Mosaics
The Life and Works of Graham Collier
by Duncan Heining
Paperback (Published)
(April 2018)
ISBN: 9781800502932
6.1 x 9.17 inches
Price: $29.95
In stock
Hardback (Published)
(February 2018)
ISBN: 9781781792636
6.1 x 9.17 inches
Price: $55.00
In stock
Graham Collier’s career in jazz lasted over five decades. He was a bassist, a band-leader, a composer, an educator and an author, who wrote extensively about the music. His working life was littered with ‘firsts’. Amongst his many achievements, he was the first British jazz musician to study at the Berklee School of music in Boston and the first to receive an Arts Council grant. In 1985, Collier began teaching at the Royal Academy of Music, where he later established the first full-time jazz degree course in the UK in 1987. Mosaics draws extensively on Collier’s personal archive, as well as on interviews with fellow musicians, ex-students and colleagues from the Royal Academy of Music. It locates Collier and his work within the social and cultural changes which occurred during his life and, particularly, in relation to developments in British and European jazz of the 1960s and 70s.
Graham Collier’s career in jazz lasted over five decades. He was a bassist, a band-leader, a composer, an educator and an author, who wrote extensively about the music. His working life was littered with ‘firsts’. Amongst his many achievements, he was the first British jazz musician to study at the Berklee School of music in Boston and the first to receive an Arts Council grant. In 1985, Collier began teaching at the Royal Academy of Music, where he later established the first full-time jazz degree course in the UK in 1987. Mosaics draws extensively on Collier’s personal archive, as well as on interviews with fellow musicians, ex-students and colleagues from the Royal Academy of Music. It locates Collier and his work within the social and cultural changes which occurred during his life and, particularly, in relation to developments in British and European jazz of the 1960s and 70s. Collier’s work as a composer-bandleader represented an attempt to resolve the paradoxes inherent in jazz between composition and improvisation, familiarity and spontaneity and change and tradition. In this regard, Mosaics compares Collier’s work with other composers such as Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus, Gil Evans, Mike Westbrook, Stan Tracey, Barry Guy and Butch Morris. Throughout, Collier emerges as a contradictory figure falling between several different camps. He was never an out-and-out musical, cultural or political radical but rather an individualist continually forced to confront the contradictions in his own position – a musical outsider working within a marginalised area of cultural activity; a gay man operating in a very male area of the music business and within heterosexist culture in general; a man of working class origins stepping outside traditionally prescribed class boundaries; and a musician-composer seeking individual solutions to collective problems of aesthetic and ethical value.
Preface Chapter 1 At Home with the Folks Chapter 2 Berklee with Herb Chapter 3 Return of the Native Chapter 4 Down another Road Chapter 5 Nil Desperandum - The Jazz Hustler Chapter 6 'Author! Author!' Chapter 7 Glad to be Gay Chapter 8 The Day of the Dead Chapter 9 The Eighties or 'Graham Collier - the Wilderness Years' Chapter 10 Pte. James Collier Returns to Hong Kong [+] Chapter 11 Educating NYJO Chapter 12 'Not for any Jazz Use' Chapter 13 The Last Suites Chapter 14 Legacy
- By (author) Duncan Heining
"Faced with making sense of the life of such a complex individual, Duncan Heining has sensibly opted for a comprehensive rather than a partisan approach, painstakingly sifting through Collier's own writings and compositions for clues to his sensibility and setting the resulting evidence dispassionately before the reader... [The book] provides a valuable celebration of the work and legacy of one of the UK's most important and influential musical figures." --London Jazz News "Duncan Heining's research embraces his own interviews with Collier and his associates, a thorough perusal of contemporary press coverage, and sharply incisive and forensic analysis of the recordings in the Collier catalogue. [...]A lasting impression is one of someone who's perceived as a complex outsider, sometimes contradictory and often resolutely forthright and protective -- as well as being a battler against the usual vagaries and uncertainties that can be a challenging aspect of the jazz world in particular. But, to most people, what matters is the legacy of recordings. There were many star names in his various ensembles -- and an extensive discography and a list of Collier's compositions will, doubtless, have the effect of making the reader scurry back to the albums." --The Beat, April 2018 "Heining does a splendid job in discussing distinct aspects of Collier's work and life in separate chapters rather than trying to run with several simultaneous threads. But he is always most convincing when he engages with the music." --Brian Morton, Jazz Journal
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