Live at the Village Vanguard, Vol. 1 captures one of the best-ever incarnations of Five Elements (alto saxophonist Steve Coleman’s musical laboratory) over two nights at one of New York’s most revered jazz clubs. The quintet plays with captivating force but also martial-art-like grace and just the right restraint. Molecules of funk, bebop, and other styles collide and reconstitute, the flow as logical as it is ferocious. Certain compositions reappear from night to night, but every take is a new entity in a zone this raw and creative. It’s Coleman at his most stripped-down and spontaneous, in stark contrast to the richly orchestrated studio concepts of Synovial Joints and Morphogenesis.