GRAHAM COLLIER — Mosaics (review)

GRAHAM COLLIER — Mosaics album cover Live album · 1971 · Progressive Big Band Buy this album from MMA partners
4/5 ·
Sean Trane
Definitely a step up from his previous works’ Collier’s Mosaics piece is an impressive mix of written series of themes mixed with a bunch of solo instrumental improvisations. Aside Graham, you’ll find the usual suspects like Beckett, Castle, Wakeman (not Rick) and Webb (not Stan) and finally newcomer (to Collier‘s entourage) Sydor on sax. Recorded live at the tail end of 1970, the album sports an uncharacteristic electronics-as-mosaics Roger Dean artwork.

A slow crescendoing piano opens the album and introduces the Mosaics theme, where you’ll find the typical Collier composing characteristics, a dramatic-sounding background, which is sometimes reminiscent of Spanish music (and the Spaghetti Western soundtracks ala Morricone) and some much freer and sometimes bordering dissonant lead horn instruments. Then there are the solos-proper themselves, which are generally not quite as easy on the eardrums and tend to dampen the aural enthusiasm on an otherwise often-remarkable project. Indeed in this writer’s opinion, while these rather short solo excursions in dissonant or inhabitual scales are generally fine (and even magnified) when accompanied by some tremendous musical foundations from the rest of the band; they fall rather flat on their face when the solo is indeed playing entirely solo, often close to masturbation. However Castle’s piano works, Webb’s drumming and Collier’s bassing (says moi! ;o)) are irreproachable, most of the (very light) blame would be attributed to the horn players, if it wasn’t the zeitgeist.

Overall another excellent Graham Collier album (despite the small reserves about soloing solo instruments), not far from the Nucleus of Ian Carr, not as JR/F either but close enough to be associated to the nascent movement.

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