© Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.
Some of Gerry Mulligan’s remarks in the following piece which appeared in the November, 1958 Down Beat about Jazz, and movies and being in them are somewhat prescient in terms of his career path as he was to be in four of them, beginning with his appearance in I Want to Live.
Mulligan also appeared in The Rat Race, The Subterraneans and Bells are Ringing [with his then girlfriend, Judy Holliday].
And while there was nothing particularly notable about his acting career, there is a positive upside to his movie appearances because he used the money that he earned from them to fund his Concert Jazz Band - one of the great big bands in the history of Jazz.
“Impressions of Jazz in Hollywood
Working on the film I Want to Live was a labor of love for the jazzmen involved in cutting the soundtrack. Among the west coast jazzmen participating were Johnny Mandel, who composed the music for the film; drummer Shelly Manne, reed man Bud Shank, pianist Pete jolly, and trombonist Frank Rosolino.
These musicians were eager to express their feelings on the film and the role jazz plays in it. When asked to comment by Down Beat, they said:
MANDEL: "Jazz has always been used in such a limited sense in pictures. Actually, the music is capable of expressing any human emotion. I was very happy to do this picture, hoping that the whole field could be opened to jazz composers like Bill Holman, Jimmy Giuffre, Quincy Jones, Al Cohn, and others."
MANNE: "Strictly from a musical standpoint, working on this picture was a complete gas. Mandel's writing was simply great. And the group he assembled to play the source music couldn't have been better.
SHANK: "My strongest recollection of working on this picture is how great it was under the direction of Robert Wise. For the first time I was working on a picture where the musicians were treated with respect. I remember, for example, on previous pictures the musicians were just extras.
JOLLY: "This was one of the first pictures I've worked on where jazz was used to advantage rather than the opposite. Mandel accomplished so much in combining jazz with the action . . . And he captured with great accuracy the contemporaneous mood. But the only thing that bugs me about working in movies is that, when they shoot a scene, they give you a beat-up, four-octave, upright piano that doesn't work—a piano half the size of the one you recorded the music on!"
ROSOLINO: "This really was a chance to exploit a good jazz composer in a motion picture. For the first time, it shows what the talented jazz composer can do. And I must say, also, that the staff and powers that be had a lot more respect for us as musicians than any others in my experience. The whole thing was a treat."
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“The club is filled with smoke and chatter.
On the stand a septet rockets through a blues.
Pete Jolly, Red Mitchell, and Shelly Manne are cooking. Frank Rosolino and Bud Shank are waiting to play. Art Farmer is fingering his trumpet and nodding his head slightly to the tempo.
In front of the main mike, Gerry Mulligan is bending back and blowing ferociously into his baritone.
This is the opening scene of I Want to Live, the United Artists movie with a fine score by Johnny Mandel. It is a curious scene in that it represents both sides of the jazz coin.
Musically, it as good as you'll find in any club a week running.
Atmospherically, it perpetuates the booze-junk-vice background that has become a cliche in depicting jazz.
None of the musicians has a speaking part. But a strong fiber of jazz is woven into the supporting music throughout the film.
"We spent a lot of time syncing," Mulligan said between sets at the International Foreign Car show in Boston recently. "We went in one day and blew on tunes we didn't know. Then we came in the next day and learned the tunes while we synced. Among the three of us — Shelly, Art. and myself — we had the band buckling down to synchronizing.
"It's a hard thing for nonmusicians to learn to do, and it's hard for musicians to do. I can't go through the motions of playing, even to a soundtrack.
"What we did was have them put the speakers on top of us ... up over the stand and turned on as loud as we could stand it. Then we could blow to match what we had played lor the soundtrack."
The results as seen in the opening long scene of the film are realistic, perhaps more so than any film involving musicians. The fingerings and lip compressions and breathing all mesh with the soundtrack. There were no noticeable lapses or overlaps between the shots of the men playing and the music coming from the sound system.
"I had a ball blowing against the choruses," Mulligan chuckled. "Of course, it sort of blew things for all of us, but it was fun."
United Artists' Jack Lewis, who selected Mandel for the film was the artists and repertoire man for the soundtrack and the two LPs that will be issued, featuring the small group and a big band. Mandel's name has been cropping up in New York gossip columns and among the music trade people as a strong candidate for an Academy award for his score.
"Johnny's music was very interesting," Mulligan said. "And I think that the way it's presented will be more intelligent than the usual. Johnny worked with the cutter [editor] all the way.
"He tried to write music with all the nervousness and anxiety of the 40s in it ... He wanted to make it very frenetic music. It fits the mood of the times and ties in with Barbara Graham's character.
"I was on the coast when this case came up, and I can remember feeling then that she wasn't guilty."
Bassist Bill Crow sat in on the discussion as it moved to the pictorial
presentation of jazz in the opening scene of the film.
The picture opens in a club, and then scenes shift rapidly outside lo the street and to a hotel room, where Barbara Graham is introduced and arrested. The opening swinger is heard right through the fade of the arrest scene.
Mulligan described the silent rushes he'd seen of the opening to Crow.
"It opens with shots of the band," he said, occasionally illustrating with his hands. "A hustler walks across the floor and picks up a cat. Then there's a bit with a roué [rake or a debauched man] and a young girl that's really too much. And to top it all, there are two cats smoking pot near a washroom and really acting it up.
"What it does is establish the mood of all the things we are trying to eliminate."
