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All Music Guide:
English composer Graham Collier was the first British student to graduate from the Berklee College of Music. Collier won a scholarship in 1961, after playing more than seven years in an army band. He toured briefly in 1963 with the Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra playing bass, then returned to England where he formed the Graham Collier Ensemble. Through the '60s, '70s, and '80s, this group contained many of Britain's finest musicians, gathered to play Collier's original compositions. It varied in size and personnel; some alumni include Harry Beckett, Kenny Wheeler, and John Surman. Collier established a big band, Hoarded Dreams, in 1983. It debuted at the Bracknell Jazz Festival with a lineup bolstered by such special guests as Ted Curson and Manfred Schoof. The next year he began a rehearsal ensemble that later became the nucleus of the group Loose Tubes.
Collier became a professor and eventually director of jazz studies at the Royal Academy of Music in London. He was awarded an Order of the British Empire by the Queen in 1987 for contributions to jazz, and also wrote music for several plays, films, and television, plus authored a number of books. After 1974, Collier owned and managed Britain's now defunct Mosaic label, not to be confused with America's premier reissue operation. Collier was also a founding member and member of the board of the International Association of Schools of Jazz and ran its magazine, Jazz Changes, for seven years until its publication ended in 2000. Collier moved to southern Spain and continued to compose and tour internationally, with projects including work with the Danish Radio Jazz Orchestra and the NDR Bigband, and concerts throughout Europe and in the U.S.A. and Australia. He subsequently lived in Greece, where he died of heart failure on September 10, 2011.
Wikipedia:
James Graham Collier OBE (21 February 1937 – 10 September 2011) was an English jazz bassist, bandleader and composer.
Life and career
Born in Tynemouth, Northumberland, on leaving school Collier joined the British Army as a musician, spending three years in Hong Kong. He subsequently won a Down Beat magazine scholarship to the Berklee School of Music, Boston, studying with Herb Pomeroy and was its first British graduate in 1963. On his return to Britain he founded the first version of an ensemble devoted to his own compositions, Graham Collier Music, which included Kenny Wheeler, Harry Beckett and John Surman, and in later line-ups Karl Jenkins, Mike Gibbs, Art Themen and many other notable musicians. Collier was the first recipient of an Arts Council bursary for jazz, and was commissioned by festivals, groups and broadcasters across Europe, North America, Australia and the Far East. He produced 19 albums and CDs of his music and also worked in a wide range of other media: on stage plays and musicals, on documentary and fiction film, and on a variety of radio drama productions.
Collier was also an author and educator, having written seven books on jazz and given lectures and workshops around the world. As Simon Purcell noted, "Jazz education in the UK owes an enormous amount to Graham Collier (alongside Eddie Harvey and Lionel Grigson) without whom our current positions and extent of provision would been considerably harder to achieve."In 1987, Collier launched the jazz degree course at London’s Royal Academy of Music and was its artistic director until he resigned in 1999 to concentrate on his own music. In 1989, he was among the group of jazz educators who formed the International Association of Schools of Jazz, whose magazine, Jazz Changes, he co-edited for seven years. He was awarded an Order of the British Empire (OBE) by Queen Elizabeth II in 1987 for his services to jazz.
Latterly, Collier lived on a small island in Greece, where he composed, wrote and administered his back catalogue, travelling to present concerts and workshops around the world. His book, The Jazz Composer: Moving Music Off the Paper, a philosophical look at jazz and jazz composing, was published by Northway Books in 2005, and his nineteenth CD, directing 14 Jackson Pollocks, mainly recorded in 2004, was released by the jazzcontinuum label.
