“As we mature, we have to accept, but also need to escape. For me, it’s that dreaming aspect which provides the satisfaction,” George Colligan, incidentally a former must-read blogger, is saying these days as a gloss on his new music. 

I enjoyed his More Powerful channelling of his inner Obi-Wan Kenobi last year and the cult US pianist continues a prodigious recording trajectory which has become an appointment to listen each time.

    A former sideman with Ravi Coltrane on one of the saxophonist’s finest albums, the pulsating Mad 6 and that bit rootsier on Marcus Printup’s New Boogaloo the new record is again coming out not on an American imprint but on the UK’s finest indie jazz label these days by some distance, Whirlwind, demonstrably given its brilliant output over at least the last five years.

“I often examine my own thoughts and would love to see things from someone else’s viewpoint. But while socio-political divisions throughout the United States (and globally) are nothing new, it seems that politicians, the media and talk radio, for example, are motivating current extremes of polarization,” Colligan is quoted by the label who describe the upcoming Nation Divided, listen above to a little, as an invitation by the Oregonian “to construct their own visions around his personal imaginings.”

Look out, listen to the new music from this highly abstract and yet tender solo piano album above as a taster, dig the “Rothko” cover too, for this studio affair recorded on home turf in Portland, which is to be released in late-July.