"The freshest sound to come out of jazz in a long time," was the way many critics and musicians greeted the first Gerry Mulligan Fantasy records. The quartet, playing compositions by Mulligan or Mulligan arrangements of standards and jazz tunes has, in the short space of six months, created considerable excitement on the jazz scene.
With grace, precision, delicacy and intelligence and without neglecting that important jazz factor, the beat, Mulligan has produced a remarkable series of records for Fantasy. Mulligan, a young saxophonist and arranger, graduate of the bands of Gene Krupa and Charlie Barnet, had already established a reputation for himself with his writing for the Miles Davis Capitol recordings when the work of his own group and his recent arrangements for the Stan Kenton orchestra broadened public knowledge of his work. Today he is accepted as one of the most talented minds in the jazz world.
The first four tunes (F-5225 ) , recorded in September of 1952 while the band was playing at the Black Hawk in San Francisco, are outstanding examples of the onemicrophone set-up which, in this instance; has captured the sound and mood of the group to an unusual degree. The charming interplay between Gerry's baritone sax and the soft but determined trumpet of Chet Baker, the flowing and solid rhythm supplied by bassist Carson Smith and drummer Chico Hamilton are presented to the listener with a clarity and detail somewhat unusual in jazz recordings. "Carioca" is a showcase for Chico's drumming-skin on skin in the introduction, rather than sticks and brushes. "My Funny Valentine" is the tune which Mulligan single-handedly brought back into national popularity. "Line for Lyons" is a catchy thing dedicated to San Francisco disc jockey, Jimmy Lyons, and "Bark for Barksdale" is for Oakland's Olympic basketball star and disc jockey, Don Barksdale.
The second set of four tunes was taped in Hollywood's Radio Recorders studios early in January of 1953 just before Chico left the group to join Lena Horne on tour. On this date four microphones and an echo chamber were used to duplicate the acoustical effect of the tunes recorded in San Francisco.
"Turnstile" and "Limelight" are both Mulligan originals. "The Lady Is a Tramp" is, of course, the perennial Rodgers and Hart sophisticated lament. "Moonlight In Vermont," a lovely treatment of a lovely, moody tune, effects a startling illusion of three horns. The "third horn" is actually the humming of Chico Hamilton!
In these eight renditions there are marvelous moments as the two horns play musical catch with the tune, tossing phrases back and forth. There are also delightful examples of parallel thinking on the part of the instrumentalists whose ideas seem to spring from one central concept, one pattern of thought and to be spoken in identical accents.
Concluding each side of this LP record you will hear 18 seconds of the Mulligan sign-off riff, a novel little effort Gerry calls "Utter Chaos." It is included here to preserve the atmosphere and feeling of one of the most inventive and unusual groups in modern music. This is the way the Gerry Mulligan quartet sounded as they played -right down to the sign-off.
RALPH J. GLEASON
Gerry's at his best in these sides, which means that the baritone sax is at its most persuasive. The best for Gerry has always meant for me a prevailing gentleness, and it is that quality which prevails in the staccato measures of Carioca and the more legato Line for Lyons. Chet Baker on trumpet and his Miles Davisish sound, vigorously inflected, complements Gerry's sweetness very well. Carson Smith is an able bassist and Chico Hamilton, on drums, gives the more or less bop flavor of these sides real authenticity.
METRONOME
Mulligan's kind of sound is just about unique in the jazz field. In comparison with the frantic extremes of bop, his jazz is rich and even orderly, is marked by an almost Bach-like counterpoint.
