The New Yorker
Nat Hentoff : 03/21 & 03/28/1959
Profiles in the Mainstream – Gerry Mulligan

Gerry Mulligan, a proud, restless baritone saxophonist, composer, and arranger—and the leader, over the past seven years, of a succession of small combinations dedicated to the phenomenon known as “modern jazz”—is a remarkably successful musician, even by some of his own standards. At thirty-one, Mulligan, like modern jazz itself, is learning, after years of aggressive insularity, to enjoy a growing, eagerly receptive international audience. He has emerged as an influential voice during a decade in which modern jazz has become guardedly recognized as useful, and even pleasurable, in certain mass-entertainment precincts, in the State Department, and in the academies. As a representative of jazz, in which instantaneous self-expression is the grammar of existence, he is, with or without his instrument, more articulate than most of his colleagues, being able to improvise with words almost as readily as with musical sounds. Mulligan occasionally produces polemical articles for the American and British jazz press—sometimes written but more often uttered extempore over the telephone and taken down by an editor or a stenographer—and one of his avocations is jousting with members of the small, dimly accredited tribe of American jazz critics, to say nothing of jousting, when the spirit moves him, with what he considers barbarous audiences. He has also taken to participating, with nervous élan, in the panel discussions on the peculiar intricacies and perils of his brand of music that have become a feature of the summer jazz festivals currently proliferating in remoter woods and watering places across the country. His comments are all the more provocative because, even without his baritone saxophone—the St. Bernard of the reed family—he is visually arresting. He is lean and angularly tall—six feet one (“although,” he comments, “it depends on the time of day and degree of slouch”). His hair is gold-red and cut slouch”). His hair is gold-red and cut short. His thin, bony face is brashly youthful, and its usual expression is one of alert, somewhat angry skepticism. Ever since his childhood, Mulligan has been habitually driven to exasperation—by any show of despotic authority, by the playing of some of his colleagues, by the business end of the music business, and by the vicissitudes of his own career—but one thing cannot possibly irritate him, and that is his musical and financial progress in recent years. His annual income is now at least fifty thousand dollars, even though at times he seems to be doing his best to keep it down. He frequently insists on taking off weeks at a stretch, and independence is so much more important to him than security that he is one of the very few outstanding modern-jazz figures who prefer to free-lance on records rather than sign an exclusive contract with one of the record companies. Moreover, he tries to work only in night clubs where he is given adequate reason to believe that the patrons come with the intention of listening to music, and not simply to drink and talk. For all his cantankerousness, though, he is in demand in nearly every branch of the jazz business. His records sell consistently well here and in Europe. His current and past combinations have played at the major jazz festivals and at the major universities—since last fall he has appeared at twelve colleges—and he sometimes allows himself to be included in the large package tours that have lately developed as a counterpart of the classical-concert wheel. Mulligan has frequently played night-club and concert engagements in Great Britain and on the Continent, and while he does not have the vast international audience of Louis Armstrong, who in recent years has been more of a popular entertainer than a jazzman, his name and the particular jazz sounds it connotes are known and discussed in jazz clubs in Prague, Warsaw, Bombay, Tokyo, Sydney, and São Paulo. As he once remarked to the modern trumpet star Dizzy Gillespie, “With our names, the two of us wouldn’t have any trouble getting something together in China.”

Of more importance to Mulligan than popular acclaim, however, is the nearly unanimous respect, if not necessarily affection, with which he is regarded by his fellow-musicians. Modern jazzmen tend to be a highly controversial lot. Skirmishing among themselves, they are also subject to a lot of truculent criticism from older musicians devoted to the New Orleans, Dixieland, and swing traditions. Some of the modernists—for instance, Dave Brubeck, a pianist with an enormous following in the colleges—are largely without musical honor among many jazz musicians, old or young. Only a few of his colleagues think that Brubeck is of the true jazz substance, although all of them marvel at his ability to enrapture masses of paying fans. Mulligan, on the other hand, is firmly admired by most jazzmen. Among musicians, Brubeck himself has perhaps most clearly described the special quality of Mulligan’s instrumental style, as well as of his arranging and composing. “You feel as if you were listening to the past, present, and future of jazz, all in one tune, and yet it’s done with such taste and respect that you’re not ever aware of a change in idiom,” he recently told an acquaintance. “Mulligan gets the old New Orleans two-beat going with a harmonic awareness of advanced jazz, and you feel not that tradition is being broken but, rather, that it’s being pushed forward.” Paul Desmond, the alto saxophonist of the Brubeck quartet, who has stern criteria for judging himself and other jazz musicians, speaks of Mulligan with the same kind of enthusiasm. “In probably no other jazz instrumentalist,” he says, “can you find such a clear progression from Dixieland through swing and into and out of bebop, all on the same record, if not in the same solo.” As George Russell, an avant-garde jazz composer, has summed it up, “Mulligan is Mr. Mainstream.”

