Gerry Mulligan: Jeru's new kind of cool

From fresh-faced, crew-cut young musician, to long-haired, bearded celebrity, Gerry Mulligan was one of the greatest of all baritone saxophonists, up there with Harry Carney, Serge Chaloff, and Pepper Adams, not to mention later masters such as Gary Smulyan, Nick Brignola and Ronnie Cuber. His command across all the registers, his immediately identifiable tone, and his fertile imagination added up to a really outstanding player. But that is to overlook his equal claims to fame as a composer, arranger, pianist and soprano saxophonist.

Born in 1927, his career started, as he told Roy Carr in the interview on these pages (see page 32), as an arranger while he was still in his teens. The first charts were for Johnny Warrington, who led the swing band on Philadelphia’s WCAU radio station. But before Mulligan was 17, the band was taken over by Elliot Lawrence, who became a close friend of Gerry’s, and who not only encouraged him to write, but to also play in his band.

Researching my recent book on Mulligan, I explored his charts for Lawrence, in the University of Wyoming archive. Here was a teenager, using French horns and unusual woodwind, some years before he is supposed by most jazz historians to have discovered these tonalities with Claude Thornhill. His precocious writing ability stayed with him throughout his life, although periods of celebrity, difficulties in his personal life, and the stress of bandleading meant that there were fallow periods between the bursts of creativity.

The Carr interview takes us through his career from the early 1950s to the 1960s Concert Jazz Band (CJB). Suffice it to say his ‘chordless’ quartet, and its equivalent sextets and tentets, put him on the map as both a player and arranger who was attempting something new in jazz. So apart from noting that some of his finest quartet music was played by groups without Chet Baker – notably with trumpeter Art Farmer or valve trombonist Bob Brookmeyer – I’ll jump forward here to look at his later career. Brookmeyer told me that Mulligan found the stress of leading the CJB affected his focus on composition and arranging, so much of the writing for that band was done by others. His divorce from his wife Arlene and his subsequent affair with the Broadway and Hollywood actress and singer Judy Holliday also meant his arranger’s pencil stayed in its box.

But it was Holliday who got him writing again – setting her lyrics for an album with members of the Concert Jazz Band, plus guests, in April 1961. Bassist Bill Crow recalled: “Judy was in awe of the band and the arrangements, and was, frankly, terrified. The booth they had set up for her was right by me – and I realized she was fuming, so I asked what the matter was. She said, ‘He should be here, helping me through this!’ Gerry just didn’t realise that although this was a situation that we were all comfortable with, she was a novice.”

Bill calmed her down, telling her that she could overdub mistakes, but being a stage singer, she wanted to sing each take with the band in real time. When they were packing up, Judy muttered to Bill, “He doesn’t realise how easy I made it for Gerry when he was doing movies in Hollywood!”

Despite numerous retakes, the end results are good, and quite unlike anything else in Mulligan’s recorded history. Their collaborative writing on pieces such as ‘What’s the Rush’ suggests that he and Judy might have become a well-established song-writing partnership, had she not succumbed to cancer in 1965.

Their album Holliday with Mulligan is also the first of Mulligan’s records with the CJB to include a chordal instrument, in this case a piano. (Not counting those occasional numbers where Mulligan or Brookmeyer would slide over to the piano stool.)

It was a harbinger for the band’s final session in December 1962, after Norman Granz sold Verve, effectively removing the band’s financial underpinning. For this album, optimistically titled Mulligan ’63, Jim Hall joined the line-up on guitar.

“I started out playing fewer notes than normal,” Hall told me. “But because the role of the bass was so well established, I hardly ever played the root of the chord. I tried to play inside the harmony, listening to what Gerry was doing. I’d do something that deliberately lay melodically between what Gerry was playing and what the bass was doing. With that band you were always aware of texture, and you’d try not to make that texture too dense, or to box the soloist in.”

The chordless Mulligan quartet continued on and off until 1967 when Gerry, as he told Roy Carr, did something rather surprising, by becoming the star soloist in Dave Brubeck’s new quartet, and moving from a chordless group to a band built around the piano. I asked Dave how it came about.

He recalled: “After my quartet with Paul Desmond broke up, we were asked to go to Mexico. So I told George Wein, who was booking the bands, that I didn’t have a group, so I couldn’t go. But he told me he’d got a whole travelling festival of musicians down there and there’d be plenty of them who’d want to play with me. ‘But,’ he said, ‘also I’ve got Gerry Mulligan hired’. And that was the start of it.”

