© Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.
“Counterpoint Jazz
MULLIGAN & BARITONE SAX From Bach and tailgate, polyphony.
The hot music topic in Los Angeles last week was the cool jazz of a gaunt, hungry-looking young (25) fellow named Gerry Mulligan, who plays the baritone saxophone. For the past three months, Mulligan's quartet has been performing in a nightclub known as the Haig, a spot that has featured such stalwarts as Red Norvo and Erroll Garner - and he was drawing the biggest crowds in the club's history. Says The Haig's happy manager: "People just like his kind of sound."
Mulligan's kind of sound is just about unique in the jazz field: his quartet uses neither piano nor guitar, does its work with trumpet, bass, drums and, of course, Mulligan's hoarse-voiced baritone sax. In comparison with the frantic extremes of bop, his jazz is rich and even orderly, and is marked by an almost Bach-like counterpoint. As in Bach, each Mulligan man is 'busily looking for a pause, a hole in the music which he can fill with an answering phrase. Sometimes the polyphony is reminiscent of tailgate blues, sometimes it comes tumbling with bell-over-mouthpiece impromptu.
Eyes Shut. Gerald Joseph Mulligan looks more extreme than he sounds. His hair is cut for a Jerry Lewis effect, crew-cropped on top. bangs in front. He has a sleepy face, and on the bandstand he keeps his watery-green eyes closed even when listening to Trumpeter Chet Baker, opens them only occasionally to glower at customers who are boorish enough to talk against the music.
Mulligan is extremely serious about his music. As early as he can remember, he was inventing tunes of his own on the piano—"I hate to play other people's." In seventh grade he got a clarinet and made his first arrangement. By his senior year at Philadelphia's West Catholic High School, he was a full-fledged arranger, ….
But Sleep Can Wait. Last June [1952] he walked into The Haig stony-broke. Somebody lent him a horn, and he began sitting in on jam sessions. Within a month he was leading the sessions and drawing customers. Pacific Jazz Records recorded an LP of the quartet playing a few jazz standards and some of Gerry's own compositions, e.g.. Soft Shoe, Nights at-the Turntable. The Haig put Gerry in the headline position at $2OOa week.
After a long evening at the horn, Jazzman Mulligan finds he is too keyed up by 2 a.m. to sleep, so he stays up until 6 writing new tunes and arrangements. Next Mulligan objective: an enlarged band and a nationwide tour. "I've got to keep moving. I've got to grow."”
The lead-in quotation is from a rarely sourced article that appeared in the MUSIC column of Time Magazine on February 2, 1953 when the Gerry Mulligan Quartet featuring Chet Baker was at the height of its popularity. I thought it would provide an additional chronological context for the following 1955 Downbeat article.
While it is always informative to read what the Jazz press has to say about Jazz performers, I find it even more interesting to hear about the music and its makers from Jazz performers themselves.
In his groundbreaking book On Writing Well William Zinsser' has this to say about “The Interview” in his chapter on “Writing About People:”
“Get people talking. Learn to ask questions that will elicit answers about what is most interesting or vivid in their lives. Nothing so animates writing as someone telling what he thinks or what he does — in his own words.
His own words will always be better than your words, even if you are the most elegant stylist in the land. They carry the inflection of his speaking voice and the idiosyncrasies of how he puts a sentence together. They contain the regionalisms of his conversation and the lingo of his trade. They convey his enthusiasms. This is a person talking to the reader directly, not through the filter of a writer. As soon as a writer steps in, everyone else's experience becomes secondhand.
Therefore, learn how to conduct an interview.”
In what follows from the September 21, 1955 issue of Downbeat, Gerry Mulligan goes Zinsser one better, of a sort, and conducts his own interview!
“By Gerry Mulligan
THE IMPORTANCE of the creative jazz musicians who have preceded us since the beginning of jazz cannot be underestimated. Many of the older jazzmen are, in fact, still contributing richly to the jazz scene—a fact sometimes lost sight of by younger jazz listeners or fans who are new to jazz.
As in any of the other arts, the presence in jazz of a living tradition is a great asset to the young performer. For one thing, of course, there is the enjoyment the men before have given us. Of more specific help to the young musician is the confidence to be gained from a knowledge of what the older jazzmen have done. By that I mean the knowledge you have that somebody else has lived the jazz life before you, and what they have done gives you an idea of what, way to go about doing things and what way not to.
By being aware of the jazz tradition, the young jazzman acquires thereby a sense of perspective. Since I know and observe the tradition, I'm able accordingly to have a basis of judgment for my own work by trying to hear how it fits in with the whole jazz tradition. It gives you confidence to know that you have roots in a language that has been growing for quite awhile, and that has now become pretty well developed. We jazz musicians can understand each other pretty well now, especially those of us who keep in mind the basics, the essential motivations for blowing jazz.
