BLP 4177

Grachan Moncur III - Some Other Stuff

Released - November 1964

Recording and Session Information

Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, July 6, 1964
Grachan Moncur III, trombone; Wayne Shorter, tenor sax; Herbie Hancock, piano; Cecil McBee, bass; Anthony Williams, drums.

1382 tk.1 The Twins
1383 tk.6 Gnostic
1384 tk.14 Thandiwa
1385 tk.19 Nomadic

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Gnostic	Grachan Moncur III	July 6 1964
Thandiwa	Grachan Moncur III	July 6 1964
Side Two
The Twins	Grachan Moncur III	July 6 1964
Nomadic	Grachan Moncur III	July 6 1964

Liner Notes

ONE of the encouraging aspects of the current jazz scene is the readiness of many new, young players to discuss their music. Unlike some of their predecessors, they feel that a tempered explanation of their work does not necessarily detract from what they ore saying musically — that it can, in fact, serve as a useful guide for on audience that is often bewildered by the startling new directions of today’s jazz.

Grachan Moncur III — late of the Jazztet and the Roy Charles band — speaks with disarming, but intense seriousness about his music and about the influences that hove had the greatest effect upon him. “I feel,” he explained,” as though the more I develop, the more I’m going to be able to play. Take playing ‘free jazz’, for example. It’s the same thing as playing straight jazz. Three or four years ago I was just as serious as I am now, but I couldn’t play that way because I hadn’t learned enough; I just couldn’t produce it."

Like most players who develop their writing skills after becoming active performers, Moncur has had on unusually rapid compositional growth that closely paralleled the maturing of his playing techniques. His early pieces, written while a member of the Art Farmer/Benny Golson Jazztet, reflect a strong bop influence. “The way I started writing is funny,” he remarked. “I was at the union one day with Art, trying to get a card. He asked me why I didn’t try to write something for the group. It really hadn’t dawned on me to write anything at all before then. The few things I had tried never sounded good enough to me to want to get anyone to play them, or even to want to play them myself. So I just put it out of my mind; I was much more concerned with lust getting my instrument together. But there was o certain way that Art said it that rang a bell, and about two days later I wrote my first tune. It was about the time Sonny Rollins had just come back on the scene and we were working opposite him at the Gallery. The tune reminded me of Sonny — it come to me one day as I was walking down the street — and so I called it Sonny’s Back.”

The subsequent development of Moncur’s composition techniques can best be observed in a comparison of that earlier effort with the work on this recording. The change is obvious, but at least one similarity remains. like several other contemporary jazz writers, Moncur attaches great importance to the relationship between his tunes and his titles. “Every tune that I’ve written so for has a meaning and a story within it that I want the whole group to capture,” he explained. “A lot of guys, when they play, are not thinking about what they’re actually playing; they’re lust thinking about maybe the chords, or how the rhythm changes, or something like that, but I really try to tell a story and I want the group that plays my tunes to try to see what I saw when I wrote them.”

There can be little doubt that Moncur has chosen the right performers for the interpretation of his music. Drummer Tony Williams, a mainstay of the Miles Davis quintet, reveals a sensitivity and understanding that is remarkable in such a young player. Herbie Hancock, another member of the Davis band, contributes an important shore of the constructive work to this session. Much of the material was gone over by Moncur with Hancock well before it came to the stage of recording. Tenor saxophonist Wayne Shorter was another important choice. “I really wanted Wayne,” said Moncur, “because I know he would know about everything I was doing.” The final member of the group, bassist Cecil McBee, is another important addition to the growing list of creative bassists who have appeared in recent years.

The compositions on this recording run the gamut from traditional to the most unusual free improvisation. “The Twins”, Moncur commented, “is built off one chord — F major — from which you can go off anywhere your information and knowledge will permit you to go and come back. But the basic thing about this tune is not so much the chords as the rhythm. I was trying to use the rhythm to portray characters — my twin brothers. The melody is very simple — the kind that stays with you wherever you go in your improvisation. I explained this to the group when we rehearsed it, because I wanted to get the picture of these two young, mischievous boys. Wayne understood perfectly; he’s known them from the time they were born. After we played it down once he said, ‘yeah man, these are the cats, allright.’”

Thandiwa, according to Moncur, means beloved one in the Zulu language. It is the only piece on the record that has a fairly demanding chord structure. For those listeners who require that young players first demonstrate their traditional improvisatory abilities, this track will offer convincing evidence that the credentiail of the Moncur group are in order.

“Gnostic”, explained Moncur, “to me means that through the expression of knowledge and wisdom you should reach salvation, and that’s what I was trying to get across in the piece. Herbie really knew where it was; he added a beautiful part. At first I was going to use chords; it was going to be similar to a blues in 12/8 which, of course, wouldn’t have allowed much freedom. But instead of using these chords, Herbie played this little thing all the way through, which more or less gave it the freedom that I really wanted it to have.”

