Grachan Moncur III

[BFrank]

Here's a wonderful article about him from today's NY Times. Let's hope it brings him some recognition.

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October 26, 2003

The Perils of Living Too Long

By ADAM SHATZ

Jazz lives often end tragically, but not all tragic endings are alike. Some jazz musicians (Clifford Brown, John Coltrane, Albert Ayler) die too young, achieving instant martyrdom. Others (Billie Holiday, Chet Baker, Bill Evans) lead lives that are like slow-motion deaths, lives that give their music a sweet, decadent perfume and make the flaws in their art seem like so many needle tracks, scattered traces of disintegration. But there is another way of exiting the scene: living too long, passing the years unproductively, falling silent. Less noticed and far more common, it's the surest route to obscurity that the music offers.

If Grachan Moncur III had perished 40 years ago in a car crash, or become one of jazz's junkie-poets, he might be a legend today, rather than an all-but-forgotten trombonist. Unless you're a serious student of free jazz, chances are you've never heard of him. But in the 1960's and early 1970's, Mr. Moncur was the leading trombonist on the scene. (His only rival was Roswell Rudd, whose style was as gregarious as Mr. Moncur's was subdued.) He dressed like a leader, wearing black turtlenecks that defined Bohemian hipness and sporting a goatee that hinted at intellectual seriousness, if not militancy. His tone, attack and sensibility embodied what the jazz critic David Rosenthal called "badness" — an air of unshakable cool that conceals, but just barely, an undercurrent of menacing intensity. For the better part of a decade, the curtain rose for this young lion, and he was resplendent. And then — darkness.

"Whenever I have a conversation about what's wrong with the jazz business, I always start out by saying, `Where is Grachan Moncur?' " the alto saxophonist Jackie McLean said recently.

Geographically speaking, he is in Newark, where he has raised six children (including a 32-year-old son named, yes, Grachan IV), taught trombone lessons and served as a composer-in-residence at the city's Community Arts Center. As far as the jazz scene is concerned, he may have ceased to exist altogether. As Mr. Moncur, 66, acknowledged by phone: "I seem to have disappeared. But in a sense I wasn't totally extinct. I just went underground."

Mr. Moncur's great Blue Note work, much of which he made in collaboration with Mr. McLean, was recently reissued on a three-disc boxed set by Mosaic Records (www.mosaicrecords.com), jazz's answer to the Library of America. If the Mosaic box doesn't recharge his career — Mr. Moncur has long been plagued by dental problems that have severely worn down his chops — it will at least help restore an extraordinary talent to his rightful place in the history of jazz. The box contains 25 tracks, 16 of them written by Mr. Moncur; the music is as unforgettable and idiosyncratic as his name. Neither bop nor free but a deft synthesis of the two; confidently rooted in the black vernacular but elegantly urbane; often sardonic but always serious: Mr. Moncur's Blue Note period prefigured the work of Greg Osby, Jason Moran and other young jazz musicians who have mined the materials of African-American music with tart, edgy sophistication.

Mr. Moncur was born in 1937 into a musical family in New York City. His father, Grachan II, played bass in the Savoy Sultans, the house band at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem. His mother, a beautician, counted Dinah Washington and Sarah Vaughan among her clients. When Mr. Moncur was a child, the family moved to a predominantly white neighborhood in Newark, where his father led a swing band called Brother Moncur and His Strollers. At age 11 he picked up the trombone. After graduating from an elite black private high school in North Carolina, he landed a chair in the Nat Phipps band, a remarkable Newark youth ensemble, thanks to the recommendation of his friend Wayne Shorter, the group's commanding young saxophonist. While still in his teens Mr. Moncur also sat in with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers and befriended Blakey's alto saxophonist, Mr. McLean.

