Mosaic (Select, Boxed, whatever)

[Tanager]

I'm not sure if this is, in fact, the right forum, but what the hell, if not, Lois or Mone can move the thread.

People should feel free to discuss other sets, but currently I'm specifically curious about the Grachan Moncur set - the only album from which this set draws material and which I already own/have heard is Jackie's Destination Out, which I really like. Anyone else have any opinions on the other material in this set? Same level of quality, playing, etc? I'm not familiar with Moncur's work except from Destination Out, so I'd love to hear what people think of his playing and whether this set is worth picking up if one doesn't already own most of the material therein.

[BFrank]

FYI, someone just posted on another board that both John Patton and Gerry Mulligan Selects will be released soon.

[John B]

Tanager -

I'd recommend grabbing the Moncur Mosaic Select, especially if you already are a fan of Moncur's playing on Destination Out. I don't spin Evolution or Some Other Stuff all that often, but I am glad I own a copy of each. On one disc you get Lee Morgan, Jackie McLean, Bobby Hutcherson and Tony Williams. On the other, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock and Tony Williams. Hard to go wrong with sidemen like these.

[stonemonkts]

The Moncur box is superb from disc 1 through disc 3. All I can say is if you like Destination Out, you certainly will enjoy the Mosaic box, and then some. Grab it while you can at list price. In a few years it will sell on E Bay for 90 bucks or more, mark my words.

I like it so much I doubt I would part with it for twice that much.

Well, maybe I would after taping it : )

[Tanager]

I just ordered the Moncur set. Next month, I might grab the Randy Weston set. And I see that they've got one coming that I really really want, Gerry Mulligan and the CJB on Verve...oooooooooooohhhhh.

[Gary Sisco]

I have the Weston set, and no Weston fan should be without it. And a very reasonable price, I might add.

[Tanager]

Moncur set just came today, looking forward to giving it a thorough listen...

[stonemonkts]

Originally posted by Tanager
Moncur set just came today, looking forward to giving it a thorough listen...

So, what do you think?

[Kevin Bresnahan]

FYI for those looking at these sets and thinking about buying them...

Mosaic has a one year license (I think) before the rights swing back to EMI. EMI is going to contunue selling the sets but at a significantly higher price point. I believe they move up to $50 or more (retail) when EMI gets them.

So, get 'em while you can at $39 and as an added bonus, you support one of the greatest Jazz reissue labels I've had the pleasure of buying from.

BTW, the Carmell Jones set is nice. I'm not as keen on the big band stuff but the small group sessions with Harold Land are well worth spinning.

Later,
Kevin

[Tanager]

Originally posted by stonemonkts
So, what do you think?

I think it's outstanding. I'd really bought it largely to get all the Jackie Mac material, but I like Moncur's playing (and his writing, which is definitely a strength, for my $$$). I haven't really worked through the third disk yet, but the first two are outstanding.

I'm still waiting for my October CD budget so I can get the just-released Mulligan/CJB set...

[Ed Swinnich]

I just picked up the Moncur, Weston and Green sets as part of the Mosaic sale.

I'd never heard Weston prior to getting this set and I think it's terrific - a must have. I'm really digging the Bennie Green as well. I already have some of the material but like the fact that they threw in some Ike Quebec stuff. The Moncur is a knock-out. I never heard Hipnosis before and think it's a killer session. Again, I had much of the material here but wanted to support Mosaic and especially the artist with my purchase.

One of the nice things I'm finding about these Selects is that, even in the cases where I have some of the material, they put a new focus on the artist in a nice size package that can be listened to in an evening. Don't care too much for the packaging though.

[Capt. W./TX.]

FWIW:

I reviewed this set some months ago.

Check out "Grachan Moncur - Mosaic Box Set"; since nobody's replied to the thread I started in the last three months or so, it's on page 4 of RECORD REVIEWS.

It's a great package; worth buying even if you already own some of the albums it was compiled from.

Regards to all!

[Tanager]

Up

[Clay Fink]

Got the Weston set with the Mulligan order. The second CD has a trio session + an unreleased quartet with Cecil Payne, Ron Carter and Roy Haynes. This is GREAT stuff - Weston's playing is incredable and his writting is good to. I like Payne on this a lot too.

The Byrd/Pepper set is worth having. Of all the hard-bop era sets I have I think that the Curtis Fuller is my favorite (with the exception of the OOP Blakey set). I don't know if it's still in print or not. The Tristano/Konitz/Marsh is good, but I think everything is also out on single CDs as well. I like the Anita O'Day box alot, but there again you can find the individual CDs in print. If you like pre-bop stuff then the HRS sessions has some interesting and important sessions on it. The Max Roach box is on my list as are the Johnny Hoges and Bix boxes. I'm also temptes by the Johnny Smith, the Eddy Lang/Joe Venuti and the Stanley Turrentine.

I'm still waiting for "The Complete Arista Anthony Braxton".

