SOUND PROJECTIONS
AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE
EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU
WINTER, 2016
AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE
EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU
WINTER, 2016
VOLUME THREE NUMBER THREE
HENRY THREADGILL
Featuring the Musics and Aesthetic Visions of:
CHRISTIAN MCBRIDE
(December 3-9)
DEXTER GORDON
(December 10-16)
JEANNE LEE
(December 17-23)
CASSANDRA WILSON
(December 24-30)
SAM RIVERS
(December 31-January 6)
TERRY CALLIER
(January 7-13)
ODETTA
(January 14-20)
LESTER BOWIE
(January 21-27)
MACY GRAY
(January 28-February 3)
HAMPTON HAWES
(February 4-10)
GRACHAN MONCUR III
(February 11-17)
LARRY YOUNG
(February 18-24)
http://www.allmusic.com/artist/grachan-moncur-iii-mn0000803589/biography
Grachan Moncur III
(b. June 3, 1937)
Artist Biography by Scott Yanow
One of the first trombonists to explore free jazz, Grachan Moncur III is still best-known for his pair of innovative Blue Note albums (1963-1964) that also featured Lee Morgan and Jackie McLean on the first session and Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock on the later date. The son of bassist Grachan Moncur II, who played with the Savoy Sultans during 1937-1945, Grachan III started on trombone when he was 11. He toured with Ray Charles (1959-1962), was with the Jazztet (1962), and in 1963, played advanced jazz with Jackie McLean. Moncur toured with Sonny Rollins (1964) and played and recorded with Marion Brown, Joe Henderson, and Archie Shepp, matching up with fellow trombonist Roswell Rudd in the latter group. He also was part of the cooperative band 360 Degree Music Experience with Beaver Harris. Grachan Moncur,
who has also recorded as a leader for BYG (1969) and JCOA (1974),
continues to play challenging music and has been an educator. Some of
his associations have been with Frank Lowe (1984-1985), Cassandra Wilson (1985), and the Paris Reunion Band.
Trombone Master and Living Legend Grachan Moncur III
Biography
Grachan Moncur III
by Joyce Morgan
Grachan Moncur III was born in New York City at Sydenham Hospital on June 3, 1937 into a musical family that included his Uncle Al Cooper, leader of the Savoy Sultans, and Grachan’s father, Grachan Brother Moncur II who played bass as a member of Savoy Sultans. His father also played with such notables as Billie Holiday, Diana Washington, and pianist Teddy Wilson among others.
Grachan’s early musical studies started at Laurinburg Institute under the musical direction of Frank H. McDuffie Jr. and Phillip Hilton, a very advanced trombonist and student. His trombone playing began with the all-state marching band and he eventually became a member of the jazz combo. He rapidly moved forward to become leader of the Laurinburg Jazz Septet, and musical director of Laurinburg’s traveling musical revue that included singers, dancers and a variety of talented performers.
After graduating from Laurinburg Institute he attended the Manhattan School of Music and the Juillard School of Music. While achieving academic training he also performed as leader and co-leader with various groups that included such stars Wayne Shorter, Gary Bartz, and Blue Mitchell along with jamming at jazz spots such as Birland, the Open Door; The Five spot; Turbo Billage; Cafe Bohemia and Count Basies. Grachan continued his career with fabulous Ray Charles Orchestra. He worked with the group from 1959 until 1961. At a Ray Charles show at the Apollo Theatre which included the Jazztet, Grachan’s outstanding solo performances were observed by Benny Golson and he was immediately recruited as the trombonist into the Art Farmer/Benny Golson Jazztet. He performed with the Jazztet until it disbanded in 1962.
Shortly thereafter Grachan became musical director of the Jackie McLean Quintet that included Bobby Hutcherson (vibes), Eddie Khan (bass), and Tony Williams (drums). Grachan inherited the leadership of the group at the departure of Jackie McLean. The group performed for several years under Grachan’s leadership at such famous clubs as the Blue Coronet in Brooklyn and Slugs in the Village. Under Grachan’s leadership on various occasions, the group included Herbie Hancock and Clifford Jarvis.
During the Jackie McLean/Grachan Moncur III era, historical Jazz albums were recorded, One Step Beyond, Evolution, Destination Out, Some Other Stuff, and the classic jazz series double album Hipnosis, were all recorded during this period of Grachan’s development. These albums on the Blue Note label featured Grachan as a trombonist and composer and lead to the acceptance of what has been termed “Avant Garde” opening the door for other musicians to record “new music” on the Blue Note Label.
Grachan’s exceptional talents afforded him an opportunity to act as well exhibit his musical genius as trombonist, composer, and actor in James Baldwin’s Broadway production of Blues for Mr. Charlie. During this period he also worked with the great Sonny Rollins playing a stint at the Plugged Nickle in Chicago, the Village Vanguard in New York City and concerts in the New York metro area. At the conclusion of “Blues for Mr. Charlie”s European tour, Grachan began playing with the Joe Henderson/Kenny Dorham Sextet. After two decades of performing with some the world’s greatest jazz musicians, composing traditional and avant garde compositions, Grachan embarked on a new and challenging mission. His appointment to the largest Art Institute (Newark Community School of the Arts) in New Jersey as composer in residence, where he taught aspiring musicians in addition to composing, gave him time to reflect on his past and prepare for his future.
Most recently he has made quest appearances with Change of the Century Orchestra. The orchestra is dedicated to the memory of John Coltrane and was founded by Philly Joe Jones and Sunny Murray. He also devotes time to college appearances and ethnic performances.
Grachan feels his maturity has enhanced his capabilities and commitment to jazz and looks forward to future tours and recording with his own ensemble as well as continuing his educational activities.
https://www.allaboutjazz.com/a-fireside-chat-with-grachan-moncur-iii-grachan-moncur-iii-by-aaj-staff.php
A Fireside Chat With Grachan Moncur III
by AAJ STAFF
January 17, 2003
AllAboutJazz
"I would say that the studying of Monk probably led to everything. I think it probably led to my whole compositional outgrowth because that's when everything started happening."
--Grachan Moncur III
GRACHAN MONCUR III
There are paths we take in life that are forever. Life is unforgiving and no one in jazz personifies that better than Grachan Moncur III. It took me over a year just to track down Grachan. And because of health issues, another year for him to sit down with the Roadshow. Allow me to be kind and rewind. I had heard Grachan on Blue Note recordings of Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, and most notably Jackie McLean. Grachan was a monster on the trombone and it puzzled me to no end why Alfred Lion, the Clive Davis of jazz, only recorded the bonist (having only done J. J.) on a couple of sessions of his own ( Evolution, Some Other Stuff ). Then I discovered some blowing sessions in the old BYG (since sold off too many times to remember) catalog, some Archie Shepp, Cliff Thornton, and his own. So my obvious first impression was Grachan was outcast from the Blue Note fold because he went free jazz or avant or whatever damn term they coined then. But aside from occasionally, and I mean occasionally, appearing on a smatter of records here and there, Grachan's bone remained silent on record for the better part of three decades. Long time. Fast forward to handful of years ago and I was doing my first interview with Sonny Rollins and I asked him whom he would have liked or like to record with and he mentioned Grachan. Ask Jackie McLean, he said the same. So where was Grachan? And why wasn't he working more? When we sat down, I asked and the following is a gut-wrenching conversation with a man that life should have been better to, but alas, such is the trial of life. I am honored to present Grachan Moncur III, unedited and in his own words.
All About Jazz: Let's start from the beginning.
Grachan Moncur III: Well, I got started basically because I was coming from a musical family. I guess you know my father being a bassist and my uncle was a leader of the Savoy Sultans. I know you've heard of that group. I was kind of born into a musical family. That didn't mean that I had to become a musician, but there was always people from the music business all around, in and out of my house all the time. My father being a bassist back in the day when he was playing with the early bands, it was normal for a good bassist to also play tuba and play valve trombone also. So he always had a tuba and valve trombone always around the house. So later on, during the early days, they had to play the tuba because of acoustic reasons, playing dances and big halls. The tuba carried much stronger than the bass. So anyway, as a kid, as a very youngster, I started doodling around with the trombone, long before I was even big enough to actually stand up and play the valve trombone, which was what was around the house. I used to take it form underneath the bed and sit on the floor and try to mess with it. So I guess I must have been about four or five years old, doing that type of thing, which didn't really amount to very much to becoming a trombone player at that age because it wasn't until I was about nine years old, first my father bought me a cello. I didn't show too much interest on that, so he eventually came in with this slide trombone. For some reason, I just kind of took to it and got kind of serious with trying to play it and was messing around with it for about a year and eventually, I decided to start taking lessons. And there was a very active music store here in Newark and a lot of the musicians that came a little ahead of me like Charlie Persip and a few others, studied there. It was the most popular community school that was available for musicians at that time. So I started taking lessons and I had a very fantastic trombonist. I don't even remember his name. I was only about ten at this time, ten or eleven. I think he kind of recognized the fact that I had a pretty good tone and a pretty good sound and he wanted to perfect that. I remember him teaching me on the fundamental B-flat until I perfected it before he even allowed me to really play the B-flat scale, which is the first scale you learn on the B-flat instrument. He would have me do things with that sound, with that note, like being able to sustain the tone and swelling the tone and doing different things with controlling that particular note, which is the fundamental B-flat on the trombone. So I think that probably had a lot to do with me developing a sound that I did have beside the fact that I would hear my father practice on the valve trombone. His sound was very interesting. I have never, up until today, heard anybody with a sound like my father. He had a timbre that was very dark and clear. That sound, it just kind of stayed with me and I always wanted to produce that same type of, project that same type of sound that my father had. So between that and the trombone teacher that I had for several months, I don't even think I studied with this teacher, it couldn't have been no more than a year.
Shortly after that, I went to the Laurinburg Institute down in North Carolina. It's a private black school, the same school that Dizzy Gillespie had went to. That was pretty close to Dizzy's hometown in South Carolina. Dizzy's from Cheraw, South Carolina. This school was in Laurinburg, North Carolina, which is very close to the South Carolina borderline and it was only seventeen miles away from Cheraw. This being an all black school during the time that Dizzy went there, it was the only black school within a twenty-two mile radius. I guess that is how Dizzy got there. So I was pretty inspired by the kids in school. It was the kind of school where you kind of had to be something. Everybody down there was down there for some kind of reason. Either they were good athletes and they were good in sports or they were good musicians or they were very good academically or they had it all. I often tell the story of when I first came to the campus. When I got to the school, it was around lunchtime and all the kids were out on the campus and when they saw the car coming up, they knew it was somebody new coming to the school, so when we stopped in front of the dormitory, I took my trunk out of the car and then I took my trombone out and one of the kids that was standing around said, "Oh, man, we got a trombone player," and that sounded good to me. Nobody had called me a trombone player before. Right away, they wanted me to take out my horn and play something for them and I had never really tried to play anything except what I had been experimenting with, but I did remember these two bars that I remembered from a record that Dizzy had made with Trummy Young on trombone and I did remember the first two bars of Trummy Young's solo and so that is all I played. I took out my horn and started playing these two bars over and over and then kids started clapping with me. That was it. I caught the bug. It was the first time somebody had gathered around me and clapped when I was playing. It was very enthusiastic. They were very supportive with their rhythm (laughing).
FJ: Your most celebrated collaborations have been alongside Jackie McLean.
GM: I met Jackie probably, I thought it was still in high school, coming home during the summer vacation. I was kind of like an early starter. I used to go around the clubs very early, sitting in and everything. I met Jackie when he used to come over to Newark with Art Blakey. Now, we're skipping way up because during the time when he was coming to Jersey, I knew of him before that, but we got tight when he started coming over to Jersey. This is a little later after I had got some experience of playing in a jazz group down in Laurinburg for about four years. When he used to come in town, I used to sit in with him. I sat in with Blakey and him just as a kid. Me and Jackie got kind of tight because Jackie liked the way I sounded and he saw this potential. I was a comer. We kept in touch and it was later on, that I used to come over to New York after I graduated from high school. I started going to Brooklyn and I started jamming at Birdland and all different things like that. I think it was a couple of years before I got with Ray Charles. I went over to Jackie's house one afternoon and we practiced all day and we kind of exchanged tunes and he saw the kind of progress that I had made since the first time that I had sat in with him. It was after I went with Ray Charles and I left the group. I was living in Brooklyn and I ran into Tony Williams and me and Tony got tight. Tony had just got in town working with Jackie in The Connection. So me and Tony got very close talking about the things we wanted to do musically and where our heads were at. We had played a little bit together. So Tony told Jackie about me and Jackie told him, "Yeah, I know Grachan." And Tony said, "Yeah, but Grachan is in town now and he's doing some new stuff." He knew that Jackie was getting ready to form a group. But it was really because of the fact that me and Jackie had shedded together maybe a year or so before that. With Tony's enthusiasm about him calling me in reference to the new group he wanted to form. I guess he knew that Tony's ear was sharp too. So right away, when he called me, it was just at a time where I had been home all during the summer and I had been doing some shedding with Bobby Hutcherson. I had met Bobby when he was working with Billy Mitchell and Al Grey. When I first met him, I was really impressed with Bobby's playing and we exchanged numbers and we immediately started rehearsing everyday together. Bobby and I had been rehearsing together for a couple of months and when Jackie called me between shedding with Bobby and writing a lot of music, a lot of new stuff that I was hearing and working them with Bobby and talking about them with Tony, when Jackie called me, he happened to call me on the same night that I had finished writing "Frankenstein" and "Ghost Town."
