Untarnished Dream

The 45-year history of Chicago's AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians) has included plenty of hornmen, bassists, and drummers - but very few pianists. Amina Claudine Myers and Muhal Richard Abrams are the senior members but in fact, the current AACM roster includes only one other pianist, highly regarded by his fellow musicians and his fans: Adegoke Steve Colson, who has continually explored and refined his compositional concepts since joining the organization in the early 1970s. The Untarnished Dream, Colson's first recording as a leader in five years, offers an unvarnished portrait of this distinctive and uncompromising artist. As has always been the case with Colson's music, the album also features the complimentary vocals of his wife, Iqua Colson, in a set of rigorously focused music that comes as a blast of fresh air. In nine compositions spanning more than three decades, Colson re-introduces us to a spare, starkly beautiful jazz esthetic that draws as much from Bud Powell as it does from Muhal Abrams - and also from the intervening figures who have contributed so much to the rich history of piano jazz. I've never done a piano trio album says Colson, whose previous discs have employed such artists as the saxophonists Joseph Jarman, Douglas Ewart, and T.K. Blue . But I've been playing so long with [bassist] Reggie Workman and [drummer] Andrew Cyrille, and Iqua kind of pushed me into the trio idea. I insisted she do a couple of tunes, at least; that's how we settled on the lineup for this album. As for the material on The Untarnished Dream, I have a lot of compositions, Colson explains. Now the thing is, when you record, you usually tend to settle on a couple of tunes you've been playing in performance. But I'm always writing, and I always have a stockpile of material. So we went with tunes that would provide a contrast: some were written some time ago, and some in just the last year. The golden oldies include Iqua's Waltz, written in 1976, while two compositions - the boppish Circumstantial and Maybe - have been in Colson's book for about a decade. More recent are Digression and Parallel Universe, which Colson wrote in the summer of 2008. The first of these, with Iqua's lyric, has a rubato melody and an amoebic structure, fitting into a body of such compositions that Colson has forged during his career. It yields a suitably dreamy, discursive solo; the minimalist dynamics and emotional restraint are matched by Iqua's lack of vibrato and her unsentimental inflection, which point the piece toward spoken-word poetry. Parallel Universe, on the other hand, builds upon it's open-ended form with stuttering phrases from the piano and then the drums, maintaining a compelling tension throughout the performance. Then there's And It Was Set in Ivory, a piece that spans the decades all on it's own. Yeah, I wrote it some time ago, says Colson. But lately, with all the focus on Darfur, and problems that have recurred - involving oil as a commodity, or political turmoil, using food as a weapon - I said maybe we should bring that one back, since we've always put ourselves out there in certain social areas. That includes habitat shortage, global warming - it's all part of that. It's why we have the bells and gongs on that track. It's a sort of cleansing ritual. In the case of Triumph of the Outcasts - which Colson initially recorded on his very first disc in 1980, titled Triumph! - Colson didn't need to bring the tune back himself: it seems to have developed a second life without his help. In 2008 the Colsons learned that the original LP version of their self-produced Triumph! was selling on eBay for $200-$300, an indication of it's value among collectors. (Luckily, the Colsons had a box of the LPs in their basement!) Shortly later, the illustration from that album was selected as one of 200 covers pictured in the book Freedom, Rhythm & Sound (published in the fall of 2009 by the cutting-edge British label Soul Jazz Records); and Lateen, another track from that same disc, was incl