments pioneered by men such as Duke Ellington and Charlie Parker.

Each of Duke's pieces had a particular feel, a special rhythmic and melodic sound progression that defined the character of each piece. We try to achieve this with our music, but in our own way. This we feel is more interesting than playing five or six songs with the same rhythms but with different chord changes. Parker was a master of improvisation. His ability to use the musical material of the song he was playing together with what was happening within the group he was playing with was phenomenal. Add to this his command of musical material from the past, his ability to constantly adjust to developments in his immediate environment, his attention to detail - and then spontaneously weave all of this together in an improvisation! This way of communicating has had a profound effect on how we perform today.

The Tao of Mad Phat differs from the concepts of the earlier Five Elements albums in that the music on this album was performed live before a studio audience. The main intention is not so much the realization of a commercially perfect project, but the documentation of the living process expressed through music. The way the band performs "live" has been pretty much a separate development from the way we play on recordings. We realized some time ago that some of the things we do in concert, like the collective meditations concept, have not been documented on recordings. 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 that has been similarly restructured. Performing in an environment which is as close as possible to doing a normal gig but still has the advantages of the sound capturing facilities of a professional recording studio seemed like one possible answer to this problem. Thanks to the audience present, the outstanding skills of the recording engineer, Joe Marciano, and the relaxed environment provided by the musicians in the band and the recording studio, we feel that some special moments were captured on tape.

This music is about our experiences in everyday life. It is a living music. We are very influenced by many of the styles and creations of music from the past and present but we are most concerned with the expression of our lives, as this is what we know best. We don't want to imitate other music, we don't even want to imitate ourselves. Music for us is a way of communicating experiences using the abstract language of organized sounds. We also enjoy playing music and we hope this recording captures all of that."

-Steve Coleman

"This album was recorded before a "live" studio audience. We play very different when playing before an audience and from this point on, we want to capture the style of performance that people experience when they see us play live. With that in mind, a small studio audience of about forty people was invited to the sessions to participate. Hopefully that vibe came off in the recording." (Five Phases Management)