TIME
MULLIGAN/BAKER
"The Perennial Guest"
When the redoubtable Charles Mingus brought a Iarge orchestra to New York's Philharmonic HaII in the winter of 1972, one of the sidemen - unannounced - was a bearded, relaxed, alert baritone saxophonist who was enjoying the proceedings as least as much as anyone in the audience. He grinned approvingly during solos, particularly those of Gene Ammons; plunged zestfully into his section work; and occasionally had some buoyantly resourceful solo statements of his own to make.The man demonstrating such manifest pleasure in the act of making music was Gerry Mulligan. A few weeks later, appearing with Dave Brubeck and Paul Desmond at Carnegie Hall, Mulligan - sharing top billing this time - was just as persistently enlivening. This "perennial guest... gave the evening its high point," John S. Wilson observed in the New York Times.
Through the years of Mulligan's presence on the jazz scene - and they span more than a quarter of a century - his adaptability to many different kinds of playing contexts particularly characterizes him for me. That, and his willingness, his eagerness, to jam. When the jazz festival scene, for instance, got to be more and more routinized and all too predictable, there was always Mulligan after hours - at Newport, at Monterey, wherever. Some of the most joyous music I remember on the festival circuit had Mulligan as its after-hours catalytic center - improvising and spurring other players in open-ended sessions that cut across categories of style, age, background. It was just the music that was happening that counted - the telling of stories right then.
Mulligan is also capable of considerable discipline with attendant concern-extraordinarily sensitized - for dynamics. Witness the Mulligan-Baker Fantasy sides in this set. And from time to time, though never for long enough to satisfy this listener, he has revealed his skills as a writer-player who, had he stayed at it, could have metamorphosized certain big band traditions into further dimensions of having a ball through music.
That's what Mulligan is centrally about - pleasure in the present. He can be a sensuous romanticist as he makes ballad lines just taut enough to bear more nightdreaming; and he can also stomp, swing, and just plain float on the natural high of being able to make his horn say a lot of things that speech doesn't get anywhere near.
It's not that Mulligan hasn't had any grim times along the way. His life hasn't all been Huck Finn sampling jam. There were some bleak, searching times - with no one involved quite knowing the question - and the 1951 Mulligan music here, originally released on Prestige, comes out of that kind of experience.
Then came the marquee years - with Chet Baker- also represented here. Soft and cooly disciplined music for listeners during a decade of privatism in which " the end of ideology" had been proclaimed. Looking back, the illusions most Americans had then about their country and themselves were bizarrely askew. But as in all periods, the inward-turning as well as the collectively turbulent, some music of durable value transcended the Zeitgeist. And Mulligan's shapes and sounds were among those that have value beyond their time of generation. (By contrast, for instance, with much of the "west coast" jazz that followed in his wake but has since submerged deeper than Atlantis.)
In recent years, Mulligan has worked on occasion with Dave Brubeck, and in various other settings such as the Mingus concert. He is no longer in the ascendancy, as he was when the recordings in this album were made; but he's not an anachronism either. Mulligan, having created his own musical microcosm, lives there quite comfortably. And since its borders are flexible, he still fits easily and ebulliently into a wide range of musical situations. I doubt hat Mulligan will ever be a museum piece. Melodists of his quality and of his spontaneous inventiveness are always rare - as are musicians with so supple and energizing a beat. Jazz has no more passed him by than it has Vic Dickenson. No matter what the dominating idiom is in any period, there remains a place on board - not in a parlor car though - for those who have survived intact. For some of them, anyway. We are not yet sufficiently musically civilized to make it possible for Dickie Wells, let's say, to leave his day job. But some of the less than young jazzmen are still telling nocturnal tales.
Remembering Gerry during the years represented in this set, it's startling, in a way, to realize that he's forty-five. But then Mingus is forty-nine; and Roy Eldridge, at sixty-one, holds down a gig six nights a week. Hell, Mulligan's got a lot of playing time left. And watching him dig everything that was going on at the Mingus concert at Philharmonic Hall, I had no sense of any diminution of energy or sureness of direction with which to contrast the Mulligan on these sides and the Mulligan of the present. Quite the contrary. He's got it all together, and the rest is playing it natural.
