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Richard Cook’s look at the music and writing of Gerry Mulligan -saxophonist, composer and the big band's staunchest admirer appeared in JazzReview, October 2001.
“Few would try and dispute Gerry Mulligan's stature as a giant in our music.
But Mulligan is hard to spot, as you try and see (he big picture of jazz. Where is he? In his quartet? His Birth Of the Cool tunes? His meetings with like- (and unlike-) minded masters, from Monk to Desmond to Hodges? His big, gracious Concert Jazz Band? Which Mulligan is the one who matters? Today's jazz musicians follow multifarious paths almost as a matter of necessity: the performer who's interested only in one direction is the odd one out. Mulligan's wide-ranging sympathies, though, were unusual in their time, not only in their diversity, but in their naturalness. He never sounds ill at ease, and rarely, if ever, does a recording suggest a situation which he was "advised" to take part in.
Big bands were things he loved, like the American locomotives which he adored: the epitome of power, but with elegance as an equal given. Mulligan started in jazz as an arranger for orchestras, working from a grounding in piano, and only later taking up the saxophone (and only after that moving from alto to tenor to baritone). He is best remembered, though, as an instrumentalist and small-group leader, primarily for the band which he led only for a little over twelve months, the quartet with Chet Baker. The jazz audience is perhaps no different to any other in zeroing in on a particular notoriety as that artist's raisons d'être, and it hurt Mulligan in his later years to be typecast in that narrow a way. Yet the path of his career suggests a steady falling-away, a perhaps grudging contentment with whatever status quo had been settled on him. even as he hungered for settings gilded enough to flatter his ideas. The young baritone master of the 50s, who really established that instrument as a solo force, no matter what Harry Carney and Serge Chaloff had done, loved jamming situations and was proud of his ability to purposefully cross friendly swords with any number of oilier players; the old warrior of the 80s and 90s seemed by contrast withdrawn, even when he was involved and playing. Did we miss out on some essential part of Mulligan's potential contribution along the way. or was his great work all set down long before?
If Mulligan had only worked as an arranger, there's a good chance that he would be remembered in the same breath as Gil Evans: both, after all, had a similarly idiosyncratic influence on a scene when they arrived in at more or less the same moment. Evans was much older than Mulligan, who at 20 was a veteran of scoring for both Tommy Tucker and Gene Krupa, when Gil brought him to the attention of Claude Thornhill. The sometimes perfumed feel of Thornhill's music might seem at odds with Mulligan's approach, and his chart for Noel Coward's "Poor Little Rich Girl" (1948) is certainly the Thornhill band at its most muscular. The gracefulness of this orchestra was, though, a significant part of what made dance orchestras special to Mulligan. As he reminisced to Ira Gitler, many years later: "One dance I ever went to with a girl in my life. The rest, I always went by myself. And was standing around... there were endless numbers of interesting things going on, in the bands. Good players around. Vaughn Monroe would come through. Terrific band. Some bands would he more interesting in a musical way, but some hands would be musical and be a dance band or whatever. Tony Pastor had a good band. Bobby Sherwood's band I loved." These were not the feelings of a revolutionary thinker, eager to press on with bop's insurrection. Mulligan's faith in the big band as a source of musical poetry never left him. He saw these grand American orchestras as keepers of a special tradition, a listening tradition.
Simple guides to jazz tend to signpost The Birth Of The Cool as a Miles Davis-Gil Evans project. But Gerry Mulligan scored seven of the pieces, wrote three of the originals, and casts a long shadow over the sound of this prototypical "modern" ensemble: not just through his lean, sonorous baritone parts, but in the timbres of brass and woodwinds which predominate as the insignia of cool. You can hear just the same sort of thing - with a steadily evolving artistry - in every Mulligan chart set down in the 50s. There is also his extraordinarily refined approach to time: Andre Hodeir called his writing here "a sensational challenge to the unity of the bar... the first time in the history of jazz that the permanence of the 4/4 bar becomes doubtful". That quiet provocation, along with the flexible, euphonious timbres, became a stylistic trademark which, in a sense, dogged him for the rest of his life, and which was crucial to the yin and yang of his quartet front-line with Chet Baker.