Nomadic is a drum solo almost in its entirety. “There’s not much to say about this one,” Moncur said. “I don’t think too many cats could have kept it as interesting as Tony did.” In order not to draw attention away from what he perceived as a free solo for Williams, Moncur explained that he “used other effects just to put a little more variety in the tune without using the horns to solo. I thought it would just be nice to have a relaxed drum solo — not one of those thousand-mile-a-minute things — that would be kind of soothing.” Whether one could ever really say that a drum solo is “soothing” is open to conjecture, but Williams’ solo is one of those rare drum exhibitions which retains consistent interest.

What Moncur cannot say about his own playing and writing, as it is demonstrated in this recording, is that he is becoming one of the more interesting of the newer jazz voices. Compositions like Gnostic, which practically eliminates a pulsating meter, and The Twins, which makes its point with a pulsating, but not specifically jazz-like beat, amply indicate the range and variety of his interests. With players like Moncur, Hancock, Shorter, Williams and McBee active on the jazz scene, both the traditional and the innovatory needs of jazz will continue to be fulfilled.

— DON HECKMAN

RVG CD Reissue Liner Notes

A NEW LOOK AT SOME OTHER STUFF

Blue Note Records was relatively late in embracing free jazz. While Atlantic brought Ornette Coleman east in 1959, the short-lived Candid featured Cecil Taylor in 1960 and Impulse! became the label of John Coltrane virtually from its inception in 1961, Alfred Lion retained his emphasis on hard bop and soul jazz. The inquisitiveness of one Blue Note artist, Jackie McLean, provided the first sign that the label could accommodate the new music; but even the daring albums of McLean's 1963 quintet were most notable for their ability to chart a middle course between accepted modern jazz techniques and the notions of what at the time was called the new thing.

Grachan Moncur III was the trombone soloist and primary composer in that McLean band, and his own two Blue Note sessions from the period, Evolution (from November 1963) and the present album, are usually considered in tandem with the earlier McLean's sessions One Step Beyond and Destination Out! It would be equally appropriate to hear Moncur's own albums as part of a wave of Blue Note masterpieces that began with Evolution and also include Eric Dolphy's Out to Lunch, Andrew Hill's Point of Departure, Herbie Hancock's Empyrean Isles, and Tony Williams's Life Time. These albums share the presence of either Bobby Hutcherson's vibes or the exploratory pianos of Hancock or Hill in the rhythm section, significant stretches where the pulse departs from regular swing, and drum phenom Williams.

Enough cannot be said about Williams, who was only 18 years old at the time. While he was turning heads in his regular gig with Miles Davis, these Blue Note recordings accorded him far greater leeway to demonstrate the lessons in abstraction he had learned in Boston from Sam Rivers. Williams's affinity for Moncur's music is illustrated by his presence on both of the trombonist's albums, and can be heard to best advantage here on "Nomadic," a drum solo with occasional commentary from the rest of the band. But then everyone in the present quintet is totally attuned to Moncur's music, from the non-continuous support offered by the rhythm section on "Gnostic" to the expanding looseness of response on the extended "The Twins." While the personnel suggests a variation on the second classic Miles Davis Quintet, Shorter would not in fact join that band until two months after this session. A longtime friend of Moncur's (they had played together in the legendary Newark band of Nat Phipps), Shorter had launched his own influential series of Blue Note recordings in 1964, and turns in a performance here that delivers more avant-garde energy than anything he did in the period save his own All Seeing Eye with Moncur and Hancock aboard from the following year. Bassist Cecil McBee had recently arrived in New York, and received important early exposure here. He would soon become part of Charles Lloyd's popular quartet, as well as a mainstay of the new music.

Moncur is in no way overshadowed by his sidemen, and turns in what is arguably the best example of his work as both player and composer. His melodies are pithy but vivid and they stay with you, especially the plaintive "Gnostic" and "Twins," with its appropriate suggestion of a nursery rhyme; and his improvisations reveal not just an assertive, brass-centered sound, but also uncommon expository continuity as each performance veers further from a fixed pulse. "Thandiwa" shows that Moncur was also persuasive when employing more conventional song form.

The future should have been bright for the trombonist, given the excellence of his two Blue Note albums and the enthusiasm he generated among important commentators of the period such as Don Heckman and A. B. Spellman. (The latter's notes for Evolution, also available in the RVG Series, provides an excellent overview of Moncur's early career.) Yet the popularity of his chosen instrument was dwindling, and a dispute with Lion over publishing ended his relationship with Blue Note as a bandleader. As the '60s progressed, Moncur moved further into free music circles, working frequently as a sideman with Archie Shepp and Marion Brown. Four more albums were issued under his name between 1969 and '77, but only one was on a domestic label, the ambitious Echoes of Prayer commissioned by the Jazz Composers Orchestra Association. He then taught for a period in Newark, but the ensuing decades were filled with struggle and neglect. In 2004, Moncur led an all-star ensemble on the Capri album Exploration. That session, and the reissue of the Blue Note albums with McLean and under his own name, has inspired a reconsideration of his contribution that has been long overdue.

— Bob Blumenthal, 2008