© Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.
In existence for about a year, the “original” Gerry Mulligan Quartet featuring Chet Baker disbanded in June 1953, about six months before this article was published in January 1954 in Theme magazine.
Unfortunately, this piece by Will MacFarland is written in a very pretentious style - one that takes itself too seriously, one that likes showing off and one that takes all the fun out of Jazz.
It's “Beatnik” kitschy, at times almost sophomoric and definitely overly ambitious in its attempt to inject serious insight into something so simple as music made by a Jazz quartet - in this case - one led by Gerry Mulligan that featured Chet Baker on trumpet.
But the article and the magazine that printed it represents a rare find and the editorial staff at JazzProfiles thought it might be fun to share it with you on these pages in its ongoing efforts to draw more attention to the career and the music of Gerry Mulligan.
MacFarland’s piece will be followed by a never published rebuttal by Herb Kimmel [who founded the JazzWest label in 1954] which was sent to Jimmy Valentine, the editor-owner of Theme and Arlyne Mulligan’s retort - “Make Mine Mulligan” which was published in the March, 1954 edition of Theme magazine.
Both the MacFarland and the Kimmel response can be found in James Harrod's book on the Jazz:West label which can be ordered via this link.
Both the MacFarland and the Kimmel response can be found in James Harrod's book on the Jazz:West label which can be ordered via this link.
“This complimentary copy of our initial issue of Theme is being presented to you to acquaint you with our magazine. If you are pleased with our basic plans and wish to see us continue, we request you subscribe to Theme at your earliest convenience. Your interest and support is necessary in aiding us to publish further issues.”
Theme magazine got off to an auspicious start with Stan Kenton writing a column for each issue. Bill Claxton joined the magazine in the October 1953 edition as staff photographer and Woody Woodward (future right-hand man at Pacific Jazz Records) signed on to contribute record reviews in the fourth edition in December-January 1953 / 1954. That same issue featured this profile of Gerry Mulligan written by Will MacFarland, entitled, “Mulligan – The Sound Alone.”
“That hot summer of 1573, Veronese the painter was brought before the Inquisition Tribunal in Venice and questioned sharply about a picture that the Holy Office found objectionable. This was not the first instance of confusing the artist with the art. As to the last instance, we will not live to see it. I needn't list the myriad boards and committees in both East and West that are today asking, in the same breath, for an accounting of the artist’s human behavior and the "meaning" of his works. Perhaps this is to be expected of governments: their functions tend to press toward conformity, in opposition to that heterodoxy which is the artist’s lifeblood.
But, in this aspect at least, officialdom is mirroring the will of the people. Consider the housewife who says, "I never go to his movies, he beats his wife." And, who among us can refrain from asking for a little history of the composer on hearing a new piece of music? Inevitably, this concept of the artist alters our concept of the music. It is hard to say whether this pattern of reaction has been occasionally useful or just overwhelmingly destructive. Certainly, the colorful personalities and legend-making crotchets of a Gillespie or a Wagner have attracted youth to healthy music . But each in his time must have frightened away his share of the hesitant, discouraged a gang of potential proselytes, and supplied endless fodder for conformist critics. (In Dizzy’s case, the imbalance of attention further served to bushel, somewhat, the needed lights of Navarro and others.)
But rather than hang this harangue on the neck of an erring world, let’s, for the moment, suspend gravity and consider an art as if without human origin. Not that there is anything unsavory about Gerry Mulligan— as humans go, he is probably above average. But like musicians and painters everywhere, he has, when so moved, talked and written (with a commendable seriousness) about his art, about his theory of approach. Like poetry, its kithiest sister, music is dangerously touchy about prose-analysis. It has been said of Stravinsky that he "musics well and theorizes badly."
Without implying that this is Mulligan’s story, do you believe it illogical to endorse a man’s music while rejecting his ideas as to what his music is? For most of us, Mulligan or Muggsy remain as non-corporeal as, say, Palestrina ornSchoenberg: a sound on a record augmented by a picture and a quote or two. True, the photographs of jazz people are taken from an angle rather than straight on, and the visual orientation may be abetted by an evening’s staring at a thin face on a big city bandstand, but other than that, we, the jazz listeners, should be admirably conditioned to listening with a useful degree of purity, throwing out the window all those programmatic dilutions of physical history and statement. When I use the word Mulligan I mean a sound; either the gargling, roomy baritone sound or the aggregate sound of a Gerry-piloted ensemble.
First, I submit that the sound emanating from the horn is more important than the arrangements—worthier of studied consideration. "No," some demur, "Gerry writes great charts, but he is limited on his horn . . . lacks technique . . . not as brilliant as his writing . . . nice, folksy solos; hardly exciting."
Nonsense. If you number among these, I suspect you have only a surface acquaintance with the arrangements. Like a Hindu deity, Mulligan’s music has many arms, and in each arm’s hand is a goodie that pleases many: witness his notable quantitative success. But to embrace the body of the goddess herself, the journey lies through the winding paths of the horn
You're in a room, listening to the sound from the machine: A baritone saxophone solo. How does it sound; what are the adverbs? "It is bumptious," someone says. "He is clownish, Rabelaisian," says another. (Rollicking or Olde Englishe or satirical, you think). While one or all of the gropings may strike home, they maneuver on the fringe of the sound’s true field. Mulligan has a veneer, a surface which conceals the core; so have the other arts, particularly painting. His is a neo-primitive veneer. He conceals behind a wall of fumbling simplicity, the only true sophistication available in jazz today. He has backing for this practice from the older arts: Invariably when a popular magazine such as Life offers a Braque print someone writes in, "I have a three-year-old daughter who could do as well with a bent spoon." This bent-spoon gambit is as adaptable to the suspicious ear as it is to the untrained eye. This apparent lack of technological discipline seldom fails to draw a cry of chicanery from the laity. But it is the proper cast of today’s art to appear rough-surfaced and it will survive these cries.