If Mulligan is indeed Mr. Mainstream, or, at any rate, in the mainstream, it is not surprising that the older jazz musicians find his music, unlike that of many modernists, intelligible and moving. Some of these musicians, their powers undiminished, have been aging in bitterness and neglect, because their public, of the twenties and thirties, has dissolved, and because most of the present-day jazz audience is caught up in one or more of the several modern-jazz currents. In contrast to classical musicians and their audiences, much of the contemporary jazz public and many of the younger players are parochially intent on the present alone. It is established programming procedure to include Haydn and Bartok, say, in a symphony concert, but rarely do the older jazz musicians appear on a program with the young modernists, and almost never do old and young join forces in the same unit. In still greater contrast to what occurs in the classical field, the older jazz musicians are not affectionately treasured, like Casals and Landowska, but sink deeper into limbo with each birthday. One important reason is that until recently the audience for jazz has been made up almost wholly of young people, and has therefore been almost wholly new with each generation. There have been signs lately that a continuing jazz public is developing—a public including some people over forty, and having both a discriminating appetite for the past and a resilient curiosity about the present and the future—but this new group is still too small to soothe the feelings and increase the incomes of the older instrumentalists. Many of these once exuberant improvisers mournfully maintain that “real jazz” is dead or comatose, and that the present product is excessively “European” and intellectual. To a large extent, however, Mulligan has escaped this scorn. Indeed, one of the older men, the powerful cornettist Rex Stewart, who was for many years a member of Duke Ellington’s orchestra and is now a member of Eddie Condon’s group, welcomes Mulligan into the true jazz nobility. “When I first heard Gerry, a couple of years ago,” Stewart told a friend not long ago, “I experienced the same feeling I had when I first heard Louis Armstrong, in the twenties. One night in the Savoy Ballroom when Louis was there, I got so excited I began breaking glasses. Well, Gerry hits me that way, too. He has soul, and he plays and talks like a man who enjoys life and people. I felt a kinship with him right away. If a man doesn’t feel him, he must be dead.” Stewart, to be sure, is uncommonly open-minded about some of the young men in jazz, but many other musicians of his generation agree with him about Mulligan. “Gerry’s full of the spirit,” says the tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins, an elder statesman whose judgments are, like his presence, weighty.