FJ: Fate.
GM: Isn't that something? And so when Jackie called me that night, he said Tony said I was in town and that he had a couple of concerts and some club dates and a possible recording. He wanted to start rehearsing and see what we could put together. So I said, "Sounds good." Then I told him that I had been shedding with this new cat named Bobby and he was interested by new enthusiasm for Bobby and so he said, "OK, give me Bobby's number," and so I gave him Bobby's number and he got us all together and made a rehearsal.
FJ: And that became One Step Beyond. Destiny.
GM: That was it. It is funny, Fred. That whole summer, I had taken that whole summer off, mainly because I had some problems with my ear. I had been working with Ray and we had a private plane and we used to fly all the time. My ears became plugged and so I wanted to take care of that. I had put in my resignation with Ray, not because I didn't dig the band or I thought I was so much ready to split, it was just that I had a burning desire to really get to New York and try to get down with a smaller group because working with a big band is nothing compared to working in a small group. So what I did was I didn't even concentrate on working that summer. I just lived off a little bread that I had made that year and just shedded. I just shedded on studying Monk's tunes. I didn't have a piano. I didn't really do that to learn his repertoire to play it. I was just doing it to analyze his music. I just wanted to get the sound of his music inside of my body. Between shedding on Monk's stuff and then I started writing on my own and this particular night, I had been listening to a lot of television and science fiction sounds and all that kind of stuff. This particular night, I would say about two hours before Jackie called, I wrote both, "Frankenstein" first and then "Ghost Town." I think I told Jackie that I just got done writing something and told him what the tunes were and he said to bring them. Dig, Fred. When we started rehearsing, we got so excited. We had about five tunes. We had five originals. It was three of mine, "Frankenstein," "Ghost Town," and "Sonny's Back" and Jackie had "Little Melonae" and "Saturday and Sunday." Besides that, we played standards. For the most part, regardless of what we played, "Frankenstein," "Ghost Town," and "Saturday and Sunday" were such odd tunes to us and to the audience and we played them every set. In other words, in between everything else that we played, we played those tunes too. We didn't have that much in our book. We played some standards like "Smile" and really hip things we did outside of that to break up the thing, but once we played "Ghost Town" or "Frankenstein," that became a show. That was like a show within itself because the music was so strange and we were stretching on it, Fred. We were playing hard and we were playing them to get everything we could get out of it. We just felt the enthusiasm. We didn't know what was going to happen, but we liked what we were doing and we played like we liked it and we liked each other and what everybody was contributing.
FJ: You mentioned poring over Monk. Did your studies lead to "Monk in Wonderland" (Evolution)?
GM: Ah, I wouldn't think so. I would say that the studying of Monk probably led to everything. I think it probably led to my whole compositional outgrowth because that's when everything started happening. After I did that study, I did the studying of Monk for six weeks or maybe two months and then I put that down and just started writing stuff and practicing and writing and writing. There were things that I started to write that I didn't finish, but those two tunes I actually finished that night, but they were things that I began to write. I was trying to look at writing at that point the way a painter would paint. You put your thing on the easel and you sketch something and you come back to it the next day or a couple of days. That's how I was trying to think musically. I wasn't trying to finish anything. I still don't do that. I don't try to write anything that I consider a complete piece, especially now. It is always a work in progress. I don't change anything, but I add.
FJ: And One Step Beyond led to your own date, Evolution.
GM: I think it was One Step Beyond or Destination Out ! I forgot the order in which we did the dates. I forgot whether it was Destination Out! or, it probably did. One Step Beyond probably did lead to my first date.
FJ: The crew mirrored the One Step Beyond sessions.
GM: Right and actually, Lee Morgan was Alfred Lion's idea. Lee was really one of my best friends, but at the time, Lee was having some problems like up in Harlem. He had got banged up pretty bad and he was out of commission and so I didn't even know that he was available. I had just met Woody Shaw because Woody was working with Eric Dolphy at the Five Stop and I had just heard Woody Shaw and I had no idea that Lee would have even been available or that Lee would even want to do it. I hadn't been in touch with Lee, but me and Lee were closer friends than me and Jackie were. Lee always tried to inspire me to come to New York and stuff like that and invite me over to spend weekends with him and show me the good life that he was living. He was making all these records with Blakey and he had a new sports car and he said, "Come on, man, you got to get a piece of this. Practice hard and see what's happening and get out here with me." Lee was very special to me, but like I said, I hadn't seen him, so when Alfred mentioned him to me, as a matter of fact, Fred, Alfred told me the night before the date that he was going to get Lee. Even Jackie didn't know that Lee was available and Jackie had asked this little trumpet player from Washington to be a standby at the rehearsal because he knew that he wanted a trumpet. I hadn't been able to contact Woody anyway. When Alfred said that Lee was going to make the rehearsal, that was fantastic. I had no objections. Woody was very disappointed. I made enemies for doing that and he never forgave me for it.
FJ: Evolution headlined Blue Note's dabble into the "new thing" as it were.
GM: I want to tell you something, Fred. To me, it wasn't avant-garde per say for what the avant-garde was really standing for at that time to me. The avant-garde at that time was dealing with the idea of being revolutionary music. I had no thoughts in my mind of this being revolutionary. I thought the way I named the album Evolution, I was thinking of the music evolving from the mainstream. I didn't want to think in terms of we are taking over, we're changing. My mind was never there. That is why my album was called Evolution. When I wrote the piece, the piece "Evolution" came to me naturally. It was weird. That came because the first guy that ever heard "Evolution," the first guy that I ever played "Evolution" for was Gil Coggins. Gillie lived up in Brooklyn too. I used to run into him quite a bit in the neighborhood. I remember the day after I wrote "Evolution," I told Gil about it and I told him I wanted to come up to his pad. I didn't have a piano. I had a melodica. I was writing most of my stuff on the melodica because I didn't have a piano at the time. I came up and I played it for him. Gil, as being as traditional as he is, I really wanted him to hear it because I wanted him to tell me what he really thought. When I played it, he said, "Damn, man, you got something there. I don't know what it is, but it sounds like something." That was good enough for me coming from him. I played exactly the way I wrote it. I played all the voicings just the way it was. I didn't change nothing.
FJ: The critical inability to register Jackie's One Step Beyond along with Evolution and your follow up, Some Other Stuff, effectively pigeonholed you.
GM: Fred, I think the reason why I got pigeonholed was because of the business because Alfred Lion and them were pretty disappointed with me that after they recorded Evolution, they thought that they were going to be able to put the music in their publishing company and I had already published mine and I had already sent them the copyrights and I had got my company name and all that. They were very disappointed with that and they kind of dropped me like a hot potato in reference to the plans that they had had for me, Fred. They were really going to go out for me, but me being as young as I was and didn't have any guidance, I didn't think it was such a big thing and I didn't know that they was going to take it the way they took it. Like if I had, knowing what I know now, I think I probably would have done it a different way. I probably would have made some kind of compromise. You take two and I'll take two or something like that. I think my mind was really going to a revolutionary attitude more on the business tip than it was on a musical tip because I was kind of determined on trying to own my own music.
FJ: Did you know at the time, Some Other Stuff would be your last Blue Note session?
GM: In a sense, yeah. I didn't even know I was going to do that. I didn't have really a contract with them at the time.
FJ: But no one had contracts with Blue Note at the time.
GM: Yeah, everybody was doing what they call one shot dates. It wasn't like I was drastically surprised. I was just surprised of their attitude and their attitude just grew and it became very detrimental to me because I think they poisoned other people in reference to me. It was almost like a blackballed thing. It hurt me very bad, Fred. I will tell you, Fred, I was very uptight about it. I had a meeting with John Hammond and John at that time was interested in trying to do something with me and I was telling him the problems I was having at Blue Note and he said to me, "The publishing thing is a touchy kind of thing right now. I will tell you something. I know what you're going through. I know it's not pretty, but I guarantee you one thing, Grachan, you will find out in years to come that in the long run, Alfred Lion and Frank Wolff are two of the best cats in the music business." And he was right. Even though I had a hard time with them, my business books is more intact with that company than it is with any other company I recorded with in the world.
FJ: Even with all the drama, Lion and Wolff still had the presence of mind to do the right thing.
GM: Right, and not only that, Fred, let me tell you something. Let me set the record straight for you. First of all, Alfred Lion and Frank Wolff had their business in order. Whoever took over, if they meant to do well, if they meant to do right, everything was in order for they to do right with it. The musicians are very fortunate that my man, Michael Cuscuna, being the dedicated person he is, musically and the business person that he is and the kind of respect that he has for musicians in general and the music. Thanks to a guy like him, who is really responsible for most of the reissues, thanks to a guy like him or guys like him, he was able to set my thing in order the way it was supposed to be and for him to pick it up and to have me where I was supposed to be as a legendary artist within their catalog. If it wasn't for a person like that, I could be lost in the shuffle. So it was like John Hammond had said, they were the two best cats in the business because he knew better than I did or better than most of the fly by night record companies that were coming up during the time and are still coming up, he knew, being the businessman that he is. He knew then how they were handling their business. He knew down the line that my stuff would be, I would be in better shape than I would be with just about anybody else that I recorded with. That holds true with everybody. There is only a few other labels that come close to that so far like ABC/Paramount, labels that I've recorded with. Domestically, those were the two major labels that I dealt with, which is now Capitol and ABC, which is like Impulse! What I am saying is that you have some other companies that I think probably are on that level now, but because I haven't recorded as much music with other companies like I did with Blue Note because in a very short period of time, within about a two year or three year period, I recorded I would say pretty much half the stuff that I've every recorded, period. This is within a two year period, so they have quite a bit of my recording material, more so than any other one company. So I can't really make the good judgment of how these other companies are doing compared to them.
FJ: I take it that doesn't hold true for the European label that you did numerous sessions for, BYG.
GM: Oh, Fred, that has been a disaster. The tragedy is within the situation that I am now. The tragedy is my financial situation and the inactivity behind not being out there properly, just not being paid, first of all. Not being paid, that puts a damper on your lifestyle within itself. With them not doing anything for the artists as a follow up, it didn't lead for me to get any exposure or any work or any tours or anything. Whereas some of these other companies, once you record for them, they help to get the artists out there to start working. If they don't give you a million dollars, they get behind you to put something together and go out there and make some money.
FJ: That still doesn't explain why you are not recorded now. Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff have long since passed and the BYG and Blue Note catalogs have been sold repeatedly. Hope, the bread by which we live, is dwindling.
GM: It's tremendously difficult. I am going through a thing right now, Fred, that is unbelievable. I wouldn't even want to discuss it with you. The only good part about it, the only real good part about it is that I know that my destiny is totally in my hands now because there are people who really want to do something with me and as soon as I give them the green light, certain things can happen. I've been so under the weather for one reason or another, a lot of it has been financially, which affects my domestic life, my family, just your family includes yourself so it doesn't help the flame that you need. When I was really out there during the days that we were talking about, everything was hot. I was around people that would inspire me everyday. They liked what I was doing and they were encouraging me. Now the things that I get, people like what I do and everything, but it is for a dog eat dog type of situation or it's a stick and blow situation. It is not a thing like it was in the past where you could kind of grow with the music and the musicians that you are dealing with. That is what is happening in New York now with the new breed of musicians like Wynton Marsalis and the so called "young lions" that are out here now, Wallace Roney and them guys. They are into a thing where me and Tony and Jackie was back then. I would imagine. This is what I miss. This is what I miss. Besides that, what hurts even more, even if that is not happening, there was a time when I had residence, a composer residence for nine years at the Newark Community Arts School. That kept my enthusiasm up, just working with younger musicians and being able to work on my material at the same time and even though I wasn't with my peers all the time, I was active and I could see things growing. It just kept me more enthusiastic. At this point, I kind of fell into a musical rut. Thank God, it is not a spiritual rut. If it was a spiritual rut, I would be finished. So I am blessed that I have not dropped to that level. But the level is only one notch from there. So it is like I am hanging on for dear life, Fred. But the life that I am hanging on to is my own and I don't have that dark feeling that I had maybe ten years ago or fifteen years ago that everybody is against me or that the world is against me. I don't have that feeling because I know it is not about that. It is about me now. I kind of feel almost the way Monk was before he died. I knew Monk very well. I got to know him very well about five years before he died. I got to know him a little bit before that. I remember the dark period that he had almost what I am going through now, is when I was very close to Monk. I think that is one reason how I got close to him because he felt very relaxed with me because he didn't feel anything pretentious or that I was, he could just feel the genuine respect that I had for him. I felt comfortable with him. I didn't look at him like he was weird. He was a human being. I really felt what he was going through and I lived through some of the things that he went through. I went through it and I couldn't believe it, somebody like Monk. When you say, Fred, "Damn, how could you be going through this Grachan?" The same thing you are telling me is how I saw Monk and I was with him. I was with him at certain times when he was embarrassed by his peers. I was with him. I couldn't believe certain things that I witnessed with him. When his break came, I got to be with him a little bit and I even traveled with him off and on because I was doing a lot of work with Archie Shepp during that time and we would meet up with Monk on the same concerts sometimes. I saw Monk at the height of this thing within this five year period after he got on the cover of Time. I was with Monk the day people came from Miles' house over to Monk's house saying that Miles sent, two young kids came over to interview Monk and I was hanging out with Monk at his house and I was hanging with Monk the day that they came. I had been hanging with Monk all day when the kids came. Miles had sent them. They went over to interview Miles, but Miles said that he wanted them to do the interview with Monk and he was the one they should be interviewing. That was Miles' way of kind of telling Monk he was sorry for some of the nasty shit that he even took Monk through. So what I am saying to you, Fred, is I was there. They came and saw what was happening. It was two young kids, a girl and a boy, two white, young writers. So anyway, when I saw Monk after that and he was at the top of his game as far as the business, but it wasn't long that he had been through such sharpness and pain that he couldn't even dig it. I am telling you some shit, Fred (Grachan's voice starts audibly breaking up). I can feel this shit as I am telling this shit man. You can hear it in my fucking voice.