Mulligan had gone to California in 1950, where he joined the Stan Kenton organisation (he later claimed that Kenton eventually came to symbolise everything he despised about the growing pomposity of big-band music, yet this was a period when, besides Mulligan, there were arrangers such as Shorty Rogers and Bill Russo contributing dynamic work to the band's book), ran a tentet when he could afford it, but finally got a break by winning a quartet residency at a little club called The Haig. Inside a year, the 85-capacity club had queues round the block on the weekends when Mulligan was playing. Paired with the darling-boy looks of Baker, Mulligan's rake-thin frame and patented crewcut made up an irresistible image, which soon enough even got them into Time magazine. Then there was the matter of the missing piano. In the notes to what became the quartet's first LP issue, on Pacific Jazz, Mulligan set out his stall as a rejoinder to the whispers of another jazz revolution: "The idea of a band without a piano is not new. The very first jazz bands didn't use them (how could they? They were either marching or riding in wagons)". With bass and drums more or less ticking off the time, everything instead focused on the two horns. Mulligan's sensuous sound both anchoring and leading. Baker played smart, crackly lines, which deny the allegations of his poor technique, and if you imagine the writing the leader was essaying in his larger groups, pared down to two voices, that is exactly what comes across. Their Pacific Jazz sides are remembered for the beautiful, signature lines which Mulligan fashioned for Chet and himself, not for the solos. Many years ago, Jazz Record Requests ran a sequence of programmes where they asked listeners to vote for the best jazz record ever made, and one insisted that it was the quartet's sublime little piece "Walkin’ Shoes": after you heard it, you almost felt compelled to agree. "Nights At the Turntable", which I used to have on a Vogue 78, is another record which seems like a distillation of whatever this jazz direction was: languid but urgent, harmonious but questingly off-centre.
The quartet with Baker actually lasted for about a year. Although, in later years, Mulligan would fume at the precedence which the instrumentation seemed to take in the way his work was perceived, most jazz musicians
should be so fortunate: it was a memorable sound, and style, and book. Mulligan himself seemed to acknowledge that much for the rest of the decade, because although he left Baker behind, he stuck with the format, and there were valuable groups with Bob Brookmeyer and, especially, Art Farmer, taking the Baker role. Baker's rendition of "My Funny Valentine", which relied on a vulnerable, twilight lyricism, wasn't easily replicated: but the version by the Mulligan-Farmer quartet of the late 50s was even better. Like so much else of Mulligan's prime work, it remains hard to find in any CD edition.
Another thing he embarked on in the 50s was a series of "Meets" records, encountering Ben Webster. Johnny Hodges, Thelonious Monk, Paul Desmond and Stan Getz. The Webster collaboration is often gorgeously effective, although Verve's current incarnation of the session - packing every note on to two CDs, including every breakdown - spoils the sense of occasion (listeners are advised to follow the original programme). Getz and Mulligan famously swapped instruments for half of their date, which turned out to be not much more than an interesting idea. The Hodges session suffers from the altoist's unsmiling professionalism, and the Monk date, although not quite the disaster it has sometimes been portrayed as, is something of a battle of wills.
With Desmond, Mulligan found a stylist whose sound and delivery dovetailed so handsomely with his own that the ongoing dialogue across the two records they made together is virtually seamless. There's little to choose between the 1957 Verve session and the one made for RCA in 1962, although the second probably benefits from a slightly superior preparation. When Desmond overdubs a third saxophone part on to "The Way You Look Tonight", the music is all but ecstatic in its feel, "the art of the fugue carried to its very limit", as the reissue note has it. Imposing musicological credentials on what he did, though, rarely impressed Mulligan, who tended to follow Ellington's "too much talk stinks up the place" line. "Jazz music is fun to me," he said. "Some of the people who do all the talking don’t seem to get any real fun out of listening to it. It seems to me that all the super-intellectualizing on the technique of jazz and the lack of response to the emotion and meaning of jazz is spoiling the fun for the listeners and players alike."
