The American jazz trombonist Grachan Moncur III, who has died on his 85th birthday, was among the first to show that a place for his instrument existed in the avant-garde of the 1960s. A valued collaborator with the saxophonists Jackie McLean, Wayne Shorter and Archie Shepp, he was destined to remain in relative obscurity while they, and others with whom he played, attracted a measure of wider fame.
The recorded evidence, particularly on several albums for the Blue Note label, left no doubt that he was their creative equal. When he slipped out of the public eye, it was largely because of his refusal to compromise a longstanding resentment against the music industry’s reluctance to reward musicians properly, particularly in respect of publishing royalties for composers.
Moncur was born in New York City. His mother, Ella, was a beautician and his father, Grachan Moncur II, the son of an immigrant from the Bahamas, played the double bass with the Savoy Sultans, a popular band with a residency at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem. He grew up in Newark, New Jersey, in a house often visited by leading musicians, including the singer Sarah Vaughan, his mother’s best friend.
His first instruments were the cello and the piano, but at nine he switched to the trombone, which he studied at the Laurinburg Institute in North Carolina, a historically black preparatory school with a renowned music department whose previous alumni included Dizzy Gillespie. His mother had sent him there at the age of 14, he told an interviewer, to get him away from the increasing presence of drugs in his home town.
When he returned home to continue his studies at the Manhattan School of Music and the Juilliard conservatory, his first professional experience came with the Newark-based big band of the pianist Nat Phipps, in whose ranks he met Shorter. After leaving Juilliard because he could no longer afford the tuition fees, he joined the band of the singer Ray Charles, where he spent a year and a half, alongside such veterans as the celebrated saxophonists Hank Crawford and David “Fathead” Newman.
Next he was recruited to a six-piece group called the Jazztet, led by the trumpeter Art Farmer and the saxophonist Benny Golson. It was Farmer who encouraged him to write his first compositions and helped him with the notation. His first effort, called Sonny’s Back, was written after they had appeared at the Jazz Gallery in New York opposite Sonny Rollins, and became the group’s theme tune.
After the Jazztet broke up in 1962 Moncur freelanced around New York and was soon involved with McLean in a new quintet that featured the vibes player Bobby Hutcherson and the 17-year-old drum prodigy Tony Williams. Two albums, titled One Step Beyond and Destination … Out! were released by Blue Note under McLean’s name in 1963 and 1964. Notable for the unusual frontline blend of the saxophonist’s slightly sour intonation and the trombonist’s dark, almost sombre sound, they contained compositions in which Moncur sometimes dispensed with a regular pulse and often favoured the sort of oblique melodic angles associated with Thelonious Monk.
His own two Blue Note albums, Evolution and Some Other Stuff, similarly combined the technical rigour and intellectual demands of bebop with an interest in expanded forms and instrumental vocabularies. They featured such sidemen as Shorter, the trumpeter Lee Morgan and the pianist Herbie Hancock, and are still listened to and admired by young musicians in search of new approaches to the basic materials of jazz.
Moncur was also demonstrating his development as a soloist. Although earlier forms of jazz had exploited the instrument’s potential for brassy flamboyance, the demand of modern jazz for instrumental agility had made it seem ungainly. Only JJ Johnson and one or two of his disciples appeared equipped to meet the new standards. Moncur and his more extrovert contemporary Roswell Rudd represented the next generation, their fluency and imagination making the instrument relevant once again.
When James Baldwin’s Blues for Mister Charlie, based on the story of the murder of Emmett Till, was produced on Broadway in 1964, Moncur appeared in the cast and contributed a composition to the show. The following year he was invited by the poet and activist Amiri Baraka, his friend and Newark neighbour, to lead a group alongside those of John Coltrane, Albert Ayler and Shepp in a concert at the Village Gate in Greenwich Village, recorded and released by the Impulse label under the title The New Wave in Jazz.
He appeared on several of Shepp’s albums, including Mama Too Tight and The Way Ahead, and in 1969 he and the saxophonist were among a group invited to the Pan African festival in Algiers, where they played with North African musicians. On the way back they stopped in Paris, where Moncur was among several who recorded albums for the BYG label. His was called New Africa, and featured the saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell and the drummer Andrew Cyrille.
In 1974 his only recorded composition for large ensemble, titled Echoes of Prayer, was released on the Jazz Composers Orchestra Association label. Its individual movements were dedicated to Medgar Evers, Marcus Garvey, Angela Davis and the Rev Dr Martin Luther King. From 1982 to 1991 Moncur was composer-in-residence at the Newark Community School of the Arts.
He is survived by his wife, Tracy (nee Sims), whom he married in 1968; two daughters, Ella and Vera; three sons, Grachan IV, Kenya and Adrien; and two brothers, Loften and Lonnie. A son, Toih, and a daughter, Hilda, predeceased him.
• Grachan Moncur III, trombonist, composer and teacher, born 3 June 1937; died 3 June 2022