FJ: Critics and the industry as a rule are pariahs, but it's a whole other animal to be beat down by your peers.
GM: Yeah, man. I haven't really been through what Monk was going through. I mean, I am going through what I am going through. But I can relate. Everybody's life is different and we touch here and there with similarities, but I'm not trying to compare my life or what I am going through with Monk's, but it boils down to be the same thing. You get disappointed, Fred. You get beat down.
FJ: One aspect of the health issues you made reference to is the extensive dental work you have had done, of which there is an adjustment period.
GM: Well, I will tell you. Once, I will tell you what would have helped, it is not going to take long. At the most, going really full speed, like everyday, I would give myself between six to eight weeks. I would say nine to ten at the most. That is with me really wanting to put the icing on the cake. But if I bear down, I know I would feel comfortable about what I want to do now because it can't be about where I just left off because it is always different. Once you start like I have to do now, or like I am doing, there is always going to be a change and the change is usually very positive, but you have to work toward making it do what you want it to do. You can hear it, but it just don't drop out of the sky. You have something to reach for. That gives you your enthusiasm. I am not working now. I am beginning to practice again now. It has been a month. The work has been finished. What has been like a stop and go thing with on the practice tip is mainly because life's problem. I am going through the domestic shit, like I have a family. I have a wife and six kids, four grandkids. We have a house. I am blessed in a sense. I've been married thirty-three years to the same woman. I see a lot of things that are positive in my life, but there is a lot of responsibility. There is a lot of things that come with it where I haven't been able to be on top of shit the way I would like to be and the way everybody else would like me to be. That is the damper on your enthusiasm. It is not always about being able to work playing. If I could have just had some kind of a teaching job like I said, the nine years that I did that residency was a breath of fresh air for me. That ended in '91. That began in the early Eighties until '91, straight through, which was very great. I had no idea that it would be so hard to come across something like that again. I've done residencies, but it has been nothing consistent. I miss that consistency of financial stability, to feel like your two feet are on the ground so you can do what you've got to do. The only positive thing I can say is it boils down to what I said earlier. The ball is in my hands. It is not that I can't do things. It is all on me. It is about getting into a position to get a grip so I can go ahead and go straight ahead. It feels though every time I think that I am not going to have to worry for the next month or two, something else comes up and the rug is pulled from underneath me in some kind of way financially and there I was back again worrying about something that I shouldn't have to worry about. I just haven't had that peace of mind, Fred, to do what I really have to do and think about my music and not have to think about nothing else. It is not like when I was young, back in the day with Jackie. I wasn't married. I didn't have no responsibilities. I could do anything I wanted to do. If I wanted to sleep in the park, you know what I'm saying? It's a different ballgame today.
FJ: I have hope. It's all we have and I cling to it daily.
GM: Hey, Fred, I am glad you said that.
https://jazztimes.com/departments/overdue-ovation/grachan-moncur-iii-some-other-stuff/
09/01/2003
by Ed Berger
Grachan Moncur III. Photo by Ed Berger
For a time, it seemed that trombonist Grachan Moncur III was destined for jazz stardom. In demand both as a soloist and a composer, he was one of the most original voices to emerge in the early 1960s. Moncur’s recordings for Blue Note as leader and sideman in the company of Jackie McLean, Lee Morgan, Tony Williams, Bobby Hutcherson and others were hailed as touchstones of an era. But for various reasons, some of his own doing and some beyond his control, Moncur never enjoyed the sustained success of his peers, although his talent was never at issue. The recent three-CD collection on the new Mosaic Select label of Moncur’s most significant Blue Note work reaffirms the trombonist’s early triumphs and focuses the spotlight once again on an artist who still has something to say. The set includes Jackie McLean’s One Step Beyond (1963), Destination Out! (1963), Hipnosis (1967) and ‘Bout Soul (1967) and Moncur’s Evolution (1963) and Some Other Stuff (1964).
Born in 1937, Moncur, a Newark, N.J., native, was all but predestined to become a musician. His father was the highly respected bassist Grachan “Brother” Moncur, and his uncle was saxophonist Al Cooper, leader of the legendary Savoy Sultans. “People like Dizzy Gillespie, Babs Gonzales and James Moody were always dropping by the house, and they took an interest in me,” Moncur recalls. “Sarah Vaughan and my mother were best friends. Sarah was a great cook and used to cook in our kitchen!”
The youngster was drawn to the trombone at a very early age: “I always remember a valve trombone being in the house. When my father was on the road, I’d sneak it out from under the bed and try to play it even though I was too small to pick it up.” After studying piano and cello, Moncur took up the trombone in earnest at nine: “My father bought a pawn ticket for five dollars and came home with a silver-plated trombone wrapped in newspaper. That was it!”
The budding musician was quickly drawn into Newark’s dynamic jazz scene. “There were quite a few jazz clubs, and every night there was a jam session somewhere,” he recalls. Moncur also learned a lot playing in the Newark YMCA band where he met another up-and-comer, saxophonist Wayne Shorter: “He was kind of weird, always looking up in space at something nobody else could see. Even then he was quite advanced and had a great sound.”
In 1951, Moncur was sent to high school at the renowned Laurinburg Institute in North Carolina. “My mother wanted to get me off the scene in Newark because the drug situation was bad in our area,” he explains. Laurinburg had an active music program. Dizzy Gillespie had attended the school, and Moncur recalls that the trumpeter’s spirit still permeated its halls almost two decades later. The students were exposed to a wide variety of music. “We played overtures and marches like ‘E Pluribus Unum’ and ‘Old Comrades,'” Moncur remembers. “That stuff was hip! I’d love to get a marching band today to play that stuff!”
After graduating from Laurinburg in 1955, Moncur returned to Newark, where he joined pianist Nat Phipps’ band. The group was made up of the city’s finest young players, including Wayne Shorter. An encounter with Miles Davis helped Moncur establish his own identity at that early stage of his career. “I used to go to Birdland and sit in on Monday nights,” Moncur recounts. “One night Miles came in. I went up to introduce myself and told him how much I admired him. He looked at me and said, ‘Don’t you ever say that corny shit to nobody! I know who you are, man. You got something. Dig yourself!’ That made me go inside myself. Not that I didn’t respect other musicians like J. J. [Johnson] anymore, but I didn’t idolize them.”
Moncur continued his formal education at the Manhattan School of Music and later Juilliard but had to drop out for financial reasons. In 1958, he formed his own group during a stay in Miami Beach. His father set up an audition at a local club, but when the owner heard the group, he hired the rhythm section without the leader. “That was a low point,” Moncur recalls. “It was like the world came to an end for me.”
A few days later, however, he got a call inviting him to join Ray Charles’ orchestra. Some of the band had heard the trombonist jamming at the Sir John Lounge in Miami Beach where Charles was appearing and brought him to the leader’s attention. “I went from wanting to die to the top of the world!” says Moncur. He spent about a year and a half with Charles, during which time he was taken under the wing of such veterans as Hank Crawford, Edgar Willis and David “Fathead” Newman. “I was the kid in the band-full of youthful enthusiasm,” says Moncur. “I wanted to play all the time. Ray used to say, ‘Tell that trombone player not to play so much behind me!'”
While Moncur was touring with the Ray Charles Show, Art Farmer and Benny Golson liked what they heard of the young trombonist and soon afterward invited him to join their Jazztet. When Moncur gave Ray Charles his notice, he explained that, although he loved working in the band, he felt it was time to spread his wings, and the Jazztet was a prime showcase for his instrument. “I really admire your spunk,” the singer replied, “but do you realize it’s 1959, and I’m booked till 1980?” Nevertheless, Moncur took the plunge with Charles’ blessing.
It was during his tenure with the Jazztet that Moncur began to write in earnest. “Art Farmer told me that he noticed from the way I played that I might make a good composer,” Moncur recalls. “That same night, I heard this little song in my head. I called it ‘Sonny’s Back’ for Sonny Rollins, who was my favorite musician. The next day I sang it for Benny Golson, who took his horn out and played it right there on the street.” The group eventually recorded the piece and adopted it as a theme.
Art Farmer helped teach the young composer to notate his work: “I’d never tried to write anything that complicated before. Art took me into a practice room, sat me down at the piano and showed me how to subdivide the bar. I learned more in that half hour with him than I had in any of my formal schooling!”
Moncur took his first recorded solos with the Jazztet. His early influences on trombone had been Bennie Green, Frank Rosolino, Bill Harris and Trummy Young, but after hearing J.J. Johnson, Moncur’s playing crystallized. Although impressed with Johnson’s speed and execution, the young trombonist was more taken with the structure of his solos. “His solos seemed to be an extension of the music,” Moncur explains. “His playing was very closely aligned with his compositions. That helped me shape some of my ideas and taught me to think in terms of keeping form.”
Hearing the playback at his first Jazztet recording session prompted Moncur to make some adjustments in his style. “I was playing too many eighth-notes in succession,” he says. “I wasn’t breaking up my phrases, and it sounded monotonous. I found that when I played shorter phrases using different inflections and articulations it could be more effective.” Moncur eventually arrived at his own highly personal style, combining a trenchant but thoughtful improvisational approach with the pleasingly robust sound and effortless swing of some of his early influences.
Moncur remained with the Jazztet until it disbanded in 1962. Living in Brooklyn, he entered into an extremely creative period of freelancing with like-minded musicians such as Jackie McLean, Herbie Hancock, Tony Williams and Bobby Hutcherson. These associations led to the Blue Note recordings that were to become classics in the evolution of modern jazz. Between 1963 and 1967, Moncur appeared on some eight Blue Note albums, including two as a leader, four as a sideman with McLean and one each with Hancock and Wayne Shorter. “A Blue Note date was more than just a record date-it was an event,” the trombonist says. “There was a certain Blue Note style of playing. I helped to break that mold because they let me do my own thing.” In addition to featuring his always-absorbing solo style, the albums showcased his evolving sensibility as a writer.
Whereas Moncur’s earliest pieces were tailored to the straightahead style of the Jazztet, his Blue Note work was far more exploratory both in form and mood. Michael Cuscuna, who produced the Mosaic Select compilation, notes that the trombonist’s pieces “are unique like Monk’s, and each one, coupled with its title, creates a vivid mental picture.” The reference to Monk is apt, for several of Moncur’s pieces from this period do have distinctly Monkish touches, particularly the ingenious “Frankenstein” and, of course, “Monk in Wonderland.” “His compositions,” Cuscuna adds, “while friendly to musical conventions, are also open and lyrical and exist within their own logic.”
Other pieces in the Mosaic box, such as “The Coaster,” are extensions of his writing for the Jazztet, while “Evolution” and “Gnostic” reflect the growing spirituality that would suffuse much of his post-Blue Note writing. Finally, there are evocative mood pieces, such as the exquisitely melodramatic “Ghost Town.” Much of Moncur’s writing is deceptively simple and sounds so natural that one is unaware of its underlying rhythmic or harmonic complexity. As Jackie McLean observed in 1968 to Nat Hentoff: “He often comes up with fantastic things that are right there in front of you, things you see every day but step over.”
Although he recorded extensively for the label, Blue Note never signed Moncur to a contract. “They got kind of pissed off at me because I had my music in my own company,” he explains. “In those days, the record companies used to publish tunes of their artists-even the biggest names gave up their early stuff like that.” Moncur has since made his peace with Blue Note: “It took 35 years, but I’m glad I lived to see it! I could have handled things differently, but I was young then and didn’t have any guidance. I don’t regret what I did because I own all my own stuff now, and these reissues pay a thousand times more than I would have gotten when these recordings were made.”
Moncur feels that his dispute with Blue Note may have alienated other companies and even some of his fellow musicians. “It forced me into another direction-toward the younger musicians in the avant-garde,” he says. “They respected what I was doing and pulled me into their thing. That saved me because I had nowhere else to go.” In the late 1960s, the trombonist found himself in a number of challenging settings, collaborating with such experimenters as Frank Lowe, Marion Brown, Sunny Murray, Beaver Harris and Archie Shepp. Moncur became one of only a handful of trombonists to move the instrument beyond the conventions of bebop. “‘Avant-garde’ or ‘free’ playing is a concept just like swing or bebop,” he observes. “You can’t just jump in and start playing it. You’ve got to respect it and learn how to fit in.”
In 1964 Moncur’s career took another odd turn. He auditioned for a role in the original Broadway production of James Baldwin’s Blues for Mr. Charlie. When director Burgess Meredith asked Moncur to play for him, the trombonist thought to himself, “He’s not going to hire me anyway, so I’m gonna play some weird shit!” Moncur played several of his own pieces and when he got to “Riff Raff,” Meredith turned to him and said, “I like that! We can use it in the third scene!” Then he asked the trombonist to play along with a Muddy Waters record. After two bars he stopped him, saying, “That’s all I need to hear. Give him a contract!” In addition to playing solo trombone, Moncur also had a speaking role in the play, which ran for four months.