ONE OF THESE BASICS is that a jazz musician is—or should be—always trying- to express himself as an individual. It's there that you find the degree of integrity of a jazz musician. Since jazz is so personal a way of expression, what we are as individuals is bound to come out by what we play as jazz. So when you hear a jazz musician, you get to know what kind of a person he is. That's one of the very illuminating: things about playing or listening to jazz. And when that basic motivation of self-expression is added to an awareness of the jazz tradition, then you've got a musician who knows not only why he's blowing, but the history of the language he's using.
The influences from what has gone before that have affected my own work include many musicians. Duke Ellington has been the biggest single influence — particularly in his writing and in his attitude toward his band Duke's bands always sounded like they were hearing themselves as they were playing. And Duke was able—for a longer period than any other leader—to take divergent personalities and combine them in a homogenous unit. I was also influenced by most of the soloists in the Ellington band of several years ago — Tricky Sam Nanton, Lawrence Brown, Johnny Hodges, Ben Webster, and Jimmy Blanton, etc.
Mentioning the last two reminds me of a further point. Ben and Blanton became quite a team; they were very close to each other musically. When Blanton died, there was a gap, and I'm sure Ben misses him to this day. So, in a sense, a man sometimes creates an influence by dropping out of the jazz scene. Once you've had that kind of rapport with another musician, you keep looking for something like it again. Like in my case, I miss the natural rapport I had with Chet Baker in the quartet.
GETTING BACK to my own influences from the jazz tradition, there was also Pete Brown. For one thing, he was one of the first men I ever really heard blow, so that was a strong influence in itself. And also, I was impressed by the attitude he had toward his instrument. He's a big man, but when he played the alto, he played with tremendous sensitivity to the horn.
Then came Lester Young, Dizzy, and Bird. I've been equally influenced by all three. Woody Herman’s 1945 band also had an impact. It was a large influence on the way I was to think in terms of orchestration. I've always been a great admirer of Ralph Burns' scoring, and he was writing particularly well at that time. The men in the band, too, created an impact — men like Bill Harris and the excellent brass section Woody had. And there was Dave Tough, who exerted a tremendous influence in that era in terms of the kind, and quality of rhythmic feeling he laid down for the band. Sonny Greer, too, was influential in his rhythmic backgrounds for Duke.
By this list you can see that I was influenced by men on a variety of instruments, not just by those who played my own horn. One result of being affected by musicians on all instruments is that you acquire a measuring rod for what you want to hear in the people you yourself play with— and that's another kind of influence. You look for people to play with who have that same kind of attitude toward music as the older men you admired and learned from.
As for the new listener to jazz— as well as the new instrumentalist— it's a wise idea not to grasp the first thing that comes along and stop there. That's a natural practice, but it's a pretty unrewarding one. You ought to go back and listen to all eras of jazz that are available. By absorbing a cross section of the jazz tradition, you'll be able to form a basis for developing your taste. You'll have firmer ground in deciding what you do like in jazz. And you'll have a stronger feeling for the growth of jazz.
THERE WERE different developments in each era. In the early days, there was an emphasis on ensemble playing. By the mid-'30s and '40s the individual emerged, and this emergence of the individual reached a climax in Bird. He was the embodiment of the strong, individual personality.
It's important to realize this development, and to know music from all jazz eras. It's a mistake to listen to only one style — to the point of its becoming a fad — and to the exclusion of all other styles. There's room for a lot of different kinds of jazz just as there's room for a lot of different kinds of people in the world as jazz listeners. In my own case, I find it very difficult to listen to music by categories and labels. You have to break it down to a much finer point than that. You have to break it down to the playing of each individual because that's the main point of jazz — the expression of the. individual.
Returning to the subject of older jazz musicians — the men who have contributed to the jazz language — it's true that some of them don't have a large audience any more among 1955 jazz listeners. If more listeners became aware of the jazz tradition, they would profit and gain enjoyment by listening to these older men. But there's another thing that also hurts the older musician. For some of them who have been used to leading their own units for the past several years, it's a little hard to put themselves in the position of a sideman again. And yet as a sideman. many of these men would be in a better position to make themselves heard more widely again.
I don't say this in any attempt to diminish the musical ability of these men. It's just that several of them are not strong as leaders. And that applies equally to several of the younger jazz musicians who are trying to make it as leaders. Leading a unit requires a particular kind of ability, and not everyone has it. And it should always be remembered, after all, that although the basis of jazz is the expression of the individual, that expression takes place in the collective framework of the group. Sustaining jazz interest is a group job, not the job of one man. And the soloist has to depend on the group for the proper framework for his individual ideas. So being a sideman is not a comedown; it's being a vital part of the essential process of jazz.
THERE IS ONE plan I have in mind with regard to the jazz tradition and its continuing cross-influences. I think it would be a good idea to organize a unit, composed of some of the older jazzmen and those of the younger musicians who can do it. It would be a fine opportunity to play and create together. I've done a lot of thinking about it but haven't yet had the specific opportunity to put the idea into practice. Under the setup I have at Em-Arcy [Records] — where I have free choice in what I want to record — we'd have a record outlet. But first I'd want to have the group work out for some time. Then if something of musical value results, we could record it. But I don't like the idea of doing something just to record it. It has to work first.”