Mosaics: The Life and Works of Graham Collier (Popular Music History)

Graham Collier’s career in jazz lasted over five decades.He was a bassist, a band-leader, a composer, an educator and an author, who wrote extensively about the music.His working life was littered with ‘firsts’. Amongst his many achievements, he was the first British jazz musician to study at the Berklee School of music in Boston and the first to receive an Arts Council grant.In 1985, Collier began teaching at the Royal Academy of Music, where he later established the first full-time jazz degree course in the UK in 1987. Mosaics draws extensively on Collier’s personal archive, as well as on interviews with fellow musicians, ex-students and colleagues from the Royal Academy of Music.It locates Collier and his work within the social and cultural changes which occurred during his life and, particularly, in relation to developments in British and European jazz of the 1960s and 70s.Collier’s work as a composer-bandleader represented an attempt to resolve the paradoxes inherent in jazz betwe