Real Time was originally recorded back in 1996, but was never widely available. Atavistic has remastered and re-released it -- very much to their credit. Albums like this make me excited about the future of jazz.

The jazz world of today is a continuum. One jazz publication recently placed ultra-traditionalist Wynton Marsalis on one end and avant downtowner John Zorn on the other. In many ways a Marsalis/Marsalis continuum could be argued as well, since Wynton and Branford have such polaristic musical personalities. Steam is somewhere in the middle. They identify the possibilities suggested by jazz tradition and exploit them. They offer an exciting take on the "post-changes" jazz of the late 60s. Steam does for Dolphy, Coleman and Ra what beboppers did for Broadway show tunes -- that is, they dissect, deconstruct and recontextualize them.

Though Real Time includes no actual covers, its songs recall some of that heady free stuff of 30-40 years ago. The aggressive "Explosive Motor" sounds like Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz on crack. What's particularly impressive about Real Time is how it can go from straight-no-chaser Thelonious Monk to crack-smoking Ornette Coleman with such fluidity. The head of "No Go" really screams of some long, lost Monk composition to me. And yet there's a point in the middle where it's clear that we've gone to some other musical world -- a world where tonality is shifting, meter is conflicted and music is the result of a strange intermediation between performers. I like this world a lot and it warms my heart to know of its existence!