Grachan Moncur III, a trombonist and composer who came to renown in the 1960s and early ’70s for his deft playing of a hybrid of post-bop and free jazz, but who later receded from the spotlight, died on June 3 — his 85th birthday — in a hospital in Newark.
His son Kenya said the cause was cardiac arrest.
“Whenever I have a conversation about what’s wrong with the jazz business, I always start out by saying, ‘Where is Grachan Moncur?’” the alto saxophonist Jackie McLean, one of Mr. Moncur’s most important collaborators, told The New York Times in 2003.
Long before Mr. McLean asked that question, Mr. Moncur (pronounced mon-KUR) had started his jazz career as a teenager, jamming at the New York nightclub Birdland and sitting in with the drummer Art Blakey’s band, the Jazz Messengers. In 1959, he went on the road with Ray Charles.
But after about two years, feeling a need to perform with a smaller ensemble based in New York City, he was recruited to join the Jazztet, a sextet formed by the trumpeter Art Farmer and the saxophonist Benny Golson. He played with that group until it disbanded in 1962, then took that summer off to study the challenging and unconventional music of Thelonious Monk. His goal was to learn how to write his own.
“I just wanted to get the sound of his music inside of my body,” Mr. Moncur said in an interview with the website All About Jazz in 2003.
On a night when he had written two compositions, he said, he got a call from Mr. McLean, whom he had known since Mr. Moncur was a teenager, asking him to join his ensemble for rehearsals and club dates in advance of recording an album for Blue Note Records.
That album, “One Step Beyond,” and “Destination … Out!,”both released in 1963, were critically praised documents of a transitional period in jazz when musicians like Mr. McLean and Mr. Moncur were blending the harmonic advances of the bebop era with the more adventurous spirit of the avant-garde. They contained five of Mr. Moncur’s compositions, among them “Ghost Town,” which conjures up desolation in long passages where little is heard except reverberations on vibes and cymbals.
Mr. Moncur then recorded two albums for Blue Note as a leader, “Evolution” (1963) and “Some Other Stuff” (1964), with stellar accompaniment. Both albums featured Bobby Hutcherson on vibraphone and Tony Williams on drums; “Evolution” also featured Lee Morgan on trumpet and Mr. McLean, while the “Some Other Stuff” lineup included Wayne Shorter on tenor saxophone.
Reviewing “Evolution” in The Pittsburgh Courier, the critic Phyl Garland praised Mr. Moncur’s technique and the album’s title number, which, she wrote, evoked images of “mankind emerging from one murky, primeval mire into another, undergoing one subtle change after another, as does the music.”
What might have been a longer relationship with Blue Note ended after two albums in a dispute over publishing rights. In the end, he managed to retain his rights to the music from “Evolution,” but he sensed that he would not last long at the label.
“They were very disappointed with that, and they kind of dropped me like a hot potato,” Mr. Moncur told All About Jazz. He believed he was blackballed over his position — a position he later came to regret. In retrospect, he said, he wished he had found a way to compromise with Alfred Lion, Blue Note’s founder.
“I think my mind was really going to a revolutionary attitude more on the business trip than it was on a musical trip,” he said, “because I was kind of determined on trying to own my own music.”
Grachan Moncur III was born on June 3, 1937, in Manhattan. His father, Grachan II, played bass with the Savoy Sultans, a swing ensemble, at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem. His mother, Ella (Wright) Moncur, was a beautician whose clients — and friends — included the singer Sarah Vaughan.
Although enamored of the trombone from age 5, Grachan nonetheless received a cello from his father. But the cello did not inspire him, so his father gave him a trombone. Lessons followed. He also had a role model for the trombone: his father, who played the instrument.
“I have never, up until today, heard anybody with a sound like my father,” Mr. Moncur told All About Jazz. “He had a timbre that was very dark and clear. That sound, it just kind of stayed with me, and I always wanted to produce that same type of — project that same type of sound that my father had.”
He graduated from the Laurinburg Institute, a historically Black prep school in North Carolina that Dizzy Gillespie had attended in the 1930s. Back in New York, he attended the Manhattan School of Music and the Juilliard School, then kick-started his career in nightclubs before joining Ray Charles’s orchestra.
In 1964, Mr. Moncur learned that the Actors Studio was looking to cast a musician for its Broadway production of James Baldwin’s civil rights drama “Blues for Mister Charlie.” Mr. Moncur played two roles, one of them a trombonist, and contributed a piece of music.
He recorded “Some Other Stuff” three months after the play opened; two of the cuts on the album, “Gnostic” and “Nomadic,” were reflections on his breakup with a girlfriend and his departure from his $27-a-week apartment.
“I was a nomad after losing my room, and I was a gnostic because I had to survive by my wits,” he told The Times.
He continued to record, releasing two albums in 1969 on the French label BYG Actuel, “New Africa” and “Aco del de Madrugada” (“One Morning I Waked Up Very Early”), and another, “Echoes of Prayer,” with the Jazz Composers Orchestra, in 1974. But he was entering a long, relatively quiet period during which he made almost no records but ran jazz workshops in Harlem in a studio called Space Station; performed in Europe; and taught jazz at the Newark Community School of the Arts.
In 1994, Mr. Moncur adapted his four-movement “New Africa” suite into a theatrical piece for the Alternative Museum in Manhattan. The poet Amiri Baraka, a friend, was the producer.
In addition to his son Kenya, Mr. Moncur is survived by his wife, Tamam Tracy (Sims) Moncur; two other sons, Grachan IV and Adrien; his daughters, Ella and Vera Moncur; his twin brothers, Lofton and Lonnie; 10 grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren. His son Toih died in 2016, and his daughter Hilda died in 1992. He lived in Newark.
In 2004, the composer and arranger Mark Masters brought together Mr. Moncur and seven other musicians to reprise, with new charts, eight of Mr. Moncur’s pieces for an album, “Exploration,” released on the Capri label.
“As a composer, he was original and singular,” Mr. Masters said in a phone interview. “He wasn’t derivative of anyone. I see the Monk influence, but Monk wasn’t hovering over him. His music doesn’t sound like anyone else’s.”
