Re-affirms Collier's feeling for Ellingtonian ideas but the
whole record is redolent of the unique Collier
spirit.
Barry
McRae, Jazz Journal
International (1974)
Portraits featuring Dick Pearce.
‘One of my personal
favourites in the whole Collier canon’
Alyn
Shipton.
Featuring
Dick Pearce
(flugelhorn)
Pete Hurt (alto sax)
Ed Speight (guitar)
Geoff Castle (piano)
John Webb (drums)
Graham Collier (bass)
Recording History
First issued on LP
by Saydisc, 1973
First issued on CD by Disconforme, 2000
Remastered and repackaged by
BGO records as part of a 2 CD compilation,
2008
Remastered
by Tom Leader of LCL Digital.
The
Tracks
And Now for
Something Completely Different is a complete
composition rather than a suite of separate items. The
structure and themes came intuitively rather than by
deliberate use of technique, but all the themes can be
traced back to the opening motif.
Portraits
was
written for Dick Pearce on flugelhorn. In the original
liner notes I wrote ‘I’ve tried to portray how
I see him in the written sections as well as to present him
with sympathetic situations in which he can
improvise’.
Some
Reviews
Very
successfully captures the way the leader’s writing
spins loose but logical structures out of sparse modal
material, the intelligence with which the soloists build on
his written ideas, and the amazing variety of textures he
produces from such a small instrumentation.
Miles
Kington, The
Times, 1974
A
more laid-back, yet more challenging listen than any
previous Collier outing, but it also dates as one of the
best.
Thom Jurek,
All Music
Guide, 2001
Both
lengthy tracks are full of telling attention to detail and
development.
Simon Adams,
Jazz Journal
Inernational, 2001
The
original album closes with a piece that is one of my
personal favourites in the whole Collier Canon, namely
‘Portraits’ itself.
Alyn Shipton, in
the liner notes to the 2008 BGO compilation.
Remastered versions of
Portraits, Deep Dark Blue Centre
and
The Alternate Mosaics
were released on a
bargain price double
CD
by BGO in 2007.
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