Well, that puts us in our place. Yet Mulligan was partial to enjoying respect, and he was one of those intellectuals who take a creative inner life for granted, thereafter seeing no need to justify it to the less enlightened. The photographer William Claxton remembered that "Gerry was one of the smartest people I knew, and he could be delightful to be around. Bui he also had a boundless ego, and he could be insufferable at times." There is an oddly uncomfortable moment on a 1957 Swedish concert recording, where Mulligan is leading the quartet with Bob Brookmeyer, Joe Benjamin and Dave Bailey. After a performance of "Moonlight In Vermont", the leader tells the audience: "Of course, you could tell it was 'Moonlight In Vermont' because we played the melody almost all the way through. That's the part that goes, uh... (plays the opening measures). Just in case you didn't recognise it." For once, Gerry doesn't sound like he was having much fun.
His most adventurous vehicle of all was a natural enough progression from his previous work, yet it came about at a moment when jazz had all but turned its back on the concept. The Concert Jazz Band (even the name set Mulligan's intentions front and centre) was formed in I960, a 13- or 14-piece group playing "concerts" al a time when big bands were all but impossible to sustain. The group made five records for Verve (all of them, astonishingly, still out of print), and while Norman Granz's patronage helped keep the group alive, it folded after the final album in 1963. Its importance is hard to quantify, but it surely assisted in several individual careers as well as in a more subtle ascendancy of creative orchestral writing. Mulligan was generous in providing opportunities for other arrangers, and kept his own contributions to a handful. He hired George Russell, John Carisi, Johnny Mandel and the then-unknown Gary McFarland, but the most significant contributor was Bob Brookmeyer. The work which Brookmeyer is still doing today in his orchestral projects is a direct extension of his work with the CJB. Russell's "All About Rosie", which he had debuted at one of his Jazz Workshop sessions for RCA, is remodelled into a large-scale vehicle which Mulligan was justly proud of in its execution: "I think the band really did it here".
The orchestra's Paris concert recording from November 1960 underlines what a fine ensemble Mulligan had assembled. Besides himself and Brookmeyer, the group could boast the best professionals - Conte Candoli, Zoot Sims, Gene Quill, Nick Travis - and a rhythm section which benefited enormously from Mel Lewis's drumming. Their delicate, almost diaphanous treatment of Mandcl's arrangement of Mulligan's "Barbara's These" shows that even in a concert situation the orchestra could play with the utmost refinement.
In the end, though, it was a group which seemed doomed to be a critics' and musicians' favourite. The Verve albums didn't sell particularly well, and the final one, Gerry Mulligan '63, is almost eccentric in its makeup: Brookmeyer's "Big City Life" is an odd little feature for his piano playing (although the succeeding "Blues" has some excellent Clark Terry and a rare glimpse of Mulligan's clarinet] and Gary McFarland's three pieces seem like idiosyncratic sketches. So Mulligan went back to small groups, recording for Philips and Limelight. One such record, If You Can't Beat 'Em, Join 'Em, looks like the kind of sellout which so many jazz musicians were importuned into making at the time (1966), yet material such as "A Hard Day's Night", "If I Fell" and even "Mr Tambourine Man" received improbably fresh and lilting treatments by Mulligan and his group. His dislike of musical snobbishness saw him through even this.