Lyricism in Limbo It used to be said - and usually accurately - that when a musician left Duke Ellington, an essential part of him (a strength that Duke had focused on and nurtured) somehow disappeared. A number of the exiles, temporary and permanent, certainly kept their strikingly individualistic thrust - Rex Stewart, for instance, and Ben Webster now. But most of those who departed Duke returned to ordinary lifesize. Or less.
In a smaller way, and for a brief time, Chet Baker found his optimum musical setting - in the collaboration with Gerry Mulligan that can be heard echoing through the years in this collection. For all his occasional attempts later to play hard, Baker was at his most persuasive in gently lyrical, introspective improvising. Mulligan provided complementary strength both in terms of rhythmic propulsion and coloristically. He also had an organizing strength that pretty much determined and held together the musical identity of the quartet.
Working with Mulligan, moreover, gave Baker the space within which his particular kind of musical imagination could best function. The tempi, even on the quartet's more outgoing numbers, did not strain his ability to have his technique keep up with his ideas. And in all that the quartet played, there was never any crowding. A primary distinguishing characteristic of all groups for which Mulligan has set policy is that space - silence - becomes an integral part of the music. Accordingly, Baker, who is most individualistic and affecting when he's in an ambience that lets him reflect as he improvises, reached his creative peak during his brief time with Mulligan.
His career went largely downhill afterwards, although indications at first were otherwise. When the Mulligan-Baker Quartet first recorded for Fantasy - at the insistence of Dave Brubeck - few musicians and observers of the jazz scene would have predicted the swiftness and extent of its success. (The first prescient writer about the group was Ralph Gleason, who spread the news in Down Beat.) But when the quartet became so unmistakable a "hot property", the illusion took hold of both Baker and certain record company executives that Baker on his own would be just as profit-making as the quartet. Even more so. The quartet's My Funny Valentine, after all, had scored unprecedentedly - the first "cool jazz" recording to find a huge and wide popular audience.
Going out on his own, Baker toured Europe, the United States, and then settled in Scandinavia and Italy for a time. But infrequent compelling performances notwithstanding, there was less and less of a center of gravity in Baker's work. The nurturing gestalt of the musical relationship with Mulligan was never equalled for Baker. Eventually, he went into limbo; and although he reappears from time to time, his prospects as a player have not appeared to be sanguine for a long time. This is not to say that it's impossible for him to climb back, but the odds are long.
The dwindling odyssey of Chet Baker is an intriguing, and rather poignant, illustration of how swiftly transient the experience of "making it" can be. Even if Baker had stayed with Mulligan, the quartet would have eventually dissolved - for reasons both of changing audience tastes and divergences of temperament between Baker and Mulligan. (The Modern Jazz Quartet's capacity all these years to retain a durable public, particularly abroad, and not explode in internal dissension is extremely unusual in jazz history.)
But Mulligan, even though tastes did change, has found ways to remain a functioning part of the jazz scene - though much less prominently than before - and on his own terms. Baker has not; because unlike Mulligan, he needs to be part of a whole that is not only greater than himself but that can also provide that particular kind of collective support his small but potentially quite expressive talent needs. And he never found a way to construct that whole after leaving Mulligan.
Yet Baker did leave a legacy, much of the best of it in this set. For that quick period, he was much more than a sideman and not yet a drifting leader. His experience is that of the young novelist who writes one or two books that last, and spends the rest of his career wondering why it never happened again. But at least there were those books, as for Baker there were these quartet recordings.
They stand up - permanent elements in the evolution of what can be called jazz chamber music. The graceful, sinewy interweaving of vocal-like horn lines; the flowing time; the transmuting of "standards" into wholly jazz epiphanies - it all did come together, however briefly. And an index of the impact of these recordings is that so many listeners who grew up during that decade consider these sides to be part of their own autobiographies. And they wonder occasionally whatever did happen to Chet Baker. It may not mean all that much to Baker, but a lot of people still do think about him. And more will, now that these performances are available again.
Nat Hentoff
と言うことらしいです。(笑)