Crow nodded and observed, "You get this type of thing every time when someone wants to establish a mood of degeneracy or vice. This picture uses jazz incidentally, but there are an awful lot of of legitimate conflicts in the life of a jazz musician which would make a good movie. And without resorting to the stereotype."
"This was done with the big bands dining the '40s," Mulligan said. "The music wasn't the greatest, but the stories were honest. Do you remember Orchestra Wives with Glenn Miller? That had a story that every musician lives. Now there's another kind of music in the ascendancy, but the same problems exist."
"Benny Goodman was in a picture about a trombonist who left the band to go out on his own and who didn't make it," Crow added. (The film was Sweet and Lowdown, wilh Bill Harris blowing the trombonist's soundtrack.)
"Maybe he wasn't ready to record," Mulligan grinned.
Then he added, "Maybe someday we'll see some stories of musicians with musicians acting important parts."
"There are plenty of good stories," interjected Crow. "There's one of the young player and his idol, which could have the drama of the struggle for identity. It might end with the player doing what he once did spontaneously for love now mechanically for money."
Mulligan was asked about some of his ideas or aspirations as far as movies and television were concerned.
"I'd like to do a lot of things in the movies,” he replied. "I would like to be a sort of independent producer and make my own TV films, records, and movies.
"In TV, for instance, I see that mostly they have just no idea of how to present jazz. And they don't know how to present me, individually. Each musician requires an individual approach to presentation. What's right for me won't necessarily be good for another player.
"I feel I've learned techniques on how to pace a show. With a couple of good cameramen, I think I could do it. It looks like a good presentation is going to have to come from the musicians."
How about motion pictures?
"If they could come up with a part I could play, I'd want to do it. There are good parts from time to time, which a musician can play. Take Young Man with a Horn; there are a number of musicians who could have made that part. I'd say a good 30 to 50 per cent of the blowing instrumentalists, given the chance, could act.
"It's a lot like blowing. You require concentration, and the ability to project a given emotion at a given time."
"A lot of it," said Crow, "could be in the direction, too."
Mulligan nodded vigorously. "On the set of I Want to Live, it was a gas. Robert Wise was great. Everyone looked to him and dug him."
"Vittorio DeSica has that quality of drawing the best out of an amateur," Crow said. "Kazan knows how to work with actors and has the discrimination to know when an actor can work or not. He gets fantastic results out of guys like Brando."
"Brando seemed to be coasting after his first couple of pictures," Gerry said. "But I liked him in The Young Lions. He had that concentration . . ."
Switching back to TV, Mulligan outlined some of his ideas. "Like everyone," he smiled, "I have a lot of ideas on presenting jazz on TV, but I'm not in a position to do it.
"For one thing, there would be no interruptions lor commercials. That's just stupid. It's necessary because of the relationship of the sponsor and the agencies and the audience. They all feel that you must put in your message while the audience is interested and waiting for a climax. But while it's good for the commercials, it can ruin the mood or the atmosphere of a presentation.
"If a sponsor let me do a show my way, he could count on me making a statement at the end of the show about the product that would be sincere.
"If they're going to use jazz on TV, I think it should be used intelligently — and really used. This way, what we're having today is too often just a use of jazz with jazz getting nothing in return.
"I'd like General Motors to sponsor us," he grinned. "They have a design on TV now that has the letters G and M with some shading
behind them. The big letters could be General Motors, and the shaded ones could be mine."
The group broke up, and Crow admired Mulligan for being willing to accept second billing.
"I hope I don't sound like an angry-young-man type," Mulligan said. "The group has had some unfortunate exposure on TV. The group is the most important thing to me right now, and we all want to be sure we're doing our best, and that we're getting the best possible exposure."
Mulligan's engagement in Boston, appearing for four half-hour sets daily during the eight-day run of the foreign car show, was a case in point.
"There are some obvious possibilities in this kind of thing," Gerry said. "Whether they work out that way remains to be seen.
"At first, the building felt cold and uninviting, and we could sense that the people didn't know how to react. We've ironed that out, and we're living with the sound. We feel we belong there, and we feel we're helping create a pleasant atmosphere.
"I'd like us to make a success of this because it would open new channels of work for the band and get us before some different audiences."
Art Farmer [trumpet] and Dave Bailey [drums] had wandered in during the movie and TV discussion, and Farmer glanced significantly at his watch. The group moved on toward the massive Mechanics building, site of the show.
Gerry paused for a moment to admire a Maserati on exhibition. A discreet sign read: "Maserati, Gran Turismo, $11,495, 145 m.p.h."
"That's a beautiful, finished piece of machinery," he said. "I've seen it underneath and it's almost as pretty as on top. Jt has real workmanship in it."
The group threaded its way through the crowd, admiring cars on the floor of the hall, and climbed the stairs to a balcony overlooking the exhibition floor. They tuned up, and on a signal from Gerry, went into Utter Chaos, the theme.
Throughout the set, while some persons clustered around the stand, others climbed in and out of cars or peered intently under hoods. At the end of each tune, both groups responded with applause. It appeared that the Mulligan quartet was accomplishing its purpose at the show: satisfying the jazz fans among the sports car fans, and providing a pleasant interlude for the strictly automotive audience.
The audience was appreciative and attentive. Particularly to Gerry's good-natured admonition at the start: "We're going to play some jazz for you. And all we ask is that you refrain from blowing car horns during our set . . . unless they fit into the chord."[!]