[Tanager]

I have a feeling that the next set I get will be the Weston - I've only heard a little of his stuff, but I've loved all of that, and the Select set is just a great way to get a lot of his music for a pretty reasonable price. Let me just say, one more time, that the Mulligan is just fantastic. I'm really looking forward to the Brookmeyer sets next year.

The other box that intrigues me is the Gerald Wilson one. I have two of his recent CDs (Theme for Monterey and New York, New Sound, of which I prefer the former), both of which I like (as I said, Theme in particular is outstanding), and I'd love to hear his prime Pacific work. But I don't know that I'm ready to drop that much on him just yet.

I finally scored the Woody Shaw box from eBay at a price that seemed pretty reasonable to me for what the seller claims is an unopened set, it should arrive in the next day or so. I am really excited about that...

[Clay Fink]

The Woody is goodie...

[Tanager]

Re: Woody, yeah, I agree. I listened to disks 2 and 3 (most of 1 I'd heard before, since I have a copy of Rosewood). I just can't believe how much great music he managed to produce in such a short time. It's really strange - he met such a sad end, yet his playing puts a real smile on my face and a warmth in my heart like few other musicians.

[BFrank]

Thumbs UP on the Gerald Wilson box. A real eye-opener and a lot of fun. The new album has several tunes lifted from that set, BTW.

[John B]

Originally posted by Tanager
Re: Woody, yeah, I agree. I listened to disks 2 and 3 (most of 1 I'd heard before, since I have a copy of Rosewood). I just can't believe how much great music he managed to produce in such a short time. It's really strange - he met such a sad end, yet his playing puts a real smile on my face and a warmth in my heart like few other musicians.

Have you heard his Muse albums yet? Little Red's Fantasy and The Moontrane are both excellent discs.

[Tanager]

Originally posted by John B
Have you heard his Muse albums yet? Little Red's Fantasy and The Moontrane are both excellent discs.

No, is Moontrane in print? I know LRF is, and it looks great, but my budget is blown, having bought two Mosaic boxes this week.

[John B]

I don't believe it is, but used copies shouldn't be too difficult to track down.

I would also highly recommend picking up Roy Brooks - The Free Slave, another 32Jazz Muse reissue. This features Woody as a sideman and smokes from start to finish.

[Clay Fink]

Another Woody album that stands out is "In My Own Sweet Way" on In 'n Out. It's a live recording with what looks like a pick-up group in Europe in 1987.


This is a great site:

http://www16.brinkster.com/fitzgera/woody/wsdisc.htm

[Clay Fink]

Originally posted by John B
I don't believe it is, but used copies shouldn't be too difficult to track down.

I would also highly recommend picking up Roy Brooks - The Free Slave, another 32Jazz Muse reissue. This features Woody as a sideman and smokes from start to finish.

I've got that one on vinyl and Woody is really on...Brooks is pretty unorthodox on this one.

[Pete C]

Tanager--if you can afford it, go for the Wilson.

[Ron Thorne]

I've been experiencing a woodrow for the Gerald Wilson Mosaic set, too, Pete. Like I need a few more CDs. Shit, we need an addition to our home as it is!

[BFrank]

Not exactly a review, but a wonderful article inspired by Grachan Moncur's Mosaic Select set from today's NY Times:

+++

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."

[Kevin Bresnahan]

Originally posted by BFrank


October 26, 2003
The Perils of Living Too Long
By ADAM SHATZ

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.

While true that "Hipnosis" was a double LP, the session with Moncur isssued in this Mosaic box is complete... in case inquiring minds wanted to know. I think it's a bit misleading to say "portions" in this case.

Later,
Kevin

[stonemonkts]

Speaking of Mosaic sets......last night I had one of those WOW listening experiences, the kind you have after a certain number of listens when the music really hits you, and you're with the band every step of the way. Musical ecstacy for a listener such as myself. I am speaking of the first several tracks of the Randy Weston Mosaic Select Box which features the album "Little Niles". Absolutely wonderful jazz, worthy of one of those Penguin Crowns. The compositions and arrangements are stellar (as well as Melba Liston's trombone playing), the music SWINGS like a mother*&^&er. Weston's superb rhythmic sensibilities (akin to Monk in this regard, IMHO) also contributed to one of the best listening experiences I've had in a while.

I strongly recommend this box, or at the very least, the album/cd "Little Niles" to anyone who is reading this post. This is Jazz music at its finest.

Many thanks to Pete C. for bringing up Randy Weston.

[Pete C]

That was a really nice article on Moncur. Thanks, B Frank. I think Some Other Stuff ranks with the McLean ones. I consider Moncur, Booker Little, and Wayne Shorter the three great small group jazz composers of the '60s.

New Africa is nice too, and Roscoe is especially stellar on that one.

[Tanager]

I actually somewhat disagree with the assessment of 'Bout Soul - although the long vocal-punctuated piece (the last on disk 2 of the Mosaic) gets tiresome to my ears, the two tracks preceeding it are quite strong, IMHO. And, whaddya know, they feature none other than (bringing it all back to Woody) Woody Shaw, albeit in a somewhat limited role.

Having said that, I really enjoyed that article - thanks for posting it!