When they finally began working together in February 1963, Mr. McLean's "search for inspiration," as he wrote at the time, "was clouded by a depression." Mr. Moncur, by then a Juilliard composition student who had made his mark with Ray Charles and the Art Farmer-Benny Golson Jazztet, provided just the inspiration he needed. They recruited a rhythm section of unknowns: a 17-year-old drummer from Boston, Tony Williams; the vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson; and the bassist Eddie Khan. After a few gigs at Brooklyn's Blue Coronet, the band recorded "One Step Beyond," which featured two tunes by Mr. McLean and two by Mr. Moncur. It was extraordinarily supple free-bop, speeding up and down with a lover's intuition, as attentive to dynamics as to pulse. Mr. Moncur, Mr. McLean and Mr. Hutcherson made two more records that year, each better than the last: the darkly mesmerizing "Destination Out," with Roy Haynes on drums and Larry Ridley on bass; and Mr. Moncur's masterpiece, "Evolution," a suite of four originals recorded under his leadership, with Williams returning on drums, Bob Cranshaw on bass and Lee Morgan on trumpet.

"When Grachan and I got together it was like a marriage," Mr. McLean recalled. Among brass-horn marriages, theirs was as distinctive as the better-known partnerships of Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry and Miles Davis and Wayne Shorter. It combined the emotional urgency of free jazz with the poise and restraint one associates with the Modern Jazz Quartet — an achievement that's all the more remarkable when you consider how little they apparently rehearsed. It helped, of course, that they came with a sense of mission, described with admirable precision by album titles like "One Step Beyond" and "Evolution" (both 1963).

Mr. Moncur's writing was integral to the group's success. It was angular yet bluesy, formally adventurous but grounded in hooks. His primary influence was Thelonious Monk. "If Monk was a tribal leader," Mr. McLean once said, "Grachan would be his medicine man." In bright, strutting, tempo-shifting numbers like "Monk in Wonderland," the medicine man paid tribute to the tribal leader. But he also displayed an impressive talent for other genres, from searing vamp-driven tunes ("Hypnosis") to somber, deadpan waltzes ("Frankenstein") to ominously slow, nearly tempoless dirges ("Love and Hate," "Ghost Town"). Some of Mr. Moncur's compositions are programmatic in feel, connecting sound to image in the manner of the movie scores he studied at Juilliard. The dramatic "Ghost Town," for example, a 14-minute "musical painting," conjures up a grandly portentous sense of desolation, through long passages in which nothing is heard but spare reverberations on vibes or cymbals, which echo like footsteps on a seemingly deserted street.

After "Evolution," Mr. Moncur and Mr. McLean went their separate ways. Although they were briefly reunited on Mr. McLean's 1967 albums, "Hipnosis" and " 'Bout Soul" — portions of both appear on the Mosaic box — neither session matched the inventiveness of their earlier collaborations. Fortunately, Mr. Moncur was able to make one more record under his own name for Blue Note, the 1964 session "Some Other Stuff." His last truly great record, it features Mr. Moncur alongside Mr. Shorter, Herbie Hancock and Tony Williams — three-fifths of what would soon become the Miles Davis Quintet — and the bassist Cecil McBee.

"That whole record was inspired by the hard times I was having in New York," Mr. Moncur recalled. "I'd just fallen out with the first young lady I'd met in New York, and I'd moved out of my apartment in the Diplomat Hotel opposite Town Hall, which was the biggest mistake I ever made since I had a room there with a private bath and telephone for only $27 a week." The song titles "Gnostic" and "Nomadic," he said, expressed his state of mind: "I was a nomad after losing my room, and I was a gnostic because I had to survive in the streets by my own wits."

Wits he had in abundance. After Mr. Hutcherson told him the Actors Studio was looking to cast a musician in a Broadway production of James Baldwin's new civil rights play, "Blues for Mr. Charlie," Mr. Moncur headed for the audition. Though he had no acting experience, he got the part. And because the play was more than three hours and he only had to be onstage for an hour and 15 minutes, he spent the other two hours in a sound-proof rehearsal room practicing voicings for "Some Other Stuff," which he recorded three months after Baldwin's play opened. Structurally, it's Mr. Moncur's most daring record, a precursor to the work of avant-garde jazz composers like Anthony Braxton and Muhal Richard Abrams. Only one of the four tracks (the glorious, up-tempo "Thandiwa") is a jazz tune. The others are daring experiments in an as-yet-undefined genre, unfolding in sections, with flashes of European dissonance, African percussion and marching-band music. As Mr. Moncur explains it, the range of influences on "Some Other Stuff" reflects the music that the band was listening to when they gathered at Mr. Hancock's Riverside Drive apartment. "Herbie had the best stereo equipment of that period, and we'd put on headphones and listen to Ravi Shankar and Trane and heavy classical stuff, and in some cases with the classical stuff we'd follow the score."

