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Rifftides

Doug Ramsey on Jazz and other matters...

CD Catchup, Part 3: Graham Collier

July 4, 2007 by Doug Ramsey

Graham Collier, Hoarded Dreams (Cuneiform). Here we have further, but not recent , adventures of the pioneering British composer, arranger and leader. Hoarded Dreams is a seven-part suite commissioned by the Bracknell Jazz Festival in 1983. Following its one performance by a band of European stars plus trumpeters Kenny Wheeler (Canadian) and Ted Curson (American), the music has languished in a tape archive for twenty-four years. Collier is in a league with George Russell and Charles Mingus in the demanding discipline of writing for large ensembles populated by musicians whose improvisation goes beyond the fringe of standard harmony.
Collier.jpg
Graham Collier
The looseness and cogency in Collier’s arrangements are in ideal balance to contain the wildness, daring and–it must be emphasized–good humor of the soloists. There is no trace of the anger and willfull distortion that marred so much avant garde playing in the final decades of the twentieth century. The quality of solos and interchanges by familiar players like Curson, Wheeler, trumpeter Tomasz Stanko and the baritone sax powerhouse John Surman is equaled by musicians who deserve to be better known outside the British Isles. Among them are guitarist Ed Speight, drummer Ashley Brown, tenor saxophonist Art Themen and trombonist Conny Bauer. Bauer manages to combine elements of Bill Harris and Roswell Rudd, to startling effect. There is so much happening in this music, I suggest that you give it two or three hearings to begin to absorb its dynamics, complexity and subtlety and to sort out which parts are written and which improvised. It’s worth your time. For thoughts on a previous release by Collier, go here.

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  1. Bill Kirchner says

    July 4, 2007 at 10:57 am

    Graham Collier is one of the great iconoclasts and unique voices in jazz composing-arranging. And Art Themen has to be one of the most underapprecated jazz musicians on the planet–in part because for years, he was a busy orthopedic surgeon.

Doug Ramsey

Doug is a recipient of the lifetime achievement award of the Jazz Journalists Association. He lives in the Pacific Northwest, where he settled following a career in print and broadcast journalism in cities including New York, New Orleans, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, San Antonio, Cleveland and Washington, DC. His writing about jazz has paralleled his life in journalism... [Read More]

Rifftides

A winner of the Blog Of The Year award of the international Jazz Journalists Association. Rifftides is founded on Doug's conviction that musicians and listeners who embrace and understand jazz have interests that run deep, wide and beyond jazz. Music is its principal concern, but the blog reaches past... Read More...

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Doug’s Books

Doug's most recent book is a novel, Poodie James. Previously, he published Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond. He is also the author of Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music and Some of its Makers. He contributed to The Oxford Companion To Jazz and co-edited Journalism Ethics: Why Change? He is at work on another novel in which, as in Poodie James, music is incidental.

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