Jazz composer Adegoke Steve Colson has spent a lifetime making music with a message. By Aaron Cohen
Adegoke Steve Colson began every piano practice session the same way. After snagging a small rehearsal room in the Music Administration Building on Elgin Road, he’d start with his scales and move on to Bach or Chopin.
But then, toward the end of his session, he’d switch it up, playing a tune from Sonny Clark or John Coltrane. Jazz — improvisational, up-tempo and rhythmically complex — sounded distinctly different from his classical lessons. Before long, “people would bang on the wall and shout, ‘Hey, cut it out!’” Colson ’71 recalls. “So, you didn’t practice too much jazz up in the old practice building.”
Colson was a music student at Northwestern in the late 1960s, a time, he says, when the music school emphasized the primacy of the European classical tradition. Jazz, the genre established by African Americans in the 20th century, was not yet part of the curriculum — or widely accepted on campus.
But for Colson, there was no incongruity in combining ideas from seemingly divergent traditions. With a background in classical and an ear for jazz, he sought to show how one discipline could inform the other.
In the decades to come, Colson would go on to receive widespread acclaim as a pianist and composer who bucked convention. He and his wife, Iqua Colson ’74, a vocalist and frequent collaborator, founded their own record label and released albums that spanned genres and carried messages of Black resistance. (The Colsons, who married in 1975, live in Montclair, N.J., and have two grown sons.)
Colson’s work reflects the methods of 20th-century jazz composers like Duke Ellington and Sun Ra, who devised epic, multipart works while expanding the music’s tonal palette. In venues throughout the world, Colson and his collaborators played a key part in developing experimental jazz. Colson has written more than 250 ensemble pieces and continues to be awarded commissions for expansive works. To this day, his compositions feature themes that range from perceptions of personal identity to deep interpretations of ancient African spirituality.
Growing up in East Orange, N.J., Colson listened to his parents’ records by Ellington, Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald. Colson started piano lessons at 9 years old with his teacher, Henry Smith, a rehearsal pianist with the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. A year later, Colson started using his allowance to purchase newer hard bop jazz albums by Art Blakey and Horace Silver.
Early on, Colson noted how rarely orchestras hired even the most virtuosic Black musicians, so he ruled out becoming a classical musician. But he understood that he could benefit from examining it as a discipline.
“I had no intent to play classical music when I got to Northwestern,” Colson says. “I wanted the training of it.”
Colson auditioned for enrollment in what is now the Bienen School of Music, where he was the only Black man in his entering class. He studied piano and later added the saxophone, working with legendary professor Fred Hemke. Colson also met Earl “Chico” Freeman ’73, son of the famed saxophonist Von Freeman ’03 H, and the two found common ground in their love for jazz. They co-founded the ensemble The Life and Death Situation.
“We were teaching ourselves,” Colson says. “We played some Miles Davis tunes, Freddie Hubbard, John Coltrane. Eventually we wound up playing for political rallies on campus and for the prisoners at the state prison in Joliet, Ill.
During Colson’s first year at Northwestern, in April 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. King’s murder was prominently on his mind when Colson joined more than 100 other Black students to protest racism on campus. One of the chief strategists of the Bursar’s Office Takeover in May 1968, Colson mapped out the tunnels beneath the Rebecca Crown Center, a University administration building, to understand how Rebecca Crown and the Bursar’s Office were connected. He also acquired the chains that the protesters used to lock out the police and National Guard.
From left: Michael Smith ’70, ’72 MA, Steve Colson, Dan Davis ’69, ’78 MA/MS and William Eric Perkins ’70, wearing the chains they used to secure the Bursar’s Office entrances. Students occupied the building in May 1968 to improve awareness of the Black student experience at Northwestern. CREDIT: Courtesy of Steve Colson/Northwestern University Archives
During the 38-hour occupation, students successfully negotiated for increased Black student admissions, additional scholarships, the creation of Black studies courses and the formation of a Black student union, which also established the Black House.
“The environment and the times were coming together. That made it difficult to sidestep the issues,” says Colson. “We realized we were going to have to do something dramatic to make people aware of the level at which the institutional racism was affecting us.”
Adegoke Steve Colson circa 1979. CREDIT: Courtesy of Steve Colson
Colson’s rebelliousness extended beyond campus as well. He and Freeman began jamming with Evanston-based saxophonist Fred Anderson and the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), a Black collective founded in Chicago in 1965 that promotes self-determination and artistic originality.
