DFSBP archives: Grachan Moncur III

 

NOTE (July 24, 2021): I've re-upped the links to the Grachan Moncur III WKCR interview below. If you have trouble accessing them, drop me a line at hank [dot] shteamer [at] rollingstone [dot] com, and I'll send them to you directly.

I've been listening to a lot of podcasts and online audio interviews recently. I highly recommend Jeremiah Cymerman's 5049 Podcast (I've checked out about ten of these so far, and I've loved pretty much every one), Aisha Tyler's Girl on Guy interview with Clutch's Neil Fallon, the Luc Lemay (Gorguts) and Bill Steer (Carcass) episodes of the MetalSucks Podcast, and the Lemay appearance on the Invisible Oranges East Village Radio show (click on September 3 here). While I'm not equipped to put together snazzy-sounding, nicely edited content à la what's linked above, I do have a fairly extensive archive of audio interviews, some recorded live on air. Since most of these radio shows are interspersed with music, they play like readymade podcasts. As time permits, I'll be going back through and digitizing various programs from the vaults, e.g., the 2000 Steve Lacy show I posted back in February.

Next up is an installment of the WKCR Musician's Show, featuring trombonist-composer Grachan Moncur III, that dates from less than a month after the Lacy Q&A. This has to be one of my most treasured interview tapes. As with the late, great Walt Dickerson, Moncur was an artist who existed in a kind of mythical state in my mind before I was lucky enough to be able to meet him. (I made the connection via a wonderful woman named Glo Harris—the widow of the drummer Beaver Harris—my collaborator on a memorial show concerning Beaver, which featured in-studio appearances from Moncur, Rashied Ali and Wade Barnes, and call-ins from Andrew Cyrille and Jack DeJohnette; maybe that'll be my next post from the archives!) I didn't know Moncur's story; I only knew his records, and at that time I was completely obsessed with them, especially the 1963 Blue Note set Evolution, which I still regard as one of the masterpieces of the period, and of jazz in general. Grachan (for the record, it's pronounced "GRAY-shun") and I sat down for three solid hours of talk, music and off-mic reminiscing. It was a really special experience—for one thing, I'll never forget Grachan discussing how his experience of the Kennedy assassination related to the title track of Evolution, one of my favorite pieces of music ever. I was just a kid at the time of this interview—a month shy of my 22nd birthday—but Mr. Moncur treated me like a peer. I hope you enjoy the show. Here it is, in four installments:

WKCR Musician's Show with Grachan Moncur III: 7.19.2000 - Part I

WKCR Musician's Show with Grachan Moncur III: 7.19.2000 - Part II

WKCR Musician's Show with Grachan Moncur III: 7.19.2000 - Part III

WKCR Musician's Show with Grachan Moncur III: 7.19.2000 - Part IV

NOTES:

1) The easiest way to stream these files is by clicking the Streampad link (the blue bar) you see at the bottom of the page. You can also download them as MP3s.

2) The level on the title track to Aco Dei de Madrugada (played at about the 24-minute mark in Part III) was too high, so I cut that piece from the MP3. You can hear it here. The same goes for Echoes of Prayer (featured on Destination: Out back in 2010), announced right at the end of Part III and continuing into the beginning of Part IV; I'm pretty sure we played the majority of the LP, which you can hear in five parts here: I, II, III, IV, V.

P.S. I want to thank my Aa bandmate Mike Colin for reminding me of the existence of this tape. I have a fond memory of he and I going to see Grachan Moncur III play at Iridum in a band that included Moncur's old Blue Note comrades Jackie McLean and Bobby Hutcherson. They played the classic "Love and Hate" that night and Moncur took a solo for the ages. (Judging by this review, this must've been 2004.)

P.P.S. Steve Lehman's 2000 interview with McLean, recently posted at Do the Math, is well worth your time.

Bio picks: A.B. Spellman, etc.