Dave recruited Jack Six on bass, and then brought in Alan Dawson on drums. They got on famously, which proved an ideal setting for Gerry, being billed as the ‘Dave Brubeck Trio Featuring Gerry Mulligan’. After a few rehearsals and four US gigs (including the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival), their Mexico debut, on the album Compadres, is remarkable. Only a few weeks old, the band already sounds well-established, with a distinctive style. It topped the bill in a package that toured Mexico and also featured Cannonball Adderley and Woody Herman.

The crowning achievement of the Mulligan/Brubeck quartet is their 1970 album from the Berlin Philharmonie, concluding a three-day festival. The crowd went crazy, stamping and clapping, so that the musicians, who had already changed into their street clothes to go back to their hotel, had to come back on stage and play encores, to prevent a riot. The music culminated in a brilliantly extrovert ‘Take Five’. Yet such remarkable performances aside, the point of this all-star group was that it was not on the road all the time, giving both Dave and Gerry time to compose. And Brubeck’s tireless invention went a long way to re-motivate Gerry as a writer after the demise of the Concert Jazz Band. The results came in 1971 with his big band album Age of Steam.

The trains that inspired this recording became subject matter that stimulated his creative imagination over and over again. His friend and colleague, journalist and lyricist Gene Lees, said: “Railroads in North America, with those long distance expresses, and their wailing whistles, fascinated Johnny Mercer, they fascinated Gerry, and they fascinated me, because they always seemed to be going to some place romantic, where we’d never been”.

And Gerry’s widow, Franca Mulligan, told me that, as a boy, his school had been next to a railroad, and he would watch giant trains setting off across the country with their glittering dining cars and gleaming locomotives heading to some exotic place far beyond the school walls. Pieces such as ‘K4 Pacific’, ‘Grand Tour’ and ‘One to Ten in Ohio’ perfectly illustrate this, and they also find Mulligan — after years of focusing on baritone saxophone and occasional piano — starting to use the soprano sax, which would remain an instrument that he used frequently for the rest of his career.

For a while in the 1970s, Mulligan experimented with an electric band, which didn’t go down too well on his final reunion with Chet Baker in 1974, but thereafter he mainly worked in specially re-formed big bands or acoustic quartets. A big band highlight is the album Walk on Water, from 1980.

Also playing baritone on that session was Joe Temperley, and when I asked him about the fundamental difference between his approach and Gerry’s he said: “He always tended to play outside the band. And I think he thought like a tenor player, which is what gave him such a unique light sound. To achieve that, he played the same mouthpiece all his life. When he dropped and damaged it towards the end of his life, he thought about retiring, because he didn’t know how he’d get his own sound without it. But we shared a dentist, who magically patched it up for him and he was able to play it again!”

One album on which this signature sound combined with different forces was Symphonic Dreams, from 1987, in which the Mulligan Quartet played with the Houston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Erich Kunzel. Aside from a whimsical set of classical pastiches – the ‘Sax Chronicles’ by Harry Freedman – the album has Mulligan’s own work at its core, and as well as a full orchestral version of ‘K-4 Pacific’, the highlight is his ‘Entente for Saxophone and Orchestra’. Mulligan recalled, ‘What I had in mind was a meeting of minds between the solo instrument for jazz and the symphony’. What he achieved was – in technical and compositional terms – the summit of the arranging career that first burgeoned so many years before with Elliot Lawrence.

Mulligan’s final years, until his death in January 1996, were mainly focused on his quartets, with piano, bass and drums backing either soprano or baritone saxophone. A personal favourite album is Lonesome Boulevard, from 1989, with Bill Charlap on piano, including yet another age of steam tribute, ‘Flying Scotsman’.

But some of his best ever playing came, according to those who were there, when confined to a wheelchair, he played his last jazz cruise in late 1995. His pianist was Ted Rosenthal, who recalled: “There was a great spirit of camaraderie with the musicians around us, and, by just being on a ship, we could take away the rest of real life. Our final concert was a really magical evening, and our level of interaction and musicality was probably one of our best nights ever. We had no clue that it was going to be our last concert. We had no clue how sick Gerry was, but that’s the way it turned out.”

His record label, Telarc, had arranged for me to be in New York to interview Gerry when he returned from the cruise, but he was too unwell, and so we never met. He died just a few weeks later on January 20, 1996.

I was privileged to have met the musicians who worked with him in those final months, and to write the liner notes for his last album, The Art of Gerry Mulligan: The Final Recordings, but I was extremely sad never to have met one of my absolute heroes in the world of jazz.

Alyn’s book The Gerry Mulligan 1950s Quartets (Oxford University Press, 2023) is shortlisted for the 2024 ARSC Awards for Excellence in jazz research

This article originally appeared in the November 2024 issue of Jazzwise. Never miss an issue – subscribe today