Graham Collier, 1937-2011
Please visit Graham’s main website,
jazzcontinuum,
for tributes, obituaries and recent news
Luminosity
– the last
two suites due later this year
Following
the Relook+
memorial
concert at the London Jazz Festival in November 2012, plans
are under way to reconvene Graham’s The
Jazz
Ensemble in
2013 to record his last two works, The Blue
Suite and
Luminosity,
inspired by the works of painter Hans Hofmann, for release
later this year. We hope the resulting double CD will be
available later in the year, so more on that as it happens.
“relook”, a memorial 75th birthday
celebration
Shortly before he
died in September 2011, Graham sat down to compile a double
CD of his favourite pieces from his 46 years of recording
his own music, which he had hoped to send to radio stations
and other media to celebrate what would have been his 75th
birthday, on 21 February 2012. Luckily he had finalised the
track list before he died on September 9, and while
initially uncertain about the future of the project, I
quickly realised it was important to complete it, now,
sadly, as a memorial rather than a celebration for his 75th
birthday. Graham originally envisaged the CD as a
promotion-only release to celebrate the birthday, but it
will now be made commercially available by jazzcontinuum
from his web store and the usual channels on February 21.
Further information and contemporary critical comment on
each album featured on the compilation is available at the
“Recordings & more” page on the menu bar
above, where there is also a page of background notes on
each track on “Relook”.
An extraordinary jazz composer... whose works should be
better known in the U.S.
Howard
Mandel, author of Miles, Ornette, Cecil, Jazz
beyond Jazz
On
the evidence of this performance, the services of Graham
Collier should be secured by just about every big band on
the planet.
John
Shand, The
Sydney Morning Herald
One
of the most genuinely modern big band compositions to come
out of Britain for twenty years.
Duncan
Heining, Jazzwise
Among
the most exhilarating, sensual, beautiful and disturbing
performances in this era’s jazz.
Ray
Comiskey, The Irish Times
On
any short list of the most polemical writers in jazz today,
he is fighting for the top spot.
Ted Gioia,
jazz.com
Some press comments from
Graham Collier’s 45 year career as a composer, one
who is regularly compared to Gil
Evans, Charles
Mingus, and
Duke
Ellington, is listened to by pop
groups such as Babyshambles,
who continues to influence young jazz musicians around the
world, and who knows jazz has a past but needs a future. A
future he is helping to shape with his radical
approach.
****
Concert
News
‘The
rich fulness of Collier's harmonies, the imagination and
inventiveness of his orchestral colour, and the
marvellous
fluency of the improvisations...’
(From
a
review of a concert
in Halifax, Nova Scotia, February 2011.)
CD
News
Hoarded Dreams
- one of the 1001 best albums in
the latest Penguin Jazz Guide.
Publishing
News
memories arrested in space
-
six saxophone quartets inspired by Jackson Pollock
paintings, now published by Advance.
Website
News
See
Free Stuff
a new section on this site.
*****
The montage
includes music from:
Portraits (1973)
Deep Dark Blue Centre (1967)
New Conditions (1976)
Bread and Circuses (2003)
Adams Marble (1995)
Symphony of Scorpions (1977)
Darius (1974)
Something British Made in Hong Kong (1987)
Midnight Blue (1975)
Hoarded Dreams (recorded 1983, released 2007)
See also
www.jazzcontinuum.com
for
Graham Collier’s writings on jazz and other things
www.thejazzcomposer.com,
an interactive site about Graham Collier’s latest
book