The older generation is particularly impressed by Mulligan because he delights in the jam session. For decades, that informal, unpredictable, and often interminable meeting of jazzmen was not only a source of pleasure but a testing ground—a strenuous prep school for young jazzmen, and an arena where the established virtuosos could keep themselves in musical condition to withstand the thrust of the new voices. In the last six or seven years, though, most young musicians have formed up into tight, intensely rehearsed units; they tend to neglect the old joys and hazards of jamming, and many elders have been complaining about the difficulty of finding sessions. Mulligan, though, is known in the trade as a relentless searcher for jamming conclaves and often ends up organizing his own. At the Newport Jazz Festival a couple of summers ago, for instance, he was scheduled to play only once, but he ended up playing half a dozen times, at jam sessions and parties, including one, given by Norman Granz, the leading jazz impresario, that produced the most spontaneous jazz of the Festival. On that occasion, Mulligan was, as he often is, the first horn to play. As the earliest arrivals sized up the resources of the bar, the pianist Nat Pierce began noodling around, and almost at once Mulligan, who had turned up wearing a red sweater and a red checked shirt, sat down near him and joined in softly. Soon other hornmen were playing, too, and Mulligan stood up and went into his characteristic rocking motion, his long back acting as a vibrantly tensile seesaw. In his devoted, rhythmic swaying, Mulligan resembles an orthodox Jew at his prayers. It was Mulligan, too, who presently organized the horns to back up the soloists with complementary figures. As has happened at many another jam session, Mulligan inexorably took over, and in the course of the next few hours he demonstrated clearly that he had the strength to stand up with venerable volcanoes like Hawkins and the trumpeter Roy Eldridge. The same sort of thing had occurred some months earlier, at a jam session that was staged after hours at Eddie Condon’s club, then in Greenwich Village. Françoise Sagan was the guest of honor, and some Collier’s photographers came, too, to catch her in the process of enjoying native American musique engagée. An observer, the magazine writer Richard Gehman, recalls, “It was an unlikely concoction. There were some of Eddie’s Dixieland guys, including Wild Bill Davison, on trumpet, and there was Zutty Singleton, the New Orleans drummer, and then, representing modern, there were Mulligan and his trombonist, Bob Brookmeyer. Before anyone knew quite what was happening, Mulligan was in charge. Even Wild Bill was following him.” Aside from the force of his personality, probably the chief reason Mulligan almost invariably becomes the director of any group, organized or casual, that he is playing with is that he doesn’t have to waste time checking his bearings. He has a thorough knowledge and understanding of almost all the idioms in the language of jazz.

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Jazz has been succinctly defined by its preeminent don, Marshall Stearns, as a semi-improvisational American music distinguished by an immediacy of communication, an expressiveness characteristic of the free use of the human voice, and a complex flowing rhythm.” Unlike the classical musicians of the time, with their “legitimate” tone and “proper” fingering, the early horn players of New Orleans used their instruments very much in their own way, ignoring traditional restraints and incorporating the slurs, glissandi, and personal vibrato of speech. Most jazz combinations were small, and the emphasis was on improvisation—often multilinear collective improvisation. Pulsating beneath, through, and over everything else was the beat, polyrhythmic but inclined, at any rate in the rhythm sections, to be heavy and jagged. Later on, in the twenties and thirties, emphasis on collective improvisation waned, and the soloists, with Louis Armstrong leading the way, dominated the jazz scene. Large bands emerged, which gave space to the improvising soloist but enclosed him in section work. Meanwhile, the rhythms of jazz were gradually smoothed as some bands, particularly Count Basie’s, in the words of one critic, “put wheels on all four beats in the bar.” By the end of the thirties, in the view of the restive young jazz musician, the whole situation had become firmly stabilized; nothing new seemed to be happening, and there were stirrings of rebellion. Among the rebels were the late alto saxophonist Charlie (Bird) Parker, the trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, and the pianist Thelonious Monk. What they and others did was to widen the harmonic base for jazz improvisation more challengingly than ever before and to make the play of rhythms over the steady metre that is jazz more intricate and subtle than ever before; so challenging and intricate was their work that for a time it took a thoroughly oriented ear to appreciate, or even to follow, the involuted contours of the music’s melodic content. The new music was given a variety of names, but the one that has survived most persistently is “modern jazz.”

There was one feature of the older jazz that the insurgents did not dispense with—the tradition of the solo. The best of the influential modern jazzmen were so intent on testing and developing their own voices in this new idiom that they preferred to function mainly as soloists whom other musicians played for, rather than with. Inevitably, a counter-revolution set in, and this was symbolized and, to a large extent, touched off by a series of recordings made by the trumpeter Miles Davis in 1949 and 1950, with an ensemble of nine instruments. These records were comparable in their impact on a new generation of jazz musicians to the Louis Armstrong Hot Five and Hot Seven records of the twenties, some of the Duke Ellington and Basie records of the thirties, and the records made by Parker and his associates in the early and middle forties. The counter-revolutionary aspect of the Davis discs was that they again put the stress on ensemble playing. The soloist was still permitted to improvise, but he did so within a cohesive framework of relatively complex, fresh written ensemble material. The rhythmic and harmonic innovations of Parker, Gillespie, and the rest were retained by the new men, but they aimed for a lighter and more flowing rhythmic pulse than had emerged from the guerrilla warfare that had sometimes existed in the early modern-jazz rhythm sections, and a considerably more sensitive and varied dynamic range. Some of the leaping cry and slashing spontaneity of the beginnings of modern jazz was lost, but the records established a standard for coping once again with the problem—solved by the early New Orleans bands for their time, and by Ellington and Basie for theirs—of maintaining each player’s individuality and at the same time emphasizing the organized expression of the group.

