Graham Collier Music – Songs for My Father (Fontana, 1970)

Graham Collier (b); Harry Beckett (tr, flgn); Bob Sydor (ts, as); Alan Wakeman (ts, ss); Alan Skidmore (ts); Tony Roberts (ts); Derek Wadsworth (tb); Phillip Lee (g); John Taylor (p); John Webb (d)

Recorded in 1970

Reissued on BGO in 2007 on a 2-CD set with two other Collier LPs: Down Another Road (Fontana, 1969) and Mosaics (Philips, 1971).

British author Brian Morton on British composer/bassist Graham Collier:

"Collier spent the last few years of his life living on a Greek island, so a famous line from Greek philosophy isn't inappropriate, even if he would have questioned its underlying premise: 'You can't step twice into the same river.'  This is a virtual mantra for jazz musicians, whose conjoined blessing and curse is that everything is in the moment and then is heard no more.  Collier devoted much of his nearly 50-year career to bridging the usually illusory gap between improvisation and composition, writing jazz down and then working through the more difficult task of getting it back 'off the page,' and also to the patient though sometimes fraught documentation of his own work.  Philosophically, he seemed committed to a not very Anglo-Saxon belief that nothing ever completely fades away, that the dead and their doings are always present. Such ideas drove some of his most remarkable work."

So Collier is first and foremost a "jazz composer."  Is this a paradox?  Theoretically YES, but perhaps practically NO.  An exquisite blurring of the lines is evident on Songs for My Father.  Blogger London Jazz Collector describes the music:

"Collier’s big-band isn’t very big, usually between 8 and 12 instruments, a 'small ensemble,' only one trombone, not three. The musicians are recognisably drawn from the jazz genre, play jazz instruments, but are used more as brushes applying musical paint on Collier’s compositional canvas, executing the composer’s vision. It is sometimes difficult to tell what is written and what is improvised, an ambiguity Collier revelled in. ... Songs For My Father moves from the modal improvisational canvas of his two previous works, towards more structured composition.  Here, Collier constructs a base layer of restless shifting tempos, edgy piano vamps, contrasting  tonal horn layers using a wide palette of brass colours from trombone and trumpet through the saxophone family up to soprano, with freeform solo improvisation breaking out from the ensemble work.  It has an unpredictable and satisfying complexity that commands active listening. Surprising even."

Yes. That.

More Graham Collier
Among Collier's recordings from the 1970s, I have enjoyed:

• Mosaics (Philips, 1971)
• Darius (Mosaic, 1974)
• Midnight Blue (Mosaic, 1975)
• New Conditions (Mosaic, 1977)

I have no doubt that other records in Collier's discography are worth tracking down as well.  Everything I've heard from him has impressed me.