While increasingly drawn into the “new music” of the turbulent 1960s, Moncur also worked with tenor saxophonists Joe Henderson and Sonny Rollins. “I used to sit in with Sonny on opening night, and then he’d tell me to make the rest of the week with him,” Moncur recalls. A tour of Europe in 1967 led to several recording projects with Archie Shepp. In Paris two years later, Moncur recorded his own New Africa suite (BYG). The album also contains the aptly titled “Exploration,” which shows just how seamlessly the trombonist had assimilated aspects of free jazz into his music. Five years later, he recorded perhaps his most ambitious work, Echoes of Prayer (JCOA), with the star-studded Jazz Composers’ Orchestra. An orchestral work of great rhythmic variety and emotional depth, it features some of Moncur’s most powerful trombone statements on record.
In the 1970s and 1980s, while continuing to perform, Moncur moved increasingly into education. From 1982 until 1991, he was composer-in-residence at the Newark Community School of the Arts. “We had students from eight to 80,” he recalls. “I did most of my teaching from the keyboard and grew with the kids! Teaching helped me develop my own musicianship.” He also conducted his own “Moncurainian” workshops with his wife, Tamam, a classically trained pianist and gifted arranger.
In recent years, work has been sporadic for Moncur. Aside from occasional reunion performances with old colleagues like Archie Shepp, Moncur has not had many opportunities to have his music performed. “A lot of musicians of my generation don’t seem to get the opportunities like the ‘new breed,'” he says. In addition, he has had extensive dental work, which required him to practically relearn his instrument. Moncur remains positive, however, saying, “In many ways, it’s been a blessing in disguise.”
A.B. Spellman wrote in the original liner notes to Evolution: “Moncur seemed constantly to talk more about what he intended to do than about what he had done.” That remains true today. “Some people have approached me about putting some of my new ideas into practice,” the trombonist says. “I don’t have an attitude anymore like the world’s against me. I know that everything’s on me this time, and I intend to be ready.”
http://www.bluenote.com/artists/grachan-moncur-iii
Artists - Grachan Moncur III
Recording period between
1963-1971
One of the first trombonists to explore free jazz, Grachan Moncur III is still best-known for his pair of innovative Blue Note albums (1963-1964) that also featured Lee Morgan and Jackie McLean on the first session and Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock on the later date. The son of bassist Grachan Moncur II, who played with the Savoy Sultans during 1937-1945, Grachan III started on trombone when he was 11. He toured with Ray Charles (1959-1962), was with the Jazztet (1962), and in 1963, played advanced jazz with Jackie McLean. Moncur toured with Sonny Rollins (1964) and played and recorded with Marion Brown, Joe Henderson, and Archie Shepp, matching up with fellow trombonist Roswell Rudd in the latter group. He also was part of the cooperative band 360 Degree Music Experience with Beaver Harris. Grachan Moncur, who has also recorded as a leader for BYG (1969) and JCOA (1974), continues to play challenging music and has been an educator. Some of his associations have been with Frank Lowe (1984-1985), Cassandra Wilson (1985), and the Paris Reunion Band. ~ Scott Yanow
https://www.allaboutjazz.com/grachan-moncur-iii-evolution-by-clifford-allen.php
Grachan Moncur III: Evolution
by CLIFFORD ALLEN
December 30, 2008
Grachan Moncur III
Evolution
Blue Note
2008
Originally released in 1963, Evolution was the leader debut of trombonist and composer Grachan Moncur III, who had previously worked with tenor saxophonist Benny Golson's Jazztet, and was the regular "cool" foil for brimming-hot Jackie McLean in the alto saxophonist's quintet. Moncur was characterized by critics of the day as a player with measured intellectual calm, in heady contrast to the slushy tailgate of Roswell Rudd. Moncur's phrasing is comparatively deft, a bugle-flick that's easily aligned with post-J.J. players like Curtis Fuller. It's probably no coincidence that Evolution's cover art recalls a slightly earlier Reid Miles/Francis Wolff sleeve design, the purple hue of Curtis Fuller Volume 3 (Blue Note 1583, 1958).
To those familiar with the trombonist's other collaborations with McLean from the period—Destination Out! (Blue Note, 1963) and One Step Beyond (Blue Note, 1963)—the lineup here might not be too surprising. Vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson lends his glassy strike to the proceedings, while a seventeen-year-old Tony Williams is the drummer and Bob Cranshaw is featured on bass. The ringer is trumpeter Lee Morgan, making his only appearance with Williams on record and certainly the most vanguard recording session in his book (apparently Moncur's original choice for brass foil was Prestige recording artist Webster Young). There are four pieces here, all of which come from the trombonist's pen.
Moncur's compositions, especially from this period, tow a line between near-stasis and jaunty modal climbs; such pieces as "Ghost Town" and "Love and Hate" (from his dates with McLean) are tense, meditative tone-poems, imagist and evocative yet with a delicate swing. It is in more abstract, free-flowing canvases such as "The Intellect" from 1965 that wavering stasis has reached its pan-tempo conclusion.
Evolution's title track is a step in this direction, long tones set into bedrock by alto, trombone and bass, with a heartbeat-pulse (tock) in single brass and vibraphone notes. With an exhalation, these tones are punctuated by snare rattle and spiraling, uncoiled solo statements. McLean expounds with tart, keening and bluesy phrases, curled bursts of energy clambering out of a taut horizon. Morgan follows with punchy arpeggios and half-valve calls; he approaches the net of obliquely dissonant drone with the rich lines of a balladeer, sounding both challenged and entirely within his "bag." Indeed, all three hornmen treat their solo spots as shaky soliloquy rather than exploring the possibilities of silence and mass a la Feldman and Ligeti (composers to which this piece offers some kinship).
While the first two pieces lean to the left of possibilities engendered by "modal jazz," the date closes with comparably more traditional tunes. "The Coaster" is jaunty, riff-laden post-bop out of a similar vein to "Riff Raff," which appeared on Destination Out!. So much credence could be given to McLean's poetic verbosity or Morgan's darting miniature explosions at the hand of Williams that the leader's solo statements might go unnoticed, which would be unfortunate. What might be termed "cool" is slick, effortless elision, the trombonist opting for evenly-paced thematic probes rather than the explosive peals chosen by his companions. "Monk in Wonderland" places side-by-side brassy swagger and detailed modal clambering, a nod to where Moncur's approaches to space and sound might also come from.
Moncur would go on to record dates with pianist Herbie Hancock and saxophonist Wayne Shorter, including one more as a leader for Blue Note, Some Other Stuff (Blue Note, 1965). His association with the avant-garde and new Black music became more distinct in the latter half of the 1960s as he worked with saxophonists Archie Shepp and Marion Brown, drummer Sunny Murray, and bassist Alan Silva, including a trip to the Pan-African Festival in Ketchaoua, Algeria in 1969. Yet this debut displays keen orchestration and a dedication to form, qualities which imbue his playing and would ground that of others. Talk about a title instilled with artistic prophecy.
ALL COMPOSITIONS AND ARRANGEMENTS BY GRACHAN MONCUR III:
Tracks:
Air Raid
Evolution
The Coaster
Monk in Wonderland.
Personnel:
Grachan Moncur III: trombone
Lee Morgan: trumpet
Jackie McLean: alto saxophone;
Bobby Hutcherson: vibraphone;
Bob Cranshaw: bass;
Tony Williams: drums.
Latest release date: 2008; Originally released in 1963 Record Label: Blue Note Records
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/26/arts/music-the-perils-of-living-too-long.html
Arts | MUSIC
MUSIC: The Perils of Living Too Long
by ADAM SHATZ
October 26, 2003
New York Times
JAZZ lives often end tragically, but not all tragic endings are alike. Some jazz musicians (Clifford Brown, John Coltrane, Albert Ayler) die too young, achieving instant martyrdom. Others (Billie Holiday, Chet Baker, Bill Evans) lead lives that are like slow-motion deaths, lives that give their music a sweet, decadent perfume and make the flaws in their art seem like so many needle tracks, scattered traces of disintegration. But there is another way of exiting the scene: living too long, passing the years unproductively, falling silent. Less noticed and far more common, it's the surest route to obscurity that the music offers.
If Grachan Moncur III had perished 40 years ago in a car crash, or become one of jazz's junkie-poets, he might be a legend today, rather than an all-but-forgotten trombonist. Unless you're a serious student of free jazz, chances are you've never heard of him. But in the 1960's and early 1970's, Mr. Moncur was the leading trombonist on the scene. (His only rival was Roswell Rudd, whose style was as gregarious as Mr. Moncur's was subdued.) He dressed like a leader, wearing black turtlenecks that defined Bohemian hipness and sporting a goatee that hinted at intellectual seriousness, if not militancy. His tone, attack and sensibility embodied what the jazz critic David Rosenthal called ''badness'' -- an air of unshakable cool that conceals, but just barely, an undercurrent of menacing intensity. For the better part of a decade, the curtain rose for this young lion, and he was resplendent. And then -- darkness.
''Whenever I have a conversation about what's wrong with the jazz business, I always start out by saying, 'Where is Grachan Moncur?' '' the alto saxophonist Jackie McLean said recently.
Geographically speaking, he is in Newark, where he has raised six children (including a 32-year-old son named, yes, Grachan IV), taught trombone lessons and served as a composer-in-residence at the city's Community Arts Center. As far as the jazz scene is concerned, he may have ceased to exist altogether. As Mr. Moncur, 66, acknowledged by phone: ''I seem to have disappeared. But in a sense I wasn't totally extinct. I just went underground.''
Mr. Moncur's great Blue Note work, much of which he made in collaboration with Mr. McLean, was recently reissued on a three-disc boxed set by Mosaic Records (www.mosaicrecords.com), jazz's answer to the Library of America. If the Mosaic box doesn't recharge his career -- Mr. Moncur has long been plagued by dental problems that have severely worn down his chops -- it will at least help restore an extraordinary talent to his rightful place in the history of jazz. The box contains 25 tracks, 16 of them written by Mr. Moncur; the music is as unforgettable and idiosyncratic as his name. Neither bop nor free but a deft synthesis of the two; confidently rooted in the black vernacular but elegantly urbane; often sardonic but always serious: Mr. Moncur's Blue Note period prefigured the work of Greg Osby, Jason Moran and other young jazz musicians who have mined the materials of African-American music with tart, edgy sophistication.
Mr. Moncur was born in 1937 into a musical family in New York City. His father, Grachan II, played bass in the Savoy Sultans, the house band at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem. His mother, a beautician, counted Dinah Washington and Sarah Vaughan among her clients. When Mr. Moncur was a child, the family moved to a predominantly white neighborhood in Newark, where his father led a swing band called Brother Moncur and His Strollers. At age 11 he picked up the trombone. After graduating from an elite black private high school in North Carolina, he landed a chair in the Nat Phipps band, a remarkable Newark youth ensemble, thanks to the recommendation of his friend Wayne Shorter, the group's commanding young saxophonist. While still in his teens Mr. Moncur also sat in with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers and befriended Blakey's alto saxophonist, Mr. McLean.
When they finally began working together in February 1963, Mr. McLean's ''search for inspiration,'' as he wrote at the time, ''was clouded by a depression.'' Mr. Moncur, by then a Juilliard composition student who had made his mark with Ray Charles and the Art Farmer-Benny Golson Jazztet, provided just the inspiration he needed. They recruited a rhythm section of unknowns: a 17-year-old drummer from Boston, Tony Williams; the vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson; and the bassist Eddie Khan. After a few gigs at Brooklyn's Blue Coronet, the band recorded ''One Step Beyond,'' which featured two tunes by Mr. McLean and two by Mr. Moncur. It was extraordinarily supple free-bop, speeding up and down with a lover's intuition, as attentive to dynamics as to pulse. Mr. Moncur, Mr. McLean and Mr. Hutcherson made two more records that year, each better than the last: the darkly mesmerizing ''Destination Out,'' with Roy Haynes on drums and Larry Ridley on bass; and Mr. Moncur's masterpiece, ''Evolution,'' a suite of four originals recorded under his leadership, with Williams returning on drums, Bob Cranshaw on bass and Lee Morgan on trumpet.
''When Grachan and I got together it was like a marriage,'' Mr. McLean recalled. Among brass-horn marriages, theirs was as distinctive as the better-known partnerships of Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry and Miles Davis and Wayne Shorter. It combined the emotional urgency of free jazz with the poise and restraint one associates with the Modern Jazz Quartet -- an achievement that's all the more remarkable when you consider how little they apparently rehearsed. It helped, of course, that they came with a sense of mission, described with admirable precision by album titles like ''One Step Beyond'' and ''Evolution'' (both 1963).
Mr. Moncur's writing was integral to the group's success. It was angular yet bluesy, formally adventurous but grounded in hooks. His primary influence was Thelonious Monk. ''If Monk was a tribal leader,'' Mr. McLean once said, ''Grachan would be his medicine man.'' In bright, strutting, tempo-shifting numbers like ''Monk in Wonderland,'' the medicine man paid tribute to the tribal leader. But he also displayed an impressive talent for other genres, from searing vamp-driven tunes (''Hypnosis'') to somber, deadpan waltzes (''Frankenstein'') to ominously slow, nearly tempoless dirges (''Love and Hate,'' ''Ghost Town''). Some of Mr. Moncur's compositions are programmatic in feel, connecting sound to image in the manner of the movie scores he studied at Juilliard. The dramatic ''Ghost Town,'' for example, a 14-minute ''musical painting,'' conjures up a grandly portentous sense of desolation, through long passages in which nothing is heard but spare reverberations on vibes or cymbals, which echo like footsteps on a seemingly deserted street.