The Davis records were an arrangers’ triumph, and one of the chief arrangers—and the baritone saxophonist—was Gerry Mulligan. In the intervening years, without in the slightest losing his interest in the jam session, he has continued to concentrate on organized expression. Beginning with a quartet, in 1952, he has had several small groups, each of them strongly integrated by means of arrangements and rehearsals but each permitting the soloists to improvise within an airy, if carefully built, structure. At Newport, the night after Mulligan himself had roared through the free-style jam session at Norman Granz’s party, at which soloing was all, or nearly all, one of his quartets—a particularly fine example of the modern-jazz group that has chosen the collective approach as the path of its development—performed before an outdoor audience of twelve thousand. Mulligan, playing his baritone saxophone, and Bob Brookmeyer, playing the valve trombone, engaged in loosely contrapuntal conversations, with bass and drums providing the foundation. The colloquy usually began either with both voices stating a theme or with one lining out the melody while the other interpolated comments. As each then soloed, the other continued, but more softly, to contribute supporting, flowing melodic figures that were linked with warm logic to the foreground assertion. The large, tawny, lunging voice of Mulligan’s horn contrasted but did not clash with the more burnished, more gently burred singing of Brookmeyer’s. Visually, Mulligan was the more commanding of the two. With the bulky baritone saxophone coming down to his knees, seemingly annealed to him, he rocked through each number, sometimes bending halfway over backward in his ardor, while Brookmeyer, also lean and long and slightly hunched over, stood with legs spread apart. The work of the quartet, individually and collectively, was subtle but strong, each voice remaining sensitive to the others not only in the spontaneous interplay of ideas but also in the constantly changing dynamics—from swelling waves of yea-saying to diminuendos so gently whispered that the bass became the loudest voice. The playing was organized with such clarity that all four instruments could be continually followed, and with such balance that, although there had been plenty of opportunity for each horn to release his own feelings, at the close of a number there were no loose ends.

While at Newport, Mulligan attended two morning panel discussions. One had to do with the working conditions of jazzmen, and at it he expressed himself tartly, if tensely, on the diffculties of road trips and one-night stands. “Jazz musicians should think of themselves as artists and should be treated as such,” he said at one point, taking up a favorite theme of his. “We’re not a bunch of vaudeville entertainers.” For years—in bookers’ and club owners offices, in magazine articles and interviews—he has insisted that the jazz musician has a right to the same sort of control over his working conditions that he has over his music. A couple of summers ago, Mulligan’s zeal cost him an engagement. He had written an artcile, “The Ideal Jazz Club,” for the jazz magazine Down Beat, calling for greatly improved—club owners might say utopian—acoustics, lighting, and audiences. The owner of a relatively high type of Chicago club, the London House, had been intending to hire Mulligan in the fall. The article was so uncompromising, however, that the owner thought Mulligan had better look the place over and decide for himself whether it would do. The invitation was probably unprecedented in jazz history; most jazzmen, in order to subsist, have at one time or another passively agreed to work under practically any conditions, no matter how harassing playing on an elevated platform within a circular bar, for instance. Mulligan examined the London House in June, pronounced it acceptable, if not ideal, and went away under the impression that he was booked for the month of September. After a few days, the owner of the London House called Mulligan’s agent and said, “He doesn’t like people talking while he plays. I sell a lot of food. He’ll be unhappy. He’d better not play here.”