Now, on the other hand, we have the surface - sophistication found in the more suspicious aspects and bulkier voting of followers of Tristano, Brubeck and some few others. A thin crust of pseudo-orientation and adaptation from non-jazz composers gives a scintillating aspect to some new music that appeals to an amazing number of jazz dilettantes. These artsy-craftsy folks, who, but for chance, would find a home in the extreme right-wing of the Tory-Dixielander camp, wallow in the ersatz-Impression-ism, the pseudo-Stravinsky, the sort-of-Bach, and the general aura of apparent Kultur that pervades this loose school of present-day jazz. The Jazz-Sophists employ a promiscuous, self-devouring, eclecticism which results, as promiscuity always does, in a watering-down, a shambles. Their music is so full of learned quotations and sputtery runs that it never has time to swing. It is a prolix music that must be labeled 'prosy' because it talks instead of sings. If the logical retrograde comes out with mulligan-music as poetry, make the most of it.
If it falls into a formula it is this: The sophisticated surface conceals a quaint, naive core; the bucolic veneer cloaks the truly oriented heart. Who would deny that sophistication in an art springs from an intensifying of its congenital subtleties? In other words, what’s clever in the classics can become what’s corny in jazz. Jazz, to become subtle, must hone itself to its own fine edge. If there is a test of validity in inversion, Gould’s jazzy compromises or some Gershwin ablution should serve as proof-positive. (Admittedly, the Pacific Jazz sides are not without their choruses of that counter-pointed-business; at least the two voices retain the obligation of swinging: as two jazz voices moving horizontally—an aspect of motion not discernible on other labels).
If you concede that jazz can't move forward by compromise—that another idiom’s trappings dilute its blood— then whither? In Mulligan’s direction is my conclusion.
Another aspect of the Mulligan movement toward purity has drawn fire from the ceramicist-jazzbos. They find his insistence on spartan tone-clusters completely anathematic to their goal for jazz. It is curious and sad that many Tory jazzophiles (buffs, they call themselves) refused to accept the idea of progress in what they wanted to pigeon-hole as a folk art, and then
moved forward into an insidious jazz-synthetic. "Barbershop harmony," they say of Mulligan.
This is simple to refute: This sound wants to move forward, not bloat in place. That’s part of swinging. Overly involved chords tend to emphasize the stationary as opposed to the mobile aspects of jazz— the static as opposed to the kinetic. Mulligan-sounds break down into phrases, and the tacits and fillips are of an import not assigned to the width of the chord. Ernst Krenek, the twelve-tone savant, has hinted that his works for solo instrument unaccompanied are his purest. Rightly so: the restriction of tools ensures clarity, proscribes emotional, meaningless extravagance. Paul Klee seldom needed more than black and white to express himself. Wallace Stevens requires no 3-D.
Returning to the horn, it would be folly to maintain that Mulligan has unlimited virtuosity. Al Cohn and George Wallington have a similarly fumbling élan, but their musicianship is not questioned. Since Mulligan has a parallel academic background to the jazz-sophists, his restraint from name-dropping permits a bit of laxity practice-wise. Or more candidly, he bungles 10% and adjures 90%. Ready for a 100%? Here it is: the degree to which Mulligan swings. What is to swing? That, of course, is a subject of monograph calibre. But it would be an odd declension of the verb "to swing" that did not include this man’s work; it would be a unique personal definition of swinging that left out Mulligan. In his swathe, he swings orthodox, tory, mock-tory, and mockorthodox. His is figuratively an inverted two-beat, a kidding of the game, the big game (Remember those adverbs?). Yes, to an extent, he builds his solos—more so than some sophists.
But jazz has never been a completely spontaneous affair; more a combination of today and yesterday, and all the yesterdays. Admittedly, Mulligan has constructed no cities of glass. His work, in fact, far from being transparent, has varied from translucent to opaque. If the whole metropoli silica mish-mash has slipped by his door without staining the stoop, we, his contemporaries, can only sigh our relief. We want our jazz to swing Asperin Era, but we remember Charlie Christian and even Pud Brown—not just Prokofiev. Surely the Neo-Elizabethan Age need not usher in Neo-Nonsense, jazz-wise.
If a positive statement is pending, it must be praise. If praise is needed, it is this: Mulligan reflects his aesthetic times as ably as Bird does, as Collette does, as Saul Steinberg and Tennessee Williams do. He has fostered a useful purity in his work and improved the health of jazz. In this way, he appears to be the legitimate link between what has gone before and what is to come after: the ineradicable influence.
If Mulligan is a step in the journey, where is jazz going? That’s bootless. Art doesn't progress like the American auto: Chris-Craftier every year. Many people, many factors, many years it will need — Jazz will get foxier and foxier and appear to progress less and less, maybe.
This much seems clear enough: Cities of glass with their chromey suburbs of hot and cold running sixteenths, their tall false facades of quasi-classicism, will tinkle fleetingly, shatter, and dissolve back to the sand on which they were built. Whether the Mulligan sound towers interminably is of no great
consequence. But the wiser of those who pass through the rooms of his school of thought will build as he did: on refinement, not mixture.
For the Mulligan foundations are laid on the solid bed-rock of the earth itself. They involve thump and hint of thump. And so long as worlds insist on swinging around suns, and blood keeps veining through listening flesh, so long will man want jazz to swing. Ah, but does Gerry swing? Many think so,
yes.”