After ''Evolution,'' Mr. Moncur and Mr. McLean went their separate ways. Although they were briefly reunited on Mr. McLean's 1967 albums, ''Hipnosis'' and '' 'Bout Soul'' -- portions of both appear on the Mosaic box -- neither session matched the inventiveness of their earlier collaborations. Fortunately, Mr. Moncur was able to make one more record under his own name for Blue Note, the 1964 session ''Some Other Stuff.'' His last truly great record, it features Mr. Moncur alongside Mr. Shorter, Herbie Hancock and Tony Williams -- three-fifths of what would soon become the Miles Davis Quintet -- and the bassist Cecil McBee.
''That whole record was inspired by the hard times I was having in New York,'' Mr. Moncur recalled. ''I'd just fallen out with the first young lady I'd met in New York, and I'd moved out of my apartment in the Diplomat Hotel opposite Town Hall, which was the biggest mistake I ever made since I had a room there with a private bath and telephone for only $27 a week.'' The song titles ''Gnostic'' and ''Nomadic,'' he said, expressed his state of mind: ''I was a nomad after losing my room, and I was a gnostic because I had to survive in the streets by my own wits.''
Wits he had in abundance. After Mr. Hutcherson told him the Actors Studio was looking to cast a musician in a Broadway production of James Baldwin's new civil rights play, ''Blues for Mr. Charlie,'' Mr. Moncur headed for the audition. Though he had no acting experience, he got the part. And because the play was more than three hours and he only had to be onstage for an hour and 15 minutes, he spent the other two hours in a sound-proof rehearsal room practicing voicings for ''Some Other Stuff,'' which he recorded three months after Baldwin's play opened. Structurally, it's Mr. Moncur's most daring record, a precursor to the work of avant-garde jazz composers like Anthony Braxton and Muhal Richard Abrams. Only one of the four tracks (the glorious, up-tempo ''Thandiwa'') is a jazz tune. The others are daring experiments in an as-yet-undefined genre, unfolding in sections, with flashes of European dissonance, African percussion and marching-band music. As Mr. Moncur explains it, the range of influences on ''Some Other Stuff'' reflects the music that the band was listening to when they gathered at Mr. Hancock's Riverside Drive apartment. ''Herbie had the best stereo equipment of that period, and we'd put on headphones and listen to Ravi Shankar and Trane and heavy classical stuff, and in some cases with the classical stuff we'd follow the score.''
It's hard to listen to ''Some Other Stuff'' without a melancholy sense of what-might-have-been, not just because so few jazz musicians today are taking comparable risks, but because Mr. Moncur was dropped from Blue Note shortly after making it. Mr. Moncur's career as a leader didn't come to an end, exactly. From the late 1960's through the 1970's, he made some fine records, notably ''New Africa'' (1969), which has some luminous improvising by Archie Shepp and Roscoe Mitchell and which was recently reissued on vinyl by Actuel. But Mr. Moncur's later work never quite delivered on the promise of his Blue Note records. One could, of course, say the same of Blue Note artists like Mr. Hancock and Mr. Shorter. But they grew rich and famous failing to deliver on that promise, while Mr. Moncur simply faded into oblivion. His Blue Note records, meanwhile, went out of print, as if the company had no interest in preserving his memory.
It's not the career Mr. Moncur hoped for, but he's rueful rather than bitter about it. ''It's strange,'' he said. ''Most of my best friends are people I very seldom see. In recent years I didn't even try to see them because I wasn't happy with things. I'm the kind of guy who wears his feelings on his sleeve, and I was afraid I wouldn't be able to snuff it out. But everything's cool, man. I'm still composing, and I'm finally beginning to see a little daylight.’'
http://www.cerisepress.com/04/10/the-soul-of-trombone-grachan-moncur-iii/view-all
The Soul of Trombone — Grachan Moncur III
|
GRACHAN MONCUR III was born
on June 3, 1937 at Sydenham Hospital in Harlem, and was raised in
Newark, New Jersey. He is a jazz trombonist and composer. He is best
known for two albums he recorded for Blue Note Records in the early
1960s, Evolution and Some Other Stuff. These albums
established Moncur’s reputation as a composer as well as an
instrumentalist, and mark Blue Note’s first forays into what was coming
to be called “avant-garde” jazz. His music spans the Black Arts Movement
with which he was associated in the 1960s, through the 1970s when the
economic bottom fell out of the jazz economy, and has recorded in the
past several years, most recently 2007’s Inner Cry Blues.
This interview seeks to give a more nuanced understanding of Newark’s
jazz culture, which was often synonymous with Newark’s African American
community, and in hope of fostering a stronger appreciation and
understanding of Grachan Moncur’s work and art.
|
October 19, 2011
Where are we and who am I talking to?Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey We’re here at Rutgers University in Newark and you’re talking to Grachan Moncur III. How did you get your first name, or how did your father get his first name? It’s an unusual name. Do you know? Uh, there’s quite a history with that name and my family, but I’ll just go for the time being, we’ll start from the Bahamas. My father’s father was Bahamian. He was the first Grachan and then my father was the second, but he was mostly known as “Brother.” People hardly knew his name was “Grachan” until I started recording because all the musicians of his era knew him as “Brother,” Brother Moncur. They didn’t know he was Grachan until the third came out. That’s pretty much where it began.[1] And where did your mother’s people come from? All of my people from my father’s side were from Florida and the Bahamas. The people from my mother’s side were from Newark, her mother and her mother’s mother. So my father came from Miami up here and met my mother. When were they born and when did they die? Let’s start from when they met and got married. They met in Newark. They got married. At the time when I was born, my father was working at the Savoy Ballroom and my mother happened to go up and visit him. So she came to New York from Newark to visit him one weekend and I guess those happy feet at the Savoy kind of urged me to want to come out, you know? I decided to come a couple of months early, so I was born a preemie in New York only because it was up to my mother. I was born in New York at Sydenham Hospital, which I’ve very proud to say. I told my mother that was the best things she ever did for me, that I could I say I was born in New York. I was very grateful about that. Although I was raised in Newark, I was born in Sydenham Hospital on Manhattan Avenue and 122nd Street.[2] I live on Manhattan Avenue, further down, near 119th Street. So, anyway, that’s how I came. At an early age my mother… want to know a little history about my mother, something like that? Sure… whatever you want to talk about. It’s kind of interesting because my mother inherited a beauty salon at a very early age. I think she started working when she was about eleven years old in this beauty salon. And I think at the time it was called “Theatrical Beauty Salon” and she inherited that beauty parlor with that name and until she died she kept that name. |
| Where was that? The “Theatrical Beauty Salon” was on 18th Avenue, near Spruce Street. So what happened was she started working for this older lady, I think her name was Mrs. Wardell. I guess she was very happy about how enthusiastic my mother was and my mother showed a little bit of talent. So, to make a long story short… she started doing hair. By the time she was thirteen, the owner started preparing her to take over the shop, because she was going to retire. Before my mother was fifteen she inherited the shop, so she inherited the shop before she had a working permit; you had to have a working permit. She had the job, so as soon as she became fifteen she got the working permit and a license. So it was legitimate. She started the “Theatrical Beauty Salon.” Before my mother took over, I think a lot of theatrical people frequented that shop. My mother inherited a lot of those kinds of customers. My mother, later, when she was sixteen or seventeen, met my father. All of her life she was really close to Sarah Vaughan. Sarah and her went to high school or grammar school, or both. Sarah was like my aunt. My mother was with Sarah from the day she got the gig at the Apollo until the day she died in California, she was at her bedside. They were like sisters.[3] I grew up in a very musical atmosphere…. At a very early age I was exposed to a variety of entertainers…. I was exposed to a world that was so rare… I didn’t know… all I knew was I had a very beautiful childhood.Sarah and my mother, being that they were very close, and my father a musician, I guess they were all close in business and stuff. I grew up in a very musical atmosphere. When I was two or three years old, my father was recording with people like Billie Holiday, and working with big bands, even some of the white bands like Paul Whiteman. The Savoy Sultans had disbanded and he started freelancing with different groups. At a very early age I was exposed to a variety of entertainers. All my life. I would say… by the time my mother had the beauty parlor on 18th Avenue, we had a two-story house. I’m not sure if my mother was the owner, but she owned part of the house. What I do remember was that after we moved down there, the next most significant place that I remember growing up was on High Street; she bought a house on High Street, and this was at a time when the whites were moving out. We were about the third black family to have a house on High Street. We were opposite the Krueger’s Mansion.[4] Some of the Krueger family was still there. I remember 602 High Street was a very popular house; because the beauty parlor was in the basement. Dinah Washington… Dinah didn’t come much to the beauty parlor, but my mother worked for her as a cosmetologist. She was more than a hairdresser; she developed styles for entertainers, like hair color way back before that was fashionable. She went to Paris and learned haircutting and hair color. She was very advanced and a lot of people catered to her because she was very updated and very modern. So I was exposed to a world that was so rare… I didn’t know… all I knew was I had a very beautiful childhood. I had my chores… we had a fifteen-room house; I was an only child for seventeen years, so I had a lot of responsibility to keep the house clean. But I had an allowance, so I was pretty cool. When I was nine years old, my father came in with a trombone. |
So, you didn’t pick the trombone?
Well, when I was six he had bought me a cello. I didn’t show too much interest in the cello.
That’s interesting because I think David Baker, who played trombone and switched over to cello, said the positions are somehow relatable, and that middle sound.
Yes, the trombone and cello are very similar. But I never really… my concept of string playing never really developed. My wife is a better string player than I am. She can play the violin; she had played the violin in school, and guitar, and bass even. My father was going to give her all the basses when he passed because he wasn’t going to leave them to me. She was good with strings. 602 [High Street] was a very nice experience for me. The people who came through there were really stars… I was a kid. They looked at me as Brother and Ella’s son. Dizzy Gillespie would come through, Rudy [Williams] would come through, Redd Foxx… Redd Foxx would sleep on our couch; that was before he was making any really big money. My mother let him crash at the pad so he wouldn’t have to pay for a hotel. The only hotel he could stay in at that particular time was the Coleman Hotel.[5] It was owned by the Coleman Brothers, a gospel group. They had their own hotel; a black family had their own hotel, their own record company, their own radio station. They were very interesting. Any entertainers who came to town would stay at the Coleman Hotel. A lot of my friends in middle school knew I was into music; especially when I got the trombone they knew I was kind of serious. They said: “Oh, you’ll automatically make it.” They knew my mother and father knew everybody. But that was not the case. That had nothing to do with it. None of the stars that ever came to my house had anything to do with my development. I developed totally on my own through my own resources from beginning to end. You would have thought a lot of people would think… you take somebody like Natalie Cole, because Nat was her father, that she would make it, but I’m sure Natalie had to show her own wares to get where she went. You can’t ride somebody’s shoulders; you’ve got to have your own talent.
Do you think your mother’s modern sensibility affected how you understood what music could be?
I think her enthusiasm for me to pursue my dream helped me believe in myself. She was great. She was a no-nonsense kind of person. I don’t think she would lead me on if she didn’t think that I had talent. She was enthusiastic; she let me try to develop. And so was my father. He definitely tried to put me on the right track. He was about no tricks and no easy way in. He was a no-shortcuts guy. You know what I’m talking about? Although one of his buddies got me my first gig, it had nothing to do with his influence. His buddy liked my enthusiasm and knew I wanted to play. His buddy was Leon Eason, a big trumpet player from Newark. As a matter of fact, we used to call him “Little Pops” because he played like Louis Armstrong. He was so much like Louis. Really. My father got to know him when he was at his peak, because unfortunately, he was an alcoholic. And he had lots of good books, but he had problems with life. He could never reach the stardom part. But he still maintained his musicianship till the end. He was a great inspiration to me. I knew how great he was, and he knew I was into a more modern type of venue. He saw my seriousness. A lot of times he put me on a gig and he’d be at the bar drinking; not that he couldn’t play, but I’ll never forget him — he gave me more money than I ever got in my life. The first gig I was eighteen or something. I think he gave me $35… most guys were getting like $7 and $10. [laughs]
What happened with the beauty shop and the community on High Street?
My mother and father decided; my father developed a group in Newark, it became a house band at Club 83, it was called Club Len & Len. It was organized by some professional Negro baseball players.
From the Eagles?
I don’t remember exactly. Len Hooper. They were all professional ballplayers. I think it was a Negro team. They got this club together. My father held a gig there for about eight or nine years. For some reason my father wanted to go back to Florida. For one thing, the house was getting to be unmanageable — the taxes and stuff like that. My father and mother felt like it might be a little easier in Florida. So they sold the house. This was around 1955 or 1956.[6]
So they left Newark prior to the uprising or riots…
Yes, they weren’t here. In 1967 they were in Florida.
But you were here?
I was here. I was here; as a matter of fact, the night of the riot, I was on my way to Canada. And… Baraka and some of his people came by my pad. See, a lot happened during that time. John Coltrane died. You know? I remember when I was in Canada, the first or second night that I opened there in Toronto, we got the word that Trane had died and I had just left Newark. But Baraka came over to my house during the riot… I don’t know if I should say all that went down, but anyway. He came by; a stop before they were doing their thing. I was on my way to Canada, but I stopped to entertain them for a while and I went downtown. On my way downtown to Penn Station or wherever I was going to get the bus and I was dodging and it was weird… very weird. I had my horn and was trying to get out of town. The first night of the riots.[7]
We had the whole spirit of what was going on in the world… Civil Rights, the Sixties… the revolution… that whole energy. The whole thing. We were uncontainable.But, another fast forward, and this is weird… I don’t know how… in 1967 I met my wife before she became my wife. I went to Europe with Archie Shepp. This was the first, either the JVC or the Newport Jazz Festival had gone to Europe. For the first time it was taking it from Newport to an international tour. And Miles Davis was the head of the show. Everybody was on the show. Sarah Vaughan. The Thelonious Monk Big Band. It was a hell of a show.[8]
And we were the cats: we had Archie, Roswell Rudd, Jimmy Garrison, and Beaver Harris. That was the group. We went over there and tore up Europe. We had the whole spirit of what was going on in the world… Civil Rights, the Sixties… the revolution… that whole energy. The whole thing. We were uncontainable. Nobody could do nothin’ with us… Miles, no one. Miles was very angry at us; they changed our spot to last because we would get a standing ovation that would last close to a half an hour. And that would cut into the time for them to come on, you dig? So they changed our spot to last. After the tour was over we stayed four months after; one club called Le Chat Qui Pêche in Paris. Madame Ricard was the owner, a very old lady, and she owned a club called Le Chat Qui Pêche, which means the little pussy cat.[9] It was the most prominent jazz club in Paris. We stayed there six weeks.
You said that the band had the spirit of the Sixties, in a sense, the power and enthusiasm. Do you think your music has something to say about the social disturbances of the Sixties?
I’ll put it like this: it wasn’t my music… I was playing with Archie Shepp.
I know he’s a political cat.
See I was a part of that. I want to make this clear: I am a jazz artist. I don’t want to pretend to be something that I’m not. I have been involved with groups that were considered revolutionary groups. That’s because…uh, I had a hard time. It seemed the younger generation embraced me; I was the first trombonist to be identified with the avant-garde. Even though I played with mainstream cats, hardboppers, I had created a form of music to put the trombone in that music. You know. I’m not saying I was the first one to do it, but I was the first one to have major exposure. Therefore, in Leonard Feather’s Encyclopedia it was written that I was the first trombone player of the Sixties to be identified with the avant-garde jazz. It didn’t list anyone’s name but mine. The reason is because my exposure, that it was on Blue Note, which was the main jazz company in the world at the time. That gave credibility to the avant-garde and opened the door for several of the avant-garde pioneers such as Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor and Eric Dolphy to record on that label; they knew my music and the groups that I recorded as guinea pigs to find out that that kind of music worked. They was ready to tear at me. After they saw what I did on Some Other Stuff they was ready to kill me! Because Alfred was out of town when I recorded that and Frank Wolff was the A&R person. Alfred wanted to kill me. [Imitates Lion in a German accent] “Are you crazy… you recorded that?” [laughs]
Oh, man. They found out that all of my music was already published in my company, they really didn’t like that![10] They dropped me like a hot potato.
They didn’t ask you to record again?
That’s right. They dropped me like a hot potato…. I recorded with other people a couple of times; but before that they wanted to sign me exclusively. I was rewarded when they did that. I didn’t do that to be funny. I put my music there about a year before I even started recording with them. That was done behind a young lady that was my friend at the time and she was working for Marv Davidson’s lawyer, Harold Levett, and Bruce Wright who was a lawyer at the time before he became judge. Remember they called him “Turn ’em loose Bruce”?[11] You don’t remember that. And my company was set up at the same time as John Coltrane’s company, Jocal, Cannonball’s, and everybody’s, so I just thought it was the natural thing to do. Now, all those cats were considered to be really well-established musicians; “You’re just coming on the scene and you’re telling me….”
I know you were planning a record with Monk and Art Blakey and maybe Woody Shaw. That was a travesty that Blue Note didn’t go for that. It would have been a classic.
Oh, man! Honest to God. We had a three-way conference call, because I told Monk and Blakey, “I have this music and I want you guys on this date” and they had heard Evolution and Monk went for it because Monk loved “Monk in Wonderland” that I wrote for him. He told Nellie that, he told Nica. That was his favorite tune that anyone wrote for him, that he really liked. I think those cats would have brought something, they would have carried my music.
It would have been amazing.
I mean, I was so surprised that they were so receptive to want to do it and to prove it they said: “We’re going to call Alfred now.” Alfred said, [imitating German accent] “No, man. No, Grachan. You’re doing something different. What they’re doing is not the same thing!”
Man, what a shame. Do you have that music? The music you would have done?
I have not recorded it. I only recorded one piece of it. That’s a piece that I did recently that I recorded in California with a group called Inner Cry Blues.
I have that CD at home.
Right, OK, “Hilda” was one of the pieces[12] that I wanted to use.
You sang on that, too…
Not on “Hilda,” but on two tracks, “Sonny’s Back” and “A for Pops.” But we didn’t have a budget or time for me to do it over; I think I could have been better. Another thing about that date. I didn’t know what to bring because the only thing I heard of these guys was what they sent me and they sent me a whole CD of originals.[13] You can’t tell how people play on all original tunes. You’ve got to hear a guy play on either a standard or a ballad to really know how he plays. I didn’t know what to play, so I just brought a whole book of stuff and we didn’t have so much time to rehearse. I heard right away that they had a group sound of their own, so I thought more like a composer than I did as an instrumentalist and as a musician. I just utilized their sound, and it was kind of difficult for me to put my thing in there because their whole thing was coming from a totally different thing, rhythmically and sound-wise. It was two sets, so I had to play my trombone on an eggshell, but they followed me well on the freer pieces. It’s just that our conceptions were so different on the inside pieces, like “A for Pops,” which are very demanding chords and “Sonny’s Back,” which is straight ahead blues. It might sound like it, but it’s not straight ahead like the New York type that I could get some use from. You see what I’m saying? But I thought their musicianship was great, especially because they let me lead the band and they did the best they could and they really came off good. I don’t think East Coast musicians would have did any better on the freer pieces, “Hilda,” “Inner Cry Blues,” the freer pieces… they knew how to play collectively and follow. I really… that’s something that East Coast cats don’t have like the West Coast cats.
Now, you said something about Miles’s reaction to this band you had in Europe, but I know that Williams, Hancock, and Wayne were in this group before they were with Miles.
That’s right!
So, he was listening to this, or was aware of them or what?
I heard Dingo and think he definitely heard Evolution, because Dingo… [hums the tune]… Da-Da-Da Dee-Daa. Da-Da-Da Daa-Dee. Anyway, I heard “The Coaster” in his Dingo record. Dingo wasn’t the most popular record. Ever heard Dingo by Miles? And he’s got something, Sean, very much like… And I heard…. The thing is, uh, I know for a fact that those cats [Williams, Hancock, and Shorter] did their best work with me. Anything they did after is after the fact. They have done nothing… I haven’t heard anything more creative from Dingo… there’re different chord changes, but there’s not one thing… they did their most creative stuff on that [Some Other Stuff].[14] You know? And Miles and them, it must have impressed Miles because Miles got the whole band and stayed with ‘em till the end, you know? But, uh, as a matter of fact, somewhere on the Plugged Nickel date, they actually played “The Twins.”[15] I mean, Wayne started it and then they all got into “The Twins.”
I have to listen for that; I didn’t make that connection.
And I told Cuscuna that and he sent me the Plugged Nickel things and I didn’t hear it.
That was a lot of music. I don’t know. I’m sure you’re right.
I didn’t hear it in what he sent me, but I know I heard it. But I heard it over the radio and they were playing tapes… it could have been the raw tapes. You know what I mean? But I did hear them indicate “The Twins.” But that stuff, uh, I’m in a totally different place now. I hear that instruction now. Like the “Hilda” that you have, when I first played “Hilda” with Marion Brown, I didn’t play it the way…
I love his music too.
Tony played “Hilda” with me to. Man! We used to play “Hilda” and “Blues for Donald Duck” and man, we got some shit out of that was like psychedelic shit! That shit was like [gestures wildly with his hands]. That has never been recorded! I mean, it was recorded on one of those old time things, but never professionally recorded. Let me tell you something, if I ever get a chance, man. People have not heard, they have not heard my music. Because back there I had an opportunity… these were fantastic musicians [referring to the musicians on Evolution and Some Other Stuff] where they copped very quickly… we did everything Bip! Bam! Boom! Bip! Bap! But can you imagine since then where I’ve had time to think and analyze that shit and come up with different shit since then? Man, if I get anywhere near some musicians to do like updated versions of stuff! I believe it’s going to happen, like this trip I’ve got coming up. Hopefully the next couple of gigs I have might blossom into something. Yeah, you know.
What do you think about recognition? I want to know why… I think your music should be better known to jazz people, or people in general. Why do you think your music is not better known?
My uncle [Al Cooper] told me years ago before he passed away. He said, “Grachan, it’s a damn shame when you made those records initially. Those records are classic records. You were so young; you didn’t have any guidance and you were thrown out there and you automatically became competition to your peers.” And so you were out there by yourself and with no guidance and all your peers, most of them got guidance from various sources, like Miles with Herbie Hancock; they got a whole lot of sheltering. Miles protected them in a lot of ways and kept them on the right tracks, and the experience of working with him for so long automatically… put one and one together yourself.
But you know…. It beats the hell out of me. The only thing I can think of, man, this music is maybe not for… maybe it belongs to God… maybe it’s something different. I don’t know. Because I feel great. I’ve realized… I’ve been through so much stuff, man. Ups and downs. I’ve had the most glorious stuff, life in the world, the most beautiful everything, and some of the most ugly shit. And, I’m at a point now where it’s hard to describe. I mean, even though… I’d love to see dealing with Herbie and Wayne and them cats, and I’d like to get that kind of recognition. Then again, I like being able to do what I want to do. You know…
No pressure…
Yeah. I’ve seen what’s happening with them. I’ve seen them recently in the White House, playing [makes a gesture and face to show astonishment]. The last time I saw them on the television at the White House and Wayne was pushing Roy Hargrove up to play, to do all the playing. Like he was ashamed to be there. Like he didn’t want to play. Herbie, they didn’t play nothing but “Watermelon Man” and Herbie put everything in “Watermelon Man” that he knew. I mean, he played so much on “Watermelon Man” like he was playing for his life. And that’s what he had to do. Something didn’t make me envy that.
I see what you’re saying; when you’re in front of President Obama and everything…
That’s the biggest thing you can do, and this is what’s up? Come on, man.
Is there any interest in them to do something again with you?
I have no idea. Let me tell you something, man. The world is so weird. Like I want to tell you something. When I heard Bobby McFerrin the other night… WBGO played him for about an hour. This new thing he has with voices… it’s very pleasant.[16] I love Bobby McFerrin. But ever since he made “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” it’s like he got lost. In other words, they don’t know what to do with him. I mean, he’s probably making much more money than me; he’s more prestigious. I see him on Channel 13, and so on and so on. But…. I don’t get it. He’s probably got a good manager that keeps him in things and the money comes in and the gigs that he gets are top notch. That’s the story of my life. Everything I do is great! I just don’t do a lot. You know, I’ve got a great family, I’ve got a great wife, I’ve got a house… I’ve got everything. I eat. You know what I mean? I’m not sick.
The thing about it… I would like to do much better just for my horn’s sake, and I love my horn so much. And I’m hearing things that’re so beautiful and I don’t have the enthusiasm to go out like I used to and be at everybody’s space and do everything. I don’t feel like that. That’s missing out of me. But, I’m not angry with anybody. I’m not jealous of anything. I just miss what’s in my horn not being able to… not getting more enthusiasm to want to do more. I don’t have a soul mate. My last musical soul mate was John Patton.[17] I don’t get that every day… I miss that. Tony [Williams] was a soul mate of mine, before he went with Miles. Me and Bobby [Hutcherson] were soul mates. Beaver Harris became a soul mate.
What about Jackie McLean?
Jackie was a big, beautiful golden feather in my hat. We did everything in a very short period of time. He was one big, gigantic golden feather that came along. And he made people respect me. He made me his music director and anywhere we played or Blue Note, he made them really respect me. He said: “This is my music director.” He didn’t worry about nothin’; he just let me run the music. And everywhere that we played he made people give me respect. No other musician has ever done that. Been big enough to love me like that, to put themselves second. He knew how big he was. That was just his love. That was really pure love. But see, that only happened a short period of time, and he had to get back to his business because that was my thing.[18] He was smart enough to know okay, I can’t do Grachan’s thing for the rest of my life. I have to get back to do my thing. But he left me with something. It’s just unfortunate I didn’t have the substantial guidance with people with power to guide me right, you dig? I’ve got my wife. My wife and I are partners now, but she’s not a jazz artist. She’s an artist, she’s a musician, she’s a poet.
Was she a teacher in Newark?
Yeah, she’s retired. She been retired for about three years now. From Louise A. Spencer; she taught the Gifted and Talented students for about twelve years.
How long have you been married?
Forty-something years. Her and her mother, before her mother passed, what I have… me and wife got it together. Like I showed you the record. She put the graphic stuff. She’s the business director and I’m the artistic director for our businesses.
How many children do you have?
Six. And they’re all very successful. They’re very supportive. My mother said my six children are my first six million dollars. And it’s becoming pretty true. In a sense. They all worked very hard; they knew they had to work hard. We gave them a good foundation; they all went to all private schools — middle school and high school — and after that they were on their own; they all got scholarships and finished college. You know? So, you know, and they’re all very close. They’re all doing their thing, but they check-in at home.
I feel like I’m very successful in a very strange way. I can do what I want to do. I just don’t have as much activity as I would like to have to keep me feeling the way I really want to feel, but hey, I’m nearly a hundred, man [laughs]. I’m seventy-four. I’m feeling great. I realize that, uh, I could have done a lot more for myself. That’s what I realize. And I think my attitude gets in the way sometimes because I did so much so fast. You know, I don’t really have the energy or the enthusiasm to do it that way again and I don’t think I should have to.
You were in your twenties when you did Evolution?
I was twenty-six. So, you know, those two and everything else, the BYG, everything that I’ve done has really carried me all this time. I mean to the point where… that’s the other thing I can’t understand. When I see my musical statements, I can’t understand why people don’t want to hear me.
I don’t understand it, either. That’s part of why I want to write this book.
It just seems very strange.
Well, let me ask you this… do you think any of this has to do with the fact that you’ve been in Newark? Because Newark has been in a state of decline.
It probably has a lot to do with it. And I’m looking forward to getting out of Newark very soon. I’ve been here too long to not have visited my family in Florida, for example. I have plans in December to go away for a while and visit my brothers down in Florida and kind of speculate and see what’s going on there, in South Beach. If I find something substantial. I mean, I can do anything. My wife wouldn’t care if I went to Timbuktoo if I could get some work and be happy. She’d be happy. So, I have her support with that. I need a good agent. I need somebody that… like you! Yeah!
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REFERENCES
Grachan
“Brother” Moncur was born on September 2, 1915; he was the half-brother
of Al Cooper. He was a founding member of the Savoy Sultans, which
formed in 1937, a swing band (called “jump” by the musicians). They were
popular with dancers at the Savoy Ballroom from 1937 until 1946.
Grachan is pronounced “GRAY-shun.”
- Sydenham
Hospital was located in Harlem on Manhattan Avenue between 123rd and
124th Streets. Sydenham first opened its doors in 1892 in a brownstone
as an African American hospital and moved to Manhattan Avenue in 1924.
It was shut down in 1980 despite bitter community sit-ins and protests.
- Sarah Vaughan was born in Newark on March 27, 1924.
- The Krueger-Scott mansion is on the corner of Court and High Street (now Martin Luther King Boulevard).
- The Coleman Hotel was just west of Newark’s Lincoln Park.
- An item in the September 22, 1955 issue of Jet
magazine says: “Wealthy Newark beauty shop owner Ella Moncur is selling
her business and will move to Florida to open a chain of motels.”
- Coltrane died on July 17, 1967. The riots in Newark took place from July 12 to 17.
- George
Wein developed this concert series, called the “Newport Jazz Festival
in Europe”; it was sponsored by Pan Am Airlines and the U.S. Travel
Service, a government agency. Eight acts performed in cities like
Antwerp, Belfast, London, Rotterdam, Stockholm, Helsinki, Copenhagen,
Berlin, Paris, and Barcelona. Not every group performed in all seventeen
cities. Other bands included the Gary Burton Quartet (with Larry
Coryell, Steve Swallow, and Bob Moses), and Wein’s own Newport All-Stars
with Buddy Tate.
- Around 1955 Le Chat Qui Pêche (The Cat That Fishes) opened at 9, rue de la Huchette in the Latin Quarter.
- All of Moncur’s music is published under Gramon Publishing Co.
- Wright was called as such because in the 1970s he set low bail for many poor and minority suspects.
- “Hilda”
is Moncur’s memorial to his first daughter, who died at a young age.
“Hilda” is a 7/4-3/4 time signature that shifts within the melodic
structure, but remains 7/4 in the improvisations.
- Moncur’s sidemen on Inner Cry Blues
were Ben Adams on vibraphone, Sameer Gupta on drums, Erik Jekabson on
trumpet, Mitch Marcus on tenor saxophone, and Lukas Vesely on bass.
- Some Other Stuff was recorded on July 6, 1964.
- The Plugged Nickel was recorded at the end of December 1965.
- VOCAbuLarieS (EmArcy) came out in 2010.
- Patton died in March 2002 and lived nearby Newark, in Montclair, New Jersey.
- Here, Moncur refers to a series of albums that McLean and him did together for Blue Note: One Step Beyond and Destination…Out under McLean’s name and Evolution under Moncur’s.
Biography
SEAN SINGER‘s first book Discography won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize. He is writing his dissertation in American Studies at Rutgers-Newark, where he teaches English and African American Studies. He lives in New York City.
https://alchetron.com/Grachan-Moncur-III-262889-W
Grachan Moncur III
Grachan Moncur III (born June 3, 1937) is an American jazz trombonist who has mostly played free jazz, as well as being a prolific composer. He is the son of jazz bassist Grachan Moncur II and the nephew of jazz saxophonist Al Cooper.
Occupation(s) Trombonist, composer, bandleader
Albums Some Other Stuff, New Africa, Evolution, New Africa - One Morning I Woke Up Very Early, Mosaic Select 1, Exploration
Genres: Jazz, Free jazz, Avant-garde jazzMusical cohorts Jackie McLean, Bobby Hutcherson, Archie Shepp, Harold Mabern, Hank Mobley
Biography
LEFT TO RIGHT: Jackie McLean, Grachan Moncur III, and Lee Morgan
Born in New York City (his father's father was from the Bahamas) and raised in Newark, New Jersey, Grachan Moncur III began playing the cello at the age of nine, and switched to the trombone when he was 11. In high school he attended the Laurinburg Institute in North Carolina, the private school where Dizzy Gillespie had studied. While still at school he began sitting in with touring jazz musicians on their way through town, including Art Blakey and Jackie McLean, with whom he formed a lasting friendship.
After high school Moncur toured with Ray Charles (1959–62), Art Farmer and Benny Golson's Jazztet (1962), and Sonny Rollins. He took part in two classic Jackie McLean albums in the early 1960s, One Step Beyond and Destination... Out!, to which he also contributed the bulk of compositions and which led to two influential albums of his own for Blue Note Records, Evolution (1963) with Jackie McLean and Lee Morgan, and Some Other Stuff (1964) with Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter.
Moncur joined Archie Shepp's ensemble and recorded with other avant-garde players such as Marion Brown, Beaver Harris and Roswell Rudd (the other big name in free jazz trombone). During a stay in Paris in the summer of 1969, he recorded two albums as a leader for the famous BYG Actuel label, New Africa and Aco Dei de Madrugada, as well as appearing as a sideman on numerous other releases of the label. In 1974, the Jazz Composer's Orchestra commissioned him to write Echoes of Prayer (1974), a jazz symphony featuring a full orchestra plus vocalists and jazz soloists. His sixth album as a leader, Shadows (1977) was released only in Japan. Unfortunately, he was subsequently plagued by health problems and copyright disputes and recorded only rarely. Through the 1980s he recorded with Cassandra Wilson (1985), played occasionally with the Paris Reunion Band and Frank Lowe, appeared on John Patton's Soul Connection (1983), but mostly concentrated on teaching. In 2004 he re-emerged with a new album (Exploration) on Capri Records featuring Grachan's compositions arranged by Mark Masters for an octet including Tim Hagans and Gary Bartz.
As a leader:
Evolution (Blue Note, 1963)
Some Other Stuff (Blue Note, 1964)
The New Breed (The Dedication Series/Vol.VXIII) Sides C and D-1 (Impulse, 1978 [recorded 1965])
New Africa (BYG Actuel, 1969)
Aco Dei de Madrugada (One Morning I Waked Up Very Early) (BYG Actuel, 1969)
Echoes of Prayer (JCOA, 1974)
Shadows (Denon, 1977)
Exploration (Capri, 2004)
Inner Cry Blues (Lunar Module, 2007)
As a sideman:
with Marion Brown:
Juba-Lee (Fontana, 1966)
Three for Shepp (Impulse!, 1967)
with Dave Burrell:
Echo (BYG Actuel, 1969)
La Vie de Boheme (BYG Actuel, 1970)
with Benny Golson:
Here and Now (Mercury, 1962) - with Art Farmer
Another Git Together (Mercury, 1962) - with Art Farmer
Pop + Jazz = Swing (Audio Fidelity, 1962) - also released as Just Jazz!
Stockholm Sojourn (Prestige, 1965)
with Herbie Hancock:
My Point of View (Blue Note, 1963)
with Beaver Harris:
Safe (Red, 1979)
Beautiful Africa (Soul Note, 1979)
Live at Nyon (Cadence Jazz, 1981)
with Joe Henderson:
The Kicker (Milestone, 1967)
with Khan Jamal:
Black Awareness (CIMP, 2005)
with Frank Lowe:
Decision in Paradise (Soul Note, 1985)
with Jackie McLean:
One Step Beyond (Blue Note, 1963)
Destination... Out! (Blue Note, 1964)
'Bout Soul (Blue Note, 1967)
Hipnosis (Blue Note, 1967)
with Lee Morgan:
The Last Session (Blue Note, 1971)
with Butch Morris:
In Touch... but out of Reach (Kharma, 1982)
with Sunny Murray:
Hommage to Africa (BYG Actuel, 1969)
with Sunny Murray, Khan Jamal and Romulus:
Change of the Century Orchestra (JAS, 1999)
with Paris Reunion Band:
For Klook (Gazell, 1987)
with William Parker:
In Order to Survive (Black Saint, 1995)
with John Patton:
Soul Connection (Nilva, 1983)
with The Reunion Legacy Band:
The Legacy (Early Bird, 1991)
with Roswell Rudd and Archie Shepp:
Live in New York (Verve, 2001)
with Archie Shepp:
Mama Too Tight (Impulse!, 1966)
The Way Ahead (album) (Impulse!, 1968)
Poem for Malcolm (BYG Actuel, 1969)
For Losers (Impulse!, 1970)
Things Have Got to Change (Impulse!, 1971)
Live at the Pan-African Festival (BYG Actuel, 1971)
Life at the Donaueschingen Festival (MPS, 1972)
Kwanza (Impulse!, 1974)
Freedom (JMY, 1991)
with Wayne Shorter:
The All Seeing Eye (Blue Note, 1965)
with Alan Silva:
Luna Surface (BYG Actuel, 1969)
with Clifford Thornton:
Ketchaoua (BYG Actuel, 1969)
with Chris White:
The Chris White Project (Muse, 1993)
with Cassandra Wilson:
Point of View (JMT, 1986)
Compositions:
Erdu
Nomadic
Monk in Wonderland
Thandiwa
Air Raid
Excursion
The Coaster
The Twins
New Africa
Sonny's Back!
Love and Hate
Blue Free
Space Spy
Tonk
The Intellect
Hipnosis
Riff Raff
Gnostic
The Breakout
Ponte Lo
Slow Poke
When - Original
Osmosis - Original
Exploration
Kahlil the Prophet
Evolution
Tiny Temper - Original
Blue Rondo
Conversion Point
Ghost Town
Back Home
Space Spy - Original
http://www.allmusic.com/album/mosaic-select-grachan-moncur-iii-mw0000431157
AllMusic Review by Thom Jurek
Mosaic Records -- that venerable jazz and blues
collector's label that issues completely necessary packages by
legendary, if sometimes obscure, artists in limited editions on both LP
and CD -- is a name synonymous with the finest quality in sound,
annotation, and packaging, and they are branching out. Mosaic Select is a
side label dedicated to bringing to light the work of musicians whose
role in the development of jazz was seminal but whose catalog was small,
or whose work was neglected or otherwise overlooked. These editions, in
two or three CD sets, just like their other boxes, are numbered and
limited. The music on this collection features both of trombonist and
composer Grachan Moncur's Blue Note LPs as well as his four historic collaborations with Jackie McLean, the albums One Step Beyond, Destination Out, Hipnosis, and 'Bout Soul.
Virtually everything here has already been released on LP and CD, so
there are no unreleased or alternate takes we haven't heard before. That
said, it is wonderful to have all of the material from this period in
one place. It was certainly one of the most fertile in McLean's history, and Moncur's compositions and arrangements are one of main reasons for this. The collaboration between the two men is symbiotic. McLean was looking to branch out his sound when Moncur brought Bobby Hutcherson and bassist Eddie Khan into the band that was to record the seminal One Step Beyond. (Tony Williams had already been gigging with McLean as part of the band for the Living Theater production of Jack Gelber's play The Connection.) There are only four tunes on One Step Beyond, two by Moncur and two by McLean. Moncur's "Frankenstein" is one of the most inventive and haunting jazz waltzes ever composed. As he and McLean trade solos off the opening lines, Hutcherson
moves into the role of transposer, moving the key signatures from
A-flat minor to A-minor on alternating measures, punching in the changes
to suggest directions in melodic hard bop improvisation. The feel on Destination Out is unlike anything else heard in the music during that time, with the possible exception of Eric Dolphy's Out to Lunch. This is a kind of chamber jazz modeled on minor keys and Asian musical phrasing -- one can hear that Moncur
had been listening to gagaku, the esoteric court music from Japan. He
composed three of the album's four tunes, and each of them swings with a
spare beauty that was to be his trademark, yet always looked forward to
the breakdown of melodic improvisation into strange elliptical
fragments that could be torn down and reassembled seemingly randomly to
suit a key change, a different time signature, or an intervallic shift
in harmony. Moncur's own recordings -- especially Evolution, which added Lee Morgan and Bob Cranshaw -- were even further on the fringe than McLean's. But Moncur's
own playing is so rooted in the notion of lyric and song that it was
impossible to dismiss them as merely avant-garde recordings. Some Other Stuff included Wayne Shorter, Cecil McBee, and Herbie Hancock, and excludes McLean.
It is the most overlooked item in his catalog and is a stunner. Note
the composition "Gnostic" for its modal expansions and unique solo
structures. Finally, Moncur reappears on two late-'60s recordings of McLean's: the decidedly angular Hipnosis and the completely out 'Bout Soul, which featured drummer Rashied Ali, trumpeter Woody Shaw, and bassist Scotty Holt. Nonetheless, despite McLean's wailing, Moncur
keeps it lean and lyrical, holding both other players in check by
swinging out of a place where there seems to be no room to swing. That
album is not in its entirety here, because Moncur only played on half. Nonetheless, for Moncur enthusiasts this is essential to have all the recordings as well as liners in one place; for those looking through McLean's catalog, this is a way to get these recordings for a fine price.
http://www.allmusic.com/album/exploration-mw0000362379AllMusic Review by Scott Yanow
Trombonist Grachan Moncur III, who was a member of the Jazztet in the early 1960s, gained his greatest fame for his two Blue Note albums (Evolution and Some Other Stuff) which were quite adventurous. He also worked with Archie Shepp, became involved in free jazz and spent much of the 1970s and '80s as a music educator. Dental problems resulted in Moncur only playing once in a great while in the 1990s. He had been in obscurity for quite awhile when he was contacted by arranger Mark Masters for the Exploration project. Fortunately Moncur's playing proved to still be in his prime. Masters wrote sympathetic charts for many of the trombonist's finest pieces, utilizing an all-star nonet that could really dig into the inside/outside music. "Excursion," a very coherent three-minute free improvisation, is a change-of-pace and precedes the closing blues "Sonny's Back," a 1962 piece originally played by the Jazztet. This CD overall is very rewarding, a dream project for those who have long admired the underrated Grachan Moncur. The musicians have their solos, there are both written and improvised ensembles and Moncur plays wonderfully throughout. This set, which sums up Grachan Moncur's career definitively, is a gem.
https://www.allaboutjazz.com/exploration-grachan-moncur-iii-review-by-dan-mcclenaghan.php
Grachan Moncur III Octet: Exploration
by DAN MCCLENAGHAN
December 27, 2004
AllAboutJazz
Grachan Moncur III Octet: Exploration
"Frankenstein" seems an odd name for a jazz tune, but then why not? The song title—and the song itself—captures the mood of Grachan Moncur III's Exploration. It's an arrangement that features an assertive—to the point of brashness, perhaps—ensemble interplay of a seven horns backed by bass and drums, sans piano or guitar. Two trombones, along with a French horn and baritone sax, ensure the darker tone predominance with—on this particular tune—a stinging, free-ranging alto sax solo by Gary Bartz, followed by Moncur's contained and very centered solo turn on his horn.
Grachan Moncur III's horn—for those of you who didn't catch him on Jackie McLean's Destination Out or One Step Beyond, or on any of his own bygone Blue Note sets—is the trombone. His is a distinctive voice: tight, terse, incisive (you won't hear a wasted note from him), and within the roiling arrangements he seems to slide into an eye-of-the-storm mode, like a measured voice of reason in the center of slightly neurotic gales.
Mark Masters of the American Jazz Institute arranged these tunes and conducts the octet—actually a nonet when you count Moncur. He proves himself yet again—as he did on One Day With Lee (Lee Konitz) and The Clifford Brown Project, both on Capri Records—a masterful enabler/interpreter. He captures the essence of the musicians in the middle of his projects, with, in this case, arrangements full of coiled intensity and sharp angles and gleaming edges, reminiscent of some of the Melba Liston charts done for Randy Weston's larger ensemble discs.
Moncur's songs are quirky in a Monk-ish sense, counterpointing harmony versus discord, restraint versus freedom, and the set is packed with searing solos alongside very measured and deliberate turns. Exploration makes up a consistently surprising set of sounds. I'll pick "Love and Hate" as a highlight, but it's probably just my precarious preference for a ballad today—any tune here on any given day could fill that bill. But the tune in question has a marvelously tight and taciturn Moncur solo that sneaks in and out some clean mainstream harmony, followed by Billy Harper—tenor sax—soaring on his horn.
Grachan Moncur III has been out of the limelight for a couple of decades. Exploration is a fine and fitting welcome back.
Track Listing: Exploration, Monk in Wonderland, Love and hate, New Africa, When?, Frankenstein, Excursion, Sonny's Back.
Personnel:
Tim Hagans--trumpet
John Clark--French Horn
Dave Woodley--trombone
Gary Bartz--alto saxophone
Billy Harper--tenor saxophone
Gary Smulyan--baritone saxophone
Ray Drummond--bass
Andrew Cyrille--drums
Grachan Moncur--trombone
Year Released: 2004 | Style: Modern Jazz
THE MUSIC OF GRACHAN MONCUR III: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS WITH MR. MONCUR:
GRACHAN MONCUR III-- "Air Raid"-- (Stereo Version):
Opening tune from "Evolution" album. Recorded at the Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey on November 21, 1963. Grachan Moncur III (trombone); Jackie McLean (alto saxophone); Lee Morgan (trumpet); Bobby Hutcherson (vibraphone); Bob Cranshaw (bass); Tony Williams (drums).
Grachan Moncur III - "Gnostic" :
Grachan Moncur III, "New Africa", from the album New Africa, 1969:
Grachan Moncur III--"Exploration":
Grachan Moncur III Octet
℗ 2004 The American Jazz Institute
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grachan_Moncur_III
Grachan Moncur III
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Grachan Moncur III | |
|---|---|
| Born | June 3, 1937 New York City, New York, U.S. |
| Genres | Jazz, free jazz, avant-garde jazz |
| Occupation(s) | Musician |
| Instruments | Trombone |
| Years active | 1959-present |
Grachan Moncur III (born June 3, 1937) is an American jazz trombonist. He is the son of jazz bassist Grachan Moncur II and the nephew of jazz saxophonist Al Cooper.
Contents
Biography
Born in New York City (his father's father was from the Bahamas)[1] and raised in Newark, New Jersey, Grachan Moncur III began playing the cello at the age of nine, and switched to the trombone when he was 11.[1] In high school he attended the Laurinburg Institute in North Carolina, the private school where Dizzy Gillespie had studied. While still at school he began sitting in with touring jazz musicians on their way through town, including Art Blakey and Jackie McLean, with whom he formed a lasting friendship.
After high school Moncur toured with Ray Charles (1959–62), Art Farmer and Benny Golson's Jazztet (1962), and Sonny Rollins. He took part in two classic Jackie McLean albums in the early 1960s, One Step Beyond and Destination... Out!, to which he also contributed the bulk of compositions and which led to two influential albums of his own for Blue Note Records, Evolution (1963) with Jackie McLean and Lee Morgan, and Some Other Stuff (1964) with Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter.
Moncur joined Archie Shepp's ensemble and recorded with other avant-garde players such as Marion Brown, Beaver Harris and Roswell Rudd (the other big name in free jazz trombone). During a stay in Paris in the summer of 1969, he recorded two albums as a leader for the famous BYG Actuel label, New Africa and Aco Dei de Madrugada, as well as appearing as a sideman on numerous other releases of the label. In 1974, the Jazz Composer's Orchestra commissioned him to write Echoes of Prayer (1974), a jazz symphony featuring a full orchestra plus vocalists and jazz soloists. His sixth album as a leader, Shadows (1977) was released only in Japan. Unfortunately, he was subsequently plagued by health problems and copyright disputes and recorded only rarely. Through the 1980s he recorded with Cassandra Wilson (1985), played occasionally with the Paris Reunion Band and Frank Lowe, appeared on John Patton's Soul Connection (1983), but mostly concentrated on teaching. In 2004 he re-emerged with a new album (Exploration) on Capri Records featuring Grachan's compositions arranged by Mark Masters for an octet including Tim Hagans and Gary Bartz.
Discography
As a leader
- Evolution (Blue Note, 1963)
- Some Other Stuff (Blue Note, 1964)
- The New Breed (The Dedication Series/Vol.VXIII) Sides C and D-1 (Impulse, 1978 [recorded 1965])
- New Africa (BYG Actuel, 1969)
- Aco Dei de Madrugada (One Morning I Waked Up Very Early) (BYG Actuel, 1969)
- Echoes of Prayer (JCOA, 1974)
- Shadows (Denon, 1977)
- Exploration (Capri, 2004)
- Inner Cry Blues (Lunar Module, 2007)
As a sideman
with Marion Brown:
- Juba-Lee (Fontana, 1966)
- Three for Shepp (Impulse!, 1967)
- Echo (BYG Actuel, 1969)
- La Vie de Bohème (BYG Actuel, 1970)
- Here and Now (Mercury, 1962) - with Art Farmer
- Another Git Together (Mercury, 1962) - with Art Farmer
- Pop + Jazz = Swing (Audio Fidelity, 1962) - also released as Just Jazz!
- Stockholm Sojourn (Prestige, 1965)
- My Point of View (Blue Note, 1963)
- Safe (Red, 1979)
- Beautiful Africa (Soul Note, 1979)
- Live at Nyon (Cadence Jazz, 1981)
- The Kicker (Milestone, 1967)
- Black Awareness (CIMP, 2005)
- Decision in Paradise (Soul Note, 1985)
- One Step Beyond (Blue Note, 1963)
- Destination... Out! (Blue Note, 1964)
- 'Bout Soul (Blue Note, 1967)
- Hipnosis (Blue Note, 1967)
- The Last Session (Blue Note, 1971)
- In Touch... but out of Reach (Kharma, 1982)
- Hommage to Africa (BYG Actuel, 1969)
- Change of the Century Orchestra (JAS, 1999)
- For Klook (Gazell, 1987)
- In Order to Survive (Black Saint, 1995)
- Soul Connection (Nilva, 1983)
- The Legacy (Early Bird, 1991)
- Live in New York (Verve, 2001)
- Mama Too Tight (Impulse!, 1966)
- The Way Ahead (album) (Impulse!, 1968)
- Poem for Malcolm (BYG Actuel, 1969)
- For Losers (Impulse!, 1970)
- Things Have Got to Change (Impulse!, 1971)
- Live at the Pan-African Festival (BYG Actuel, 1971)
- Life at the Donaueschingen Festival (MPS, 1972)
- Kwanza (Impulse!, 1974)
- Freedom (JMY, 1991)
- The All Seeing Eye (Blue Note, 1965)
- Luna Surface (BYG Actuel, 1969)
- Ketchaoua (BYG Actuel, 1969)
- The Chris White Project (Muse, 1993)
- Point of View (JMT, 1986)
References
- Sean Singer & Grachan Moncur III, "The Soul of Trombone — Grachan Moncur III", Cerise Press, Vol. 4, Issue 10, Summer 2012.
External links
- Grachan Moncur at MySpace.
- "A Fireside Chat With Grachan Moncur III", All About Jazz, January 17, 2003.
- Peter Marsh, "Grachan Moncur III Exploration", BBC Review, 2005.
- Andrew Durkin, "Grachan Moncur III: Exploration", All About Jazz, March 21, 2005.
http://www.grachanmoncur.com/recordings/
Recordings
Grachan Moncur III – Discography
As a Leader…. |
Grachan Moncur III, Evolution, Blue Note November 1963 | ||
| Grachan Moncur III, Lee Morgan, Jackie McLean, Bobby Hutcherson, Bob Cranshaw, Tony Williams | |||
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Grachan Moncur III, Some Other Stuff, Blue Note July 1964 | ||
| Grachan Moncur III, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Cecil McBee, Tony Williams | |||
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Grachan Moncur III, New Africa, BYG August 1969 | ||
| Grachan Moncur III, Roscoe Mitchell, Dave Burrell, Alan Silva, Andrew Cyrille, Archie Shepp | |||
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Grachan Moncur III, Aco dei de madrugada (One Morning I Waked Up Very Early), BYG November 1969 | ||
| Grachan Moncur III, Fernando Martins, Beb Guérin, Nelson Serra de Castro | |||
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Grachan Moncur III, Echoes of Prayer, JCOA April 1974 | ||
| Grachan Moncur III, Stafford Osborne, Marvin Hannibal Paterson, Janice Robinson, Jack Jeffers, Carlos Ward, Pat Patrick, Perry Robinson, Mark Elf, Carla Bley, Cecil McBee, Charlie Haden, Beaver Harris, Leroy Jenkins, Ngonia, Jeanne Lee, Tawana Dance Ensemble | |||
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Grachan Moncur III, Shadows, Denon Jazz June 1977 | ||
| Grachan Moncur III, Marion Brown, Dave Burrell, Roland Prince, Reggie Workman, Joe Chambers, Andy Bey | |||
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Grachan Moncur III Octet, Exploration, Capri Records 2004 | ||
| Grachan Moncur III, Tim Hagans, John Clark, Dave Woodley, Gary Bartz, Billy Harper, Gary Smulyan, Ray Drummond, Andrew Cyrille | |||
