Solo piano albums can be and indeed often are an intense listen, and you need to be in a certain headspace to enter their world. When they work you can leave that headspace and let the album become part of your life. If the intensity is overcooked that can be a big problem and Nation Divided, a studio album recorded in Portland, Oregon, suffers from that at first.
Opener Wounds of Another Time fails to catch fire. I was willing Colligan on however and waiting for the fork in the road given that I think he is one of America’s finest pianists and has been for some time even if he is not particularly well known beyond. I am mostly familiar with his work with Jack DeJohnette and his is an individual sound and very hard to place. It takes up the slack from the innovations of McCoy Tyner and can be very avant and eclectic.
Last year’s More Powerful was pretty good and I think I prefer it to Nation Divided. All originals the feeling that persists with me is that the writing merging composition and free flowing improvisational episodes is too oblique. There is a certain skirting around the subject. It is better when the music goes out more (say on ‘Street Fight’ and ‘Cognac Logic’). ‘Blues for Charleston’ seems to be arriving at what Colligan is best at, tunnelling to the heart of the matter with his left hand and creating a giant panorama that draws you in.
The exploratory side of his playing returns on ‘Nights of Passion’ but I am never quite sure how the hesitancy of the trajectory of the piece develops beyond that carefully established halting quality it certainly possesses. ‘The Strength to Move On’ is lovely, there is a great skill in the way the notes linger and maybe it is rhapsody that this track points to which again lifts the spirits and shows a glimpse of where Colligan’s best direction is located.
The title track is extremely serious and is quite Fred Hersch-like in some ways, Colligan’s sense of note clustering and modality are compatible to Hersch although Colligan sometimes introduces more wintry moods. There is a classical sensibility at play to an extent but by no means is this a jazz-classical hybrid. ‘If That’s All There Is To Say’ is another big peak, a kind of floating quality to the progressions installed and Colligan builds up his narrative layer by layer.
A stark album then that does not work on every level but should be on your radar nevertheless. SG