"I have tried to let the musicians speak for themselves as much as possible... I have shifted and spliced, and moved their ideas around to put them in their most advantageous places, but I have not put words in their mouths. They have plenty of good ones of their own." - A.B. Spellman (pictured above), introduction to Four Lives in the Bebop Business (1985 edition)

I always feel at home when I'm reading jazz biographies. I've been working my way through Four Lives, a really great book, in piecemeal fashion. (If you're not familiar with Four Lives, it was first published in 1966 and consists of lengthy, freestanding profiles of Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, Herbie Nichols and Jackie McLean.) I picked it up last year when I was researching Taylor, but I only read the section on him at that time. Just got through with the Coleman and McLean portions and I was enthralled.

It's pretty fascinating to hear from Taylor and Coleman, both famously tough interviews, at a time when they were still talking very lucidly about their work. Don't have great recall of the Taylor portion just now, but I do remember some fascinating insights into his practice method, which then involved a lot of solfège singing. The Coleman chapter, though, is a pretty fascinating portrait of inner turmoil and neurosis. At the time Spellman interviewed him, Coleman does not seem to be a very happy dude, and reading about the insane prejudices (both racial and artistic) that he had to endure in order to find an audience, you can't really blame him. Speaking of race, there's some pretty fascinating material in here about the strengths and weaknesses of black bassists vs. white bassists. ("I've met more white bass players who could be free on their instrument than black bass players," he says at one point.) Sometimes Coleman's logic seems iffy, but it's still valuable to have a window into his conception of race at that time. From everything I've read, it's clear that for him and a lot of other players and critics, it was still very much a foreground issue.

McLean comes off as far less eccentric. His chapter is also about hardship, but not so much aesthetic hardship. Spellman is very interested in McLean's struggle with heroin, and the saxist is sort of a case study re: the whole phenomenon of young Charlie Parker disciples falling unwittingly into their own addictions. McLean's accounts of interacting with bebop giants such as Parker, Bud Powell and Monk are fascinating. These men were superstars while he was growing up and he eventually joined their ranks as a respected peer. Spelllman also gives a good sense of McLean's artistic awakening via his work with Charles Mingus, an experience which led directly into the saxists finest sessions as a leader (Let Freedom Ring, Destination Out, One Step Beyond, etc. - some of my favorite jazz records.)

I read the Herbie Nichols piece a long time ago, but I have little memory of it (though I can say it seems to me that the common perception of Herbie Nichols as a tragic overlooked genius probably originated here). Getting ready to dive back in. But overall I love the depth of this book and also the subjectivity. It's so cool that Spellman just sort of chose these four artists, who don't represent any logical cross-section of jazz, without fussing over why they belong together as a set in any easily definable way. "Yes, I could have chosen four others," he writes, "but frankly these are four of my favorite musicians and men, and, like most people, I tend to satisfy my subjective instincts first." Nice.

After I polish this one off, I'm on to Robin D.G. Kelley's new Monk bio. I've browsed this and I'm extraordinarily psyched to get into it in depth. From what I can tell, Kelley is really out to debunk common understanding of Monk as this eccentric savant character. It's interesting because in the Spellman book, Jackie McLean speaks to the same issue. "Jackie feels that people have tended too much to regard Monk as a talented nut," Spellman writes. "During all his years of dealing with Monk, Jackie has found him to be enormously wise, lucid and informed. [this is McLean talking] 'Monk is a deep person; I know this because I knew Monk well. His interests vary far beyond what most people would imagine. He's very easy to know as long as you deal with him in a plain and friendly way. But if you try to be dishonest with him or play mental chess with him, then you might have trouble. His mind is something that should be respected at all times. People are too quick to think that a jazz musician knows jazz and that's it, you know.'"

Speaking of Monk, there's another amazing anecdote in the McLean section of the Spellman book about how the pianist once insisted on following McLean home after a gig so as to score a piece of Jackie's mother's chocolate pie. In a related yet somewhat more disturbing incident discussed in the Ornette chapter, Ed Blackwell recalls that when Coleman was living in a hotel during his early days in L.A., some fellow musicians strong-armed the saxist out of a cake his mother had sent him for his 25th birthday.

Weird parallels all around. Anyway, loving the Spellman and can't wait for the Kelley.

P.S. Just found a recent A.B. Spellman interview at The Independent Ear.