It's hard to listen to "Some Other Stuff" without a melancholy sense of what-might-have-been, not just because so few jazz musicians today are taking comparable risks, but because Mr. Moncur was dropped from Blue Note shortly after making it. Mr. Moncur's career as a leader didn't come to an end, exactly. From the late 1960's through the 1970's, he made some fine records, notably "New Africa" (1969), which has some luminous improvising by Archie Shepp and Roscoe Mitchell and which was recently reissued on vinyl by Actuel. But Mr. Moncur's later work never quite delivered on the promise of his Blue Note records. One could, of course, say the same of Blue Note artists like Mr. Hancock and Mr. Shorter. But they grew rich and famous failing to deliver on that promise, while Mr. Moncur simply faded into oblivion. His Blue Note records, meanwhile, went out of print, as if the company had no interest in preserving his memory.

It's not the career Mr. Moncur hoped for, but he's rueful rather than bitter about it. "It's strange," he said. "Most of my best friends are people I very seldom see. In recent years I didn't even try to see them because I wasn't happy with things. I'm the kind of guy who wears his feelings on his sleeve, and I was afraid I wouldn't be able to snuff it out. But everything's cool, man. I'm still composing, and I'm finally beginning to see a little daylight."

[Rooster_Ties]

There was an article about Moncur in the September JazzTimes concering the Mosaid Select.  I think they actually interviewed him, though.

Nice to see him getting some exposure.

Thanks Rooster for the headup. Bery interesting article.

Here is the Grachan Moncur story in Sunday's New York Times. There is a photo of Moncur playing trombone at the 2001 Verizon festival illustrating the article.

All quotes from the other thread I started on this (which also included the article). But this one is just as good, so I'm hereby transfering the quotes here to this thread, and I'm about to nuke the other thread. No harm, no foul.

[BFrank]

Rooster, I looked around for another thread to add this to. I guess I didn't look hard enough. Oh, well ...

[clandy44]

This is a terrific article, not only for the subject matter but also for the writing ability of the reporter-I don't remember seeing his byline, but I will be keeping an eye out for it in the future.

[7/4]

Isn't this the guy who bashed Zorn in the NY Times a few years ago?

[BFrank]

He writes for "The Nation", too.

[7/4]

He writes for "The Nation", too.

When I did a google search for Shatz, I noticed that. I know someone at the Nation.

[davef]

Great article here, thanks for sharing!

Very well written.

[Lazaro Vega]

McLean and Moncur played the Chicago Jazz Festival a few years ago and those chops problems were much in evidence which was too bad. There's also a recording Moncur issued on the Jazz Composers Orchestra Label that merits mention. Not up to the Blue Notes, but none the less the next chapter in his extended compositional development and writing for a broader range of instruments. "Echoes of Prayer," Grachan Moncur III, The Jazz Composer's Orchestra, presented at New York University's Leob Student Center, April 10, 1974, recorded Aprill 11, 1974. Including Pat Patrick, flutes; Perry Robinson, clarinet; Carlos Ward, alto sax, flute; Leroy Jenkins, violin; Ngoma, violin; Hannibal Marvin Peterson, Stafford Osborne, trumpets; Janice Robinson, trombone; Jack Jeffers, bass trombone; Mark Elf, guitar; Carla Bley, piano; Cecil McBee, Charlie Haden, basses; Beaver Harris, drums; plus the Tanawa Dance Ensemble; Jeanne Lee and Mervine Grady, voices....