Which is not to say that this wasn't anything more than a lightweight record. Mulligan's appeal, for many, is the way he made lightness out of heavyweight materials. His choice of saxophone (admittedly, he often picked up the soprano in later years) was the biggest and by custom the most cumbersome, and he played it in a way that ignored its difficulties. The departures which so enraptured Andre Hodeir came in music which was songful, if sometimes oblique. With the Concert Jazz Band, he established a group that asked for a kind of connoisseurship from its listeners, while offering music that still kept its communicative warmth. From the 70s onwards, though, Mulligan's music seemed to turn a little pale. The Age Of Steam, an album he made in 1972 featuring a middle-sized ensemble, has some lovely music, especially the serenely nostalgic "Grand Tour", but for once modish elements such as the rock beat for "A Weed In Disneyland" defeat him. When he was granted the resources to return a big band to the studios, it resulted in Walk On The Water, which seems irretrievably thin next to the great achievements of the CJB.
Most of his activity, in any case, took place away from jazz recording schedules - film music, songwriting, concerto-like works for himself and classical ensembles. Mulligan continued to tour in various situations, and was always received with affection. Married to an Italian lady who was his solicitous companion, he turned into a white-haired elder statesman, always impeccably turned out. Yet one promoter who worked with him in these later years recalls how the gracious gentleman could still be impossibly difficult when he wanted to be: "if there was a glass of water which hadn't been poured in the right way, it was a problem".
He might have been a shade resentful of his standing, whatever it was, in the jazz pantheon at this point, and when the opportunity came to revise a little of his own history, he quickly grasped the nettle. Re-Birth Of The Cool was a corny title for the project, and since Mulligan had spent much of his career trying to persuade that 'cool' was not all he did, there was a hint of sourness in it. But the 1992 recording was still engrossing. Mulligan had asked Miles Davis to take part the previous year, but Davis was already ailing and whether his capricious temperament would have allowed him the humility to become involved is doubtful (in the end. Wallace Roney was the capable sub). The main difference in the record is the presence of Phil Woods rather than Lee Konitz: Woods is in his diamond-cutter mode, and he plays the hell out of the occasion, which is enlivening but not really the cool in question. Bop, ironically, plays a stronger role than it did in the more atmospheric originals. Yet Mulligan seems to have enjoyed it, and he must have drawn a zesty satisfaction out of pulling his name on the marquee front this time.
It was his last notable achievement. In his final years, denied another major-label association, he made three albums for Telarc, none of them especially vital although each has its felicitous Mulligan moment or two. Dream A Little Dream Of Me featured him in quartet settings with the two pianists who worked most closely with him towards the end, Ted Rosenlhal and Bill Mays. If his career went public in a pianoless quartet, it reached its twilight with keyboard harmony - which he never meant to abjure - in a restorative role.
His death in 1996 was attended by comparatively little in the way of memorialising, as if many thought that Mulligan had quietly slipped away some time before. Predictably enough, most returned to the quartet records in paying their respects -despite Mulligan's lifelong involvement with big ensembles of different kinds. Perhaps hidden in the folds of his numberless scores is the real Jeru - a sentimentalist with a twist of wry, not quite holding out his heart, but welcoming any kindred spirit.”
[In the interest of maintaining the integrity of Mr.Cook’s article, I am including his “Listening Notes” but please keep in mind that these as well as the discography references in the article itself are written from the vantage point of 2001.]
Listening Notes:
The Original Quartet, Blue Note 94407-2.
Gerry Mulligan-Paul Desmond Quartet, Verve 519850.
Live In Stockholm 1957, Moon 046-2.
The Complete Gerry Mulligan Meets Ben Webster Sessions, Verve 539095-2.
Gerry Mulligan And The Concert Jazz Band, RTE Europe 1 710382/3.
A Concert In Jazz, Verve V-8415 [LP only).
Gerry Mulligan '63, Verve V-8515 (LP only).
Verve Jazz Masters 36, Verve 523342-2 (a compilation from the five CJB albums).
Two Of A Mind, RCA Victor 796202.
If You Can't Beat 'Em, Join 'Em, Limelight 82021 (LP only).
The Age Of Steam, A&M 396996-2.
Re-Birth Of The Cool, GRP 05967'9-2.
Dream A Little Dream, Telarc 83;
The interview between Mulligan and Ira Gitler is from Swing To Bop (Oxford, 1985).