*All tracks previously unreleased. Stereophonic sound. In process of stocking* Composer/bassist, Graham Collier’s career was littered with “firsts” – Britain’s first jazz graduate, first jazz musician to be awarded an Arts Council grant, founder of the first full-time jazz degree in the UK. More to the point for our purposes here, he was the first British musician to perform his own music at the Hamburg Jazz Workshop. Collier opened doors to opportunities for himself and other British musicians and composers soon followed.

This performance occurred in December 1968, three months before Collier took his sextet – Collier, trumpeter Harry Beckett, multi-instrumentalist Karl Jenkins, saxophonist Stan Sulzmann, trombonist Nick Evans and drummer John Marshall - into the studios to record his second LP, Down Another Road (Fontana 1969). None of the pieces here feature on that album – or elsewhere.

These tracks find Collier at a point of transition in his music. Several tunes here hark back in style and mood to the modal, Miles-inspired approach of Deep Dark Blue Centre (Deram 1967), while others anticipate the music on Down Another Road or can be linked with Workpoints, the music composed for his 1968 Arts Council commission. All in all, this makes for an excellent addition to Collier’s catalogue and further illuminates a major chapter in British jazz history.