TROMBONIST, COMPOSER OF A HYBRID FORM OF JAZZ IN THE 1960S, ’70S
Grachan Moncur III, a trombonist and composer who came to renown in the 1960s and early ’70s for his deft playing of a hybrid of post-bop and free jazz, but who later receded from the spotlight, died June 3 — his 85th birthday — in a hospital in Newark, New Jersey.
His son Kenya said the cause was cardiac arrest.
“Whenever I have a conversation about what’s wrong with the jazz business, I always start out by saying, ‘Where is Grachan Moncur?’” alto saxophonist Jackie McLean, one of Moncur’s most important collaborators, told The New York Times in 2003.
Long before McLean asked that question, Moncur had started his jazz career as a teenager, jamming
at New York nightclub Birdland and sitting in with drummer Art Blakey’s band, the Jazz Messengers. In 1959, he went on the road with Ray Charles.
But after about two years, feeling a need to perform with a smaller ensemble based in New York City, he was recruited to join the Jazztet, a sextet formed by trumpeter Art Farmer and saxophonist Benny Golson. He played with that group until it disbanded in 1962, then took that summer off to study the challenging and unconventional music of Thelonious Monk. His goal was to learn how to write his own.
On a night when he had written two compositions, he said, he got a call from McLean, whom he had known since Moncur was a teenager, asking him to join his ensemble for rehearsals and club dates in advance of recording an album for Blue Note Records.
That album, “One Step Beyond,” and “Destination ... Out!” both released in 1963, were critically praised documents of a transitional period in jazz when musicians like McLean and Moncur were blending the harmonic advances of the bebop era with the more adventurous spirit of the avant-garde.
Moncur then recorded two albums for Blue Note as a leader, “Evolution” (1963) and “Some Other Stuff” (1964), with stellar accompaniment. Both albums featured Bobby Hutcherson on vibraphone and Tony
Williams on drums; “Evolution” also featured Lee Morgan on trumpet and McLean, while the “Some Other Stuff” lineup included Wayne Shorter on tenor saxophone.
He continued to record, releasing two albums in 1969 on the French label BYG Actuel, “New Africa” and “Aco del de Madrugada” (“One Morning I Waked Up Very Early”), and another, “Echoes of Prayer,” with the Jazz Composer’s Orchestra, in 1974. But he was entering a long, relatively quiet period during which he made almost no records but ran jazz workshops in Harlem in a studio called Space Station, performed in Europe, and taught jazz.