Picking up the cello at a young age as a result of his father playing the instrument in large group settings, Grachan Moncur III began his musical career as unassuming as the next dilettante player. It can't be said that he didn't exhibit talent, but by the time that he settled upon the trombone as his instrument of choice, few others were working that instrument out during the hey day of be-bop.

After completing high school - the Laurinburg Institute in North Carolina where Dizzy Gillespie was a student as well - Moncur toured with Ray Charles, the Jazztet and Sonny Rollins. So, even if his choice of instrument seemed to place him a bit out of the norm, it was more than offset by his talent and ability to work with some enormous personalities. Despite have made such an impact on the jazz recording industry, Moncur still had a few years to wait before earning the right to lead his own date.

During the early part of the '60s, Moncur joined Jackie McLean's group on a few dates resulting in the recordings of One Step Beyond and Destination Out. The McLean combos, as much as anyone else at the time, were attempting to work out the middle ground between Ornette Coleman's musical advances and more traditional be-bop. Coltrane worked in roughly the same territory for the first few years of the decade, but soon exploded into something drastically different.

The McLean dates, though, were informative for the trombonist and on a great many of his own dates. His first outing, the 1963 Evolution even counted the saxophonist as a side man alongside Tony Williams, Lee Morgan and Bobby Hutcherson. And while this album, replete with a pink cover, might be the most well known date - that's relative - from Moncur, it wasn't the pinnacle of his recorded works. An argument against that, though, could easily be made.

As Moncur continued to record dates as a leader, he also maintained a few gigs as a sideman. Most significant, perhaps, was the trombonists association with Archie Shepp. In this particular musician, Moncur found a vociferous band leader, who while not always at the vanguard of new developments, possessed ample talent to taken any new thing and spin it in his own direction. And the 1966 Live at the Pan-African Festival, even found Shepp, along with Moncur travelling to Algiers to work out some African motifs.

Drawing influence from the experience, a few years later when Moncur again was able to lead a date in '69, he entitled the album New Africa. Musically distant from the outing with Shepp, it still bore some relation to Evolution. But Moncur hadn't yet reached the compositional prowess he would attain a five years on for Echoes of a Prayer - which could be considered his Africa Brass.

At the time New Africa was released, a number of folks had plugged in already, so even as Moncur's melodic flair may have been beyond some of those electric jazzbos, the setting that he would record with may have caused him to missed out on a portion of the record buying populace simply because of instrumentation. Their loss.