composed in the ultramarine
(When Graham died, it struck me that the essay written by the esteemed cultural critic Brian Morton for the booklet to the twin CD re-release of Symphony of Scorpions and The Day of the Dead would make a splendid, if unintended, epitaph for Graham. Certainly, it moved Graham to tears when he read it, so it is comforting that he read what is possibly the finest piece ever written about his work before he died. It is the sort of writing, rarely seen in any media today, that people used to cut out of magazines and keep for future reading pleasure, and it is a similar pleasure to have Brian’s permission to reproduce it here.)
I love the sun yet I would trade the sun,
For ‘In a Mist’ by Beiderbecke’s ghost,
A break from ‘Singing the Blues’, a phrase from Bach,
‘Walking the Dog’ in 1929; Liverpool;
Frankie Trumbauer’s ‘Imagination’, and good Gogol . . .
So Malcolm Lowry, in what may have been a verse-letter to his close friend Martin Case, or may simply have been a poem-with-a-byline, headed ‘Oaxaca to North Africa’. It was dated around Christmas 1937, the Christmas Lowry was to spend in jail. The greatest present he’d ever had was when Case rescued enough pages of the Ultramarine manuscript from waste-bins and firelighter boxes to reconstruct the novel after the fair copy was stolen from a publisher’s car. Lowry wrote letters with the same care he wrote fiction. A spontaneous note to a friend, full of improvisational word-play, was often the refinement of a draft in the papers. The boundaries between imagination and fact, as between the novelist and his characters (and particularly the drunken Consul of Under the Volcano) were always blurry, as creative boundaries ought to be.
Graham Collier loves the sun, and has lived under an exile’s blue skies for many years. He might conceivably have traded the Mediterranean heat for a warmer understanding of his work back home in the UK, or a more sustained engagement with it. Collier is part of a generation of British musicians passionately admired for work they completed forty years ago, but not so admired that frigates are sent to bring them home. There is a danger in stating this, and particularly in our present context, because it certainly won’t do to imply that the work of forty years ago is unworthy of praise – we’re here precisely to praise a sequence of masterworks now half a lifetime old – but simply that a little more time and attention might be expended in the present tense.
Collier also loves the works of Malcolm Lowry. They haunt and interpenetrate one another as various Collier titles suggest: The Day of the Dead, October Ferry, Forest Path to the Spring. But the association needs to be properly finessed. Other composers have been drawn to Lowry, even if one goes no further than Jack Bruce and Pete Brown in ‘The Consul at Sunset’. If one has only an impression of Lowry as a headlong drunk, swigging tequila in full sun while Bix and Tram blare out of a gramophone horn at damaging proximity to his ear, or a Lowry whose only characteristic mode is a kind of jet-fuelled bawdry (his story about the prostitute with the mink mitten is rather good), that is just one side of a man who lacked several layers of epidermis and felt sunlight or a piano stroke, friendship or betrayal, like a physical blow. In the same way, to categorise Collier as a ‘jazz’ musician – and a jazz musician addicted to the cartoon Lowry – is also to miss, and miss grievously, the balances and shades of his remarkable body of work, all the way from Deep Dark Blue Centre in 1967 (exactly ten years after Malcolm Lowry left the planet) to directing 14 Jackson Pollocks in 2009 (the year of Malcolm Lowry’s centenary – see how the writer stalks him!).
What Collier gets from Lowry is intense and various. There is the intoxicating palette of colours, but colours always in movement, as on the Day of the Dead, that most unEnglish of cultural moments. There is an easy articulacy that comes only from complete engagement with every instrument of the language-orchestra. No one (or we might embarrass him by saying no one since Ellington, or perhaps Mingus, his bass-playing predecessor) who shows such a complete understanding of instrumental voice as Graham Collier. Like all great bandleaders and composers, he writes for specific voices, whether it’s Art Themen’s tenor saxophone of Ed Speight’s guitar, or any one of the voices that come out of the throng on his Hoarded Dreams. That remarkable and iconic piece reflects another of the virtues that comes out of a careful reading of Malcolm Lowry, that the prose is a sustained exercise in the balance of figure and ground. This is a concept more familiar in painting, where there are rules about where you place your figures (and rules which can be creatively broken), or in Gestalt psychology, where the ability to make swift and sure determinations between figure and ground is taken as a sign of mental health, but it has clear relevance to both a novelist whose characters fall back into the landscape or are swallowed by it, and to a composer/improviser whose approach requires a careful, or even a virtuosic, modulation between individual statement and ensemble values.
I haven’t much to say in detail about the wonderful music gathered here, because I have too much to say in detail about it, and could command you for hours with the pause and rewind buttons. (Someone – and I think it was Lowry’s biographer, Gordon Bowker, who was once an acquaintance – told me that Malcolm could drop the needle back into the groove of a favourite record at exactly the moment he wanted you to hear. It takes a steady hand to do that . . . ) Suffice it that this music has been with me for years. It has grown with me or more likely I have grown with it. Its vicissitudes of availability and re-release have reflected that less than enthusiastic support for Collier in his native country, but they have also supplied good opportunity for regular re-acquaintance. Let me simply commend them to you, with a toast to the composer, who will shortly be 75, but with a more citrusy chaser: Graham Collier has continued to write and create essential music and in a range of moods and styles that reflects his literary mentor’s. Lowry himself described the style of Under the Volcano as ‘overloaded’ or ‘churrigueresque’, after the Spanish sculptor/builder José Churriguera, but Lowry was also capable of writing with the utmost simplicity and directness. The letters are full of tiny observations rendered with absolute precision. In the same way, the richness and elaboration of Collier’s music (which is never Baroque enough to seem ‘churrigueresque’) is tempered by an ability (listen right now to Forest Path) to deliver music that has the immediacy and intimacy of speech. Be intoxicated by these old records, but taste the salt and lime as well. It takes a lifetime for music like this to unfold and a man who writes like this at 40 won’t have run out of things to say by 70. Collier’s is a life lived and composed in the ultramarine: ‘ . . . outward bound, always outward, always onward, to be fighting always for the dreamed-of harbour . . .’
