Grachan Moncur III

Influences

• Grachan Moncur II — His father was the bassist for the Savoy Sultans and kept the house filled with professional players during the swing era. The exposure to the grind of the big band circuit gave Moncur a fundamental understanding of rhythm sections that he would later deconstruct. You hear that lineage in his rock-solid sense of timing, even when the melodies go completely off the rails.
• J.J. Johnson — Johnson was the undisputed king of the bebop trombone and Moncur’s primary technical benchmark before he went avant-garde. While Moncur eventually rejected Johnson's 'speed-at-all-costs' approach, he retained the clean, articulate slide technique that Johnson mastered. It's the reason Moncur sounds so intentional even when he's playing the most dissonant shit imaginable.
• Thelonious Monk — Moncur frequently cited Monk as a primary influence for his approach to space and rhythmic displacement. You can hear the 'Monkish' use of silence and unexpected intervals all over the arrangements on Evolution. He treats the trombone like Monk treated the piano—less as a lead voice and more as a percussive tool for shaping the composition.
• Benny Carter — Carter was Moncur's uncle and a master of sophisticated jazz arranging who actually gave the kid his first instrument. The DNA of Carter’s complex, multi-voiced orchestration is what allowed Moncur to write such dense charts for his Blue Note sextets. He took Carter’s structural logic and applied it to the far more aggressive 'New Thing' scene.
• Art Farmer — Moncur spent a formative stint in the Jazztet, co-led by Farmer and Benny Golson, right before he broke out on his own. Farmer’s lyrical, almost vocal quality on the flugelhorn rubbed off on Moncur’s phrasing. Even at his most abstract, Moncur maintains a singing quality in his tone that he pulled directly from those Jazztet frontlines.