Graham Collier Music
From near-traditional sextet work to avant-garde live recordings to suites with larger ensembles, Collier has proven to be an inventive and underrated jazz figure.
- Bill Meredith, Jazziz
'Collier’s music – rather like a free version of early Charles Mingus – continued to embrace long-form pan-tonal compositional frameworks, angular and dissonant yet with a natural, even-toed penchant for measuring and tempering that freedom that frameworks provide. He has also maintained a constancy of direction throughout a career that is still going strong to this day.' Paris Transatlantic reviewing Workpoints.
Graham Collier has made 18 records during his 40 year career. All have been widely praised with some of the original LPs fetching high prices on internet auction sites (‘more than we made for making the damn thing in the first place’). His first 11 LPs were released on CD in 2000 by Disconforme, with the very first, Deep Dark Blue Centre, being returned to vinyl by whatmusic.com around the same time. Tracks from some of the records are beginning to turn up in compilations - including one remix by a Japanese DJ - and in new versions by younger bands.
Full details of each record will be found by clicking on the title below.
Penguin Praise
The latest edition of the acclaimed Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD is fulsome in its praise of Graham Collier whose ‘’60s groups were consistently fascinating’ and who has ‘continued to make interesting and compelling music’. Workpoints is in the top four star category which signifies ‘an outstanding record… a splendid example of the artist’s work’; four of the others are classified as ‘fine records with some exceptional music’, and nine come in the third three star category ‘lack[ing] the stature or consistency of the finest records, but certainly rewarding on its own terms’. Comments on each record are erudite and interesting (although some facts are slightly awry) and, while we would wish for four stars all round, ’im indoors says the roundup is a fine encomium of Graham’s career to date.
New Records
Hoarded Dreams released in January 2007, at the start of Graham's 70th birthday year, is a previously unreleased concert recording of the highly praised Bracknell Festival commission from 1983. Included in the trumpet section of the twenty piece band are Ted Curson, Manfred Schoof, Kenny Wheeler, Henry Lowther and Thomas Stanko, while in other sections of the band were internationally known musicians such as John Surman, Matthias Schubert, Art Themen, Eje Thelin, Connie Bauer, John Schröder and Roger Dean. The first review - in Jazzwise Magazine - called it 'a monumental piece of music'.
Meanwhile we are exploring possibilities for the release of the 2004 London Concert of Graham’s Celebration band playing his new work The Vonetta Factor, and Forty Years On, a relook at many of Graham’s compositions throughout his career. Also being considered for release are other concert recordings from the early days.
Compilations and radio plays
While all Graham Collier's older recording are now available for digital download from iTunes and eMusic, individual tracks are also now beginning to turn up in compilations, and in new recordings by young jazz musicians. See Compilations etc for further information.
Impressed with Gilles Peterson (Universal) has two tracks of Graham’s work: Karl Jenkin’s Lullaby for a Lonely Child, from Graham’s second CD Down Another Road and Graham’s composition Rolli’s Tune from Harry Beckett’s album Flare Up.
Crumblin’ Cookie has been included in two whatmusic compilations - Trailer Happiness, Velvet Voodoo, and in a remix version by Japanese DJ Masanori Morita for New Tokyo International Jazz Airport meets whatmusic.com
Down Another Road, the title track of Graham’s acclaimed 1969 album was recently recorded on seven's and eight's by rising star Ben Lamdin’s nostalgia 77. It has received over 6000 plays on the band's MySpace page.
Two extracts from the alternate takes of Mosaics are included in elastic jazz, Sketches of Britain, a CDBook compilation of British jazz from the 60s and 70s from Auditorium Edizioni, Milan, Italy. Jazzwise called it 'a marvellous package'.
Aberdeen Angus is included in Back to the Bus, Babyshambles (DMC) a selection of tracks that the pop group listen to on their tour bus. Also to be heard are tracks from The Clash, Stone Roses and Burt Jansch.
Downloads
Click on the underlined titles below for audio samples from Graham Collier recordings.
A long extract from the alternate Mosaics featuring Harry Beckett is the first of our free audio downloads. It can be accessed on the Mosaics page.
A complete performance of Under the Pier by The Jazz Ensemble, featuring Patrick White, Art Themen - on bass saxophone, Geof Warren and Henry Lowther can be accessed on the Charles River Fragments page.
A new full length piece will be posted every month or so.
Recording History
The two most recent records available are Workpoints and Hoarded Dreams, both on the American label Cuneiform. Workpoints is a double CD of previously unissued archive recordings, one from 1968 with an all star 12 piece band, the other a sextet date from 1975. Released in 2005, the record was well reviewed, and received airplay on radio stations around the world. Hoarded Dreams, released in early 2007, features a star-studded international 20 piece big band playing a major 70 minute long Collier composition.
