Jazz Articles about Graham Collier

Graham Collier: Down Another Road @ Stockholm Jazz Days ’69

by Chris May
March 7, 2023

In 1969, when the composer and bassist Graham Collier took his sextet to Stockholm Jazz Days to give a live performance of their album Down Another Road (Fontana, 1969), the presence of a British band onstage at a European jazz festival was exceptional. The idea that British musicians would one day have their names on the marquee at US festivals, as Sons of Kemet, The Comet Is Coming and Nubya Garcia have in the 2020s, would have been regarded as ...

Mosaics: The Life and Works of Graham Collier

by Duncan Heining
August 28, 2018

The following is an excerpt is from “Chapter 9: The Eighties or Graham Collier -The Wilderness Years" of Mosaics: The Life and Works of Graham Collier by Duncan Heining (Equinox Publishing, 2018). All Rights Reserved. The late Graham Collier was a bandleader, a composer and a jazz educator. As far as this latter role was concerned he was arguably one of the most significant figures in jazz education, a point supported by the many awards he received ...

Graham Collier: Luminosity

by Duncan Heining
November 14, 2014

A new work, posthumously released and recorded--how many of those can there have been in jazz? Luminosity features two late works by composer Graham Collier brought to realisation through the efforts of his partner, author John Gill and conductor Geoff Warren. To say this record is a fine valediction is a statement infused with regret. These two compositions reveal just how much music Collier still had to offer. Fortunately, Gill and Warren were able to bring together a ...

Graham Collier: Relook

by AAJ Italy Staff
July 9, 2012

Graham Collier, compositore britannico scomparso in Grecia nel settembre 2011, non è mai stato un personaggio facile. Anticonvenzionale per natura, è sempre stato nemico degli stereotipi, dei luoghi comuni - e nel jazz ce ne sono ancora moltissimi - e del cosiddetto establishment. Basterebbe leggere il suo ultimo saggio “The Jazz Composer, Moving the Music off the Paper," pubblicato nel 2009 dalla Northway Books, dedicato al ruolo del compositore e del suo rapporto con lo spartito e la realtà esterna ...

Graham Collier: The Day of the Dead

by Nic Jones
January 4, 2012

Graham Collier's death, in 2011, lends this release a sad air--at least until the gravity of the music is considered, because truly the composer/arranger has gained some measure of immortality through it. Recorded over the years 1976 to 1978, the albums collected here mark a period of transition from Collier the bassist and small band leader to Collier the composer for large ensembles who grasped the implications of the tonal palette such groups could offer. In his ...

Graham Collier: Darius / Midnight Blue / New Conditions

by Nic Jones
May 9, 2010

Graham Collier Music Darius / Midnight Blue / New Conditions BGO 2009

The benefit of hindsight reveals how the three LPs, recorded in the mid-1970s, collected here form the bridge between British bassist, composer and bandleader Graham Collier's early small group work and the expansion of tonal palette and compositional ambition that have marked his more recent forays. His music thus amounts to one of those occasions when increasing ambition is complimented by increasing ...

The Jazz Composer: Moving Music Off The Paper

by Nic Jones
November 12, 2009

The Jazz Composer: Moving Music Off The Paper Graham Collier Hardcover; 314 pages ISBN: 978 09557888 0 2 Northway Books 2009

Bassist, composer and bandleader Graham Collier's preoccupation with form is itself, in a very literal sense, a central concern of this book: with the passage of time, Collier's music has grown ever more structurally sophisticated. Such is its depth in 2009 that it is hardly surprising that The Jazz Composer: Moving Music ...