Steve and Iqua, who met as students at Northwestern, joined the AACM in 1972 and 1974, respectively. Instead of playing decades-old standards, the AACM embraced forward-thinking original compositions by the members themselves, laying the groundwork for much of contemporary jazz. Artists no longer limited themselves to commonly recognized musical notation or traditional instruments. Improvisation did not have to emerge from easily recognized chord changes. Individuals and groups were encouraged to devise their own rules for performances. The Colsons fit right in.
“The idea was to create original music,” Colson says. “At Northwestern, the curriculum was strictly canon — Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and so forth. In the AACM it was, ‘We don’t even know what this is going to sound like, but we’ll put the notations where we want them and see what happens.’”
Rather than rely on the music industry’s demands for potential commercial success in exchange for record contracts, AACM members became entrepreneurs. That ethos inspired the Colsons to form the Silver Sphinx record label in the late 1970s, which provided them the autonomy to produce albums without compromise.
Colson plays in the Rudy Van Gelder Studio, a legendary jazz studio in Englewood Cliffs, N.J. Credit: Rayon Richards
Multi-instrumentalist Douglas Ewart, who served as AACM president from 1979 to 1987, has known Colson since 1971 and played on Colson’s 1980 album Triumph! Ewart still marvels at how his friend incorporates ideas from his reading list into his music. Colson, he says, would draw from Black authors Langston Hughes, Toni Morrison and Zora Neale Hurston, as well as an array of composers including classical and jazz innovators Paul Hindemith, Arnold Schoenberg and Coltrane.
“Adegoke has a global mentality,” Ewart says. “He’s drawing from a huge reservoir of information from a great cultural and spiritual depth.”
Black consciousness is an AACM hallmark, and that ideal carries throughout Colson’s music. For example, his 1989 Greens, Rice and a Rope is a 10-part composition detailing African American history, an expansive presentation that included 16 musicians with dancers and visual projections. As Colson wrote in the program notes, “It is meant to cover the great, extensive and varied periods from ancient Africa through the Euro-American slave trade, the modern Civil Rights era and on, into the future.”
Those program notes are included in a new collection of Colson’s papers at Northwestern’s Music Library. About three years ago Charla Wilson, curator of the Black experience at Northwestern, introduced Greg MacAyeal, curator of the Music Library, to the Colsons while Wilson was conducting research on the Bursar’s Office Takeover. MacAyeal recently acquired the Colson’s archives. The acquisition marks just how far Northwestern has come in embracing all types of music.
Now publicly accessible, Colson’s papers will be valuable for musicians, students and researchers alike, says MacAyeal, who is also a lecturer in the Bienen School of Music. As an example, he offers the musical plan for Colson’s “Patch N. 2,” a piece from the 1980 album No Reservation, recorded by Colson and his Unity Troupe. In keeping with the piece’s singular character, the page is a color-coded sequence of directions rather than standard notes within bar lines.
Christina Wouters, who is pursuing a master of music in musicology at Northwestern, reviewed Colson’s papers and interviewed Steve and Iqua for a research project as part of MacAyeal’s Introduction to Music Research course. She appreciates Colson’s focus on Black history in Greens, Rice and a Rope as well as how he puts different musical genres on equal footing. In Colson’s works, the harmonies of the woodwinds and strings in a classical ensemble can blend with the bluesy feel and improvisational emphasis inherent in jazz.
“Colson clearly says you have to know what came before,” Wouters says. “He considers studying Beethoven and Brahms as important as studying jazz forms and jazz theory. Why not have the genres come together? It’s all valid.”
Colson’s newer scores include Mirrors, an operatic chamber composition commissioned by the Fromm Music Foundation and premiered in New York City by the International Contemporary Ensemble in 2023. As subtle passages move toward a quiet climax, the lyrics center on the United States’ confrontation with its image and the recognition of internal conflicts with its stated ethics and ideals.
The Colsons are still innovating. Glow, their album of original compositions in myriad styles, will be released in May at the National Jazz Museum in New York City. Colson is also writing Osiris, a project that reflects his study of ancient Egyptian beliefs. That timeless inspiration offers lessons for future musicians.
“Music has so many other things in it beyond what we’re aware of when we’re listening to it,” Colson says. “It carries values. It carries histories. …
“With all of the stress and problems we have, the one thing that may keep us on an even keel is to have good music to listen to, to cleanse your mind of daily problems,” he says. “Then, you can refocus on what you need to do.”
Aaron Cohen teaches humanities at City Colleges of Chicago. He wrote Move on Up: Chicago Soul Music and Black Cultural Power and co-wrote Ramsey Lewis’ memoir, Gentleman of Jazz: A Life in Music.
Colson’s journey supports the University priority to enhance the creative and performing arts. Learn more.
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