Graham’s first recordings were for a variety of labels. Deep Dark Blue Centre (1967) was recorded by the sons of legendary British DJ Jack Jackson, with the end product being sold to Deram, a subsidiary of Decca. Down Another Road, (1969), Songs for My Father, (1970), and Mosaics (1970), were issued on Fontana, a subsidiary of Philips Records, marking the period when Graham, like almost every jazz musician throughout history, was allowed his five minutes of fame with a major record company. When they found that - surprise, surprise - his CDs didn’t sell as many as, say, Tom Jones, they lost interest. (Although it can be admitted now that some of Tom Jones’s audience applause was dubbed into one of these records!)
Portraits, (1972) his fifth record, was made, with a new band, for Saydisc, a label involved in recording the tracks for Jazz, a Students’ and Teachers’ Guide (See Writings). The rights for these five records were taken back from the companies involved (which in the case of Philips meant an interminable string of letters and phone calls) and were the first batch to be released on CD by Disconforme.
[The re-releases] may well prompt a serious reassessment of this important British artist, out of whom much of the most inventive latter-day British jazz, including that anarchic collective Loose Tubes, has emerged.
- Brian Morton, Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD
In 1974 Graham, following the example of some jazz musicians, and anticipating similar moves by many others, formed his own record company. Called Mosaic, after his fourth LP, the company (which has no connection with the American label of the same name) largely consisted of boxes of LPs under the bed, or disguised as furniture in the sitting room, by having a rug artfully thrown over them. The sales force was, like the rest of the operation, minimal and was supported by a non-existent advertising budget.
Mosaic issued 13 CDs in all, including, thanks to some help from Monty Python star Terry Jones, material from Roger Dean, Howard Riley, Stan Sulzmann and Alan Wakeman. A full list of these recordings will be found in Life, the Deep Background.
The six Graham Collier LPs issued by Mosaic, include three small group recordings, Darius, (1974), Midnight Blue (1975), and Something British Made in Hong Kong, (1986), as well as New Conditions, and Symphony of Scorpions, (both 1976), two extended compositions for 12 piece band. The latter work was inspired by the writings of Malcolm Lowry, author of Under the Volcano, words from which were used in the only Mosaic double LP The Day of The Dead, (1978).
These six recordings comprised the second batch issued on CD by Disconforme. Like the first group they elicited very few sales statements from Disconforme, and even fewer royalties (although the initial advance was reasonable). For this reason - and a long running saga between Graham, them and Universal with regard to a Gilles Peterson compilation (see Life, the Deep Background) - the contracts were not renewed.
These eleven records are now back under the control of Graham and are now available for digital download.
Collier’s reputation as educator and nurturer of British jazz talent has overshadowed his accomplishments as a composer ... there is a distinctiveness to his explorations of modal material and unconventional tone colour. Above all, he is imaginative and generous in making space for his high calibre soloists. - Julian Cowley, The Wire
Writing in Jazz Journal when Graham’s next record was released, Simon Adams said how shocking it was that there was a nine year gap between Something British (the last LP issued by Mosaic) and Charles River Fragments, (1995), his first CD. That record, originally issued on Hugh Fraser’s Boathouse label, was subsequently rereleased on Jazzprint, as was The Third Colour, (1998). This double CD, compiled from three London Jazz Festival concerts, was originally released on Steve Plews’ ASC label.
Jazzprint have also released Winter Oranges recorded with the Danish Radio Jazz Orchestra in Copenhagen in 2000, and Bread & Circuses, recorded in 2001 by The Collective, a group of young contemporary classical and jazz musicians, in Perth, Australia. As well as recording his own music, Graham has produced several CDs of students’ original compositions at the Royal Academy of Music, and one of his own music recorded with British and Israeli students in Israel. See Life, the Deep Background for details.
On the horizon is the release of The Vonetta Factor, a concert recorded at the London Jazz Festival in 2004 by an all star 14 piece band, and, as reported above, another archive recording, Hoarded Dreams.
- John L Walters, reviewing Dave Douglas, The Guardian
Sales Points for all Graham Collier Music
All Graham Collier records except for Workpoints are available for digital download from on-line stores such as iTunes or eMusic.
We are working towards making copies of the sleeve and notes available by digital means. Contact us if you are interested.
Vinyl vultures should look first at Sounds Travel, who have some Graham’s LPs for sale.
The four recent CDs can be obtained from Jazzprint.
Workpoints and Hoarded Dreams can be obtained from Cuneiform.
Details of the compilations which include tracks from Graham Collier and other relevant material can be found here.