Few jazz musicians over the past four decades have developed a practice as rigorous and original as that of alto saxophonist and composer Steve Coleman, whose many awards include a 2014 Mac­Arthur Fellowship. A Chicago native, he grew up on the south side in thrall to the music of bebop pioneer Charlie Parker, whose harmonic dexterity and rhythmic invention remain cornerstones of Coleman’s work. He studied with Chicago legend Von Freeman, a fiercely individualistic player who no doubt helped Coleman find the fortitude to trust in his own vision. By the mid-80s that vision had crystallized as M-Base (it stands for “macro-­basic array of structured extemporization”), a term for his approach to music that also became the name of a loose collective ensemble that originally included reedist Greg Osby, vocalist Cassandra Wilson, and pianist Geri Allen. M-Base dug into rhythms from around the world, melding the buoyancy of bebop with hard funk grooves and complex polyrhythms.

Other than the kind of workshop that you saw, there’s community outreach where we go out and do either open rehearsals or—I don’t know if you’d call them workshops, because some of them are for kids. “Demonstrations” would be more accurate. Demonstrations, question-and-answer open rehearsals, and performances. They’re not like performances at a nightclub or something—they’re looser than that. They’re in the surrounding south-side community. And then we do more formal performances at the Logan Center.

Normally a tour is a series of one-­nighters. You can’t get into anything because it’s just one night in a place, and most of it actually is traveling. This takes all that out of it. You’re just in one spot. This kind of thing was done more in the past—Miles would come here and play at some club like the Beehive for three weeks. People would play some club, and then the hotel—the rooms would be right up above the club, so they had to do a lot less moving around. They played more—which is another benefit of this, by the way, that we’re doing a lot more playing—and as a result they played better.

Yeah, there was one Doris Duke in 2014 and a different Doris Duke in 2015. The first one was called an Impact Award, and the second one was the real award, the Artist Award. I wasn’t eligible to win the bigger one until I won the smaller one.

Before you ask that question, one more thing. People don’t realize that you have to pay taxes on all of that. So it’s not what it looks like!

Steve Coleman & Five Elements Thu 8/6, 6:30 PM Pritzker Pavilion, Millennium Park 201 E. Randolph All ages Free