The other Newport panel discussion interested Mulligan even more than the one on working conditions, though this time he sat not on the platform but with the audience. The subject was “Musicians and the Use of Habituating and Addicting Drugs.” Mulligan, seated alone in a back row, with his elbows on the chair in front of him and his hands supporting his head, listened, almost without moving, for the two hours the discussion lasted. His curiosity was more than casual. For several years, he had been intermittently addicted to heroin. The addiction had caused him great suffering, and after a hard fight he had succeeded in freeing himself. Unlike some musicians, he had never regarded addiction as a symbol of sophistication and of status within the group, and he had not glorified it to himself or to others. He had been invited to take part in the Newport panel but had declined, not because he wanted to hide his experience with drugs—he has talked about it openly for years—but because he thought he might become too vehement. After the discussion, talking to some friends, Mulligan complained bitterly—and not for the first time—about how in America the addict is treated as a criminal. In many cases, he feels, this forces the addict to become one, or at least to consort with criminals, and in all cases it prevents a doctor from following the sensible British procedure of withdrawing him gradually from the grip of a drug—if he is withdrawable.

England, at times, appeals to Mulligan as a more satisfactory place than the United States, and he has talked of perhaps making it his home. He particularly likes British audiences, because they are courteous and respectful. Mulligan not only wants a certain degree of respect from his audiences; he tries to exact it. From time to time, between numbers in night clubs, he has delivered acidulous lectures on manners to raucous patrons. The lectures sometimes have given way to angry saxophone solos, and when everything else has failed, he has been known to blow loudly in an offender’s ear. Even when Mulligan is not irate, he talks to his audiences much more than other jazzmen do. There are several jazz leaders who avoid talk altogether in the course of a performance. They feel that they are being paid to provide music, and that anything else is an invitation to the club owner to demand that they wear funny hats. Other leaders matter-of-factly introduce their sidemen and announce each number, and stop there. A few, like the pianist George Shearing, tell what they believe to be jokes. Ellington purveys charm, spreading words like cake icing. Mulligan, while erratic and occasionally verbose, is easily the most intelligently communicative master of ceremonies in jazz. “He isn’t a gagster or a comic,” explains Bob Brookmeyer. “He has an attitude toward an audience—toward life, actually—that’s humorous.” A British newspaperman has reported how Mulligan handled one London audience, at a concert in the Royal Festival Hall. “Gerry started talking to the audience to bring them in closer,” the reporter said. “He was just kidding around in that crackerbarrel kind of humor he reserves for the public when quite suddenly, during a quiet moment, he said, apropos of nothing at all, ‘And about our foreign policy; you can’t blame that on me.'” Even when Mulligan does not speak or play, he projects. “Onstage,” Paul Desmond says, “Mulligan has always had a quaint theatrical flair. One night, his quartet played at Carnegie Hall on the same bill with us. I watched the way he went on and off, and I got the same impression of twinkling legs that I remembered getting when I saw Alfred Lunt. And he uses those courtly gestures—the bows, the hand extended in tribute to his sidemen.” The only stage influence Mulligan admits to is that of George M. Cohan. “When I was about twelve, I saw Cohan in ‘I’d Rather Be Right’ and was very impressed,” he recalls. “It wasn’t as a singer but as a stage performer that he moved me. All that magnetism! I’ve always been a sucker for the debonair, big-time, old-style show-business attitude.”

—

Mulligan was born on April 6, 1927, in Queens Village, Long Island, the youngest of four brothers, and was christened Gerald Joseph. (He is three-quarters Irish and a quarter German, and this has led John Lewis, the musical director of the Modern Jazz Quartet, who feels that there have been too few men of Irish descent among the major jazz figures, to welcome him into that category with special warmth. Racial references of any kind, however, infuriate Mulligan. Shortly after an earnest jazz-magazine editor had suggested that most of the best musicians have been Negroes, Jews, and Italians, in that order, Mulligan ran into him in a night club, told him fiercely, “The really impressive thing about jazz, and the important musicians like Bird and Miles and me, is that it and we are so individualistic,” and warned him not to bring “everything down to some kind of common denominator.”) Mulligan’s father, George Vincent Raphael Mulligan, is a management engineer, and the three older sons have followed him into that profession. During Gerry’s childhood, George Mulligan, who now works for the Bureau of Aeronautics of the Navy Department, in Washington, travelled from one job to another, and before Gerry left home, he had lived in Marion, Ohio; Franklinville, New Jersey; Lockport, New York; Chicago; Kalamazoo, Michigan; Detroit; Reading, Pennsylvania; and Philadelphia. Today, he recalls this juvenile wandering with distaste. “I became uncommonly insecure in my relations with other people,” he has said, “especially the kids in the different schools.” One thing, at any rate, abided through all his changes of domicile, and that was his interest in music. From the time he could walk, he was picking out tunes on the piano, and when he was seven he composed a tune called You and Me and Love, which he later submitted for copyright. His first wind instrument was an ocarina, and by the time he was in the second grade, he had half a dozen ocarinas, of different sizes and pitches. “When he put an ocarina to his mouth, we’d look at each other in amazement,” says his mother, an alert, energetic matron, who is pleased at her son’s renown but does not pretend to understand how it came about. “We’re very proud of Gerry, but we don’t take credit for him. We can’t possibly. What did we have to do with it?” Actually, Mrs. Mulligan concedes, the family was musical, if only moderately so. Both she and her husband sang in church choirs in their younger days, and so did her three older sons, and the senior Mulligan played the piano and the violin. When she herself was fifteen, she was seized by an unaccountable urge to own a piano, and went to work as a stenographer, at five dollars a week, to earn the money to buy one. The piano remained in the family for many years, and Mulligan remembers it with nostalgia. “It was a very good piano,” he said recently, “and besides, I wrote my first music on it.”

Of the towns Mulligan lived in as a child, the one he remembers with most affection is Marion, a community of about thirty thousand, where he spent the years from two to ten. “We had a large house on a tree-shaded street,” he recalls. “There were ravines and Indian-type forests in the neighborhood, and I used to find arrowheads and flints. And I had my first musical success there.” The success was scored in kindergarten, where he quickly mastered such instruments as the triangle, the cymbals, and the tambourine, and, equipped with a full-size baton, became the leader of a rhythm band. This accomplishment he attributes to an overpowering tendency to lead. “The only place I was never a ringleader was in my own house,” he says. “That and sports.” In his own house, as he looks back on it, he was hedged in by the kind of authority that allows for no debate; to hear him tell it, his father was every inch the disciplinarian—a reserved man who found it difficult to express his gentler emotions and who expected his sons to live, as he did, by a rigid code. In the second grade, the boy collided with non-parental authority as well, and the scars still have not healed. He zealously started taking piano lessons from a nun named Sister Vincent, but he had his own convictions as to what was important and what was not, and was important and what was not, and within a few months Sister Vincent told his mother firmly that it was all a waste of time; Gerry, it appeared, was a willful boy who would not take the trouble to learn scales. Actually, as he remembers it, Sister Vincent’s chief grievance was that he had let her down during a recital put on by her pupils, each of whom was supposed to play a piece from memory. Halfway through his assignment, Gerry faltered and stopped, and it took two more abortive starts before he managed to race—undoubtedly improvising—to an ending. “That finished me with Sister Vincent,” he has said, with some acerbity. “You know, there’s a wall around people like her and my parents.” Though Gerry was distressed by this first run-in with authority in the musical field, he was not in the least deterred from his goal, and he pursued his studies not merely on the ocarinas and the family piano but at the home of the Mulligans Negro maid, Lily, who, with her husband, ran a rooming house that was much frequented by traveling musicians. Lily is one of Gerry Mulligan’s pleasanter memories; she was affectionate, easygoing, and not authoritarian. Then, too, she had a player piano, and he would spend hours listening to rolls of ragtime and popular songs. Moreover, she presented him with a ukulele on which hundreds of musicians had written their initials. He treasured the initials on the ukulele, if not the sounds that emanated from it. Speaking to a friend not long ago, he said, “The ukulele is an inadequate instrument—it’s the absolute least.”

Mulligan’s musical career gathered momentum in Kalamazoo, where the family moved in 1938 for what turned out to be a two-year stay. He had been begging his parents in vain to buy him a musical instrument, but there was a clarinet at his school, and he began taking lessons on it from a youthful trumpet player—a not altogether unmixed blessing, he feels. “That guy taught me many bad habits I’ve been years breaking,” he says. “The way I’ve learned the instruments I play is by playing them, by standing up and blowing at sessions. On the whole, I haven’t had much luck with instruction.” Mulligan soon shook the trumpet player and forged ahead on his own, playing clarinet in the school orchestra and writing his first arrangement, for that group. “I’d had no training,” he has said. “I just decided to try it. I chose Lover. I liked the chord progressions. It didn’t occur to me that the tune would be taboo. Well, it was taboo, and that arrangement never did get played. God, I hate that kind of prejudice.” Kalamazoo did afford Mulligan some glimpses of freedom, though; while there, he began to listen to the alluring sounds of traveling dance bands. “I remember one big band, with four brass and four saxes, playing in a loose-jointed kind of swinging arrangement,” he says. “That really exhilarated me. And there was something else about the bands that moved me. It went back to one morning in Marion. I was on my way to school when I saw the Red Nichols bus sitting in front of a hotel. I was in the second or third grade, and that was probably when I first wanted to become a band musician and go on the road. It was a small old Greyhound bus with a canopied observation platform, and on the bus was printed ‘RED NICHOLS AND HIS FIVE PENNIES.’ It all symbolized travel and adventure. I was never the same after that.”

In the ensuing years, Mulligan’s determination to become a jazz musician flagged only once—in Detroit, when he was fourteen. Living next door was a high-spirited family named O’Connor, with a son, Jack, who was a newly ordained priest, and who exerted such magnetism on Mulligan that for several weeks the boy arose at six in the morning to serve Mass for him. “This was the first time I’d been in a religious climate with some humor to it,” he says now. “The O’Connors enjoyed life. For a while, Father Jack had me won over to the point where I wanted to be a priest. Not that I was ready to give up music altogether; I thought there’d be a wide-open field for writing church music. Well, I soon found that the Church just doesn’t have a creative attitude toward music. And another priest told me what I had to look forward to. He said that in eight or ten years I’d finish up at the seminary and be assigned somewhere as an assistant pastor, and then I could organize a choir of parishioners and, he said, ‘have all the music you want.'” This dismal prospect quenched Mulligan’s desire to become a priest, and it may also have influenced his attitude toward religion as a whole. He has not been in church for many years, and describes himself as an agnostic. One explanation of his estrangement from the Church has been offered by Father Norman O’Connor (no relation to Mulligan’s onetime neighbor), the chaplain of the Newman Club at Boston University, who is well known in Boston and elsewhere as “the jazz priest.” Father O’Connor conducts jazz programs on radio and television, writes on jazz for the Boston Globe (though not for his archdiocesan paper, the Pilot), lectures on jazz to teen-age groups, mothers, and other audiences, and is a friend of many jazz musicians, including Mulligan. “Gerry is rebelling against his conception of the Irish Catholic world in which his family was molded—middle-class and rather provincial,” he says. “One explanation of his tremendous drive, of his need to collect recognition, is that he has to prove to his family that his values, so opposed to theirs, do work.”

In the summer of 1943, now in Reading, Mulligan worked as an office boy and saved enough money to buy a clarinet, the first legitimate instrument he ever owned. Shortly thereafter, he acquired the only music teacher he looks back on with reverence—a former dance-band musician named Sammy Correnti. Correnti not only taught Mulligan the clarinet but encouraged him to arrange; casually, one day, he gave Mulligan a score of Dark Eyes written for three saxophones and three brass, and told him to revoice it for four saxophones and four brass. To this day, Mulligan has retained an undimmed admiration for that impromptu method of teaching. “When Correnti gave me the score, I didn’t stop to figure that I didn’t know how to do it, so I went ahead and did it,” he says. “Correnti knew there’d be problems, and that I’d work out the ones I could and ask him about the rest. He had a stimulating attitude toward music and toward kids.” Between lessons with Correnti, Mulligan played clarinet in his high-school orchestra and band, and organized his first professional combination—clarinet, trumpet, piano, and drums. The outfit, which expanded, as time went on, into a big band, played at a series of Saturday-night dances at a parish church, got up by Mulligan himself, with the help of his brothers. Some of the band’s arrangements were stock; the rest were by Mulligan.

Early in 1944, the Mulligan family moved to Philadelphia and Gerry bought a tenor saxophone. When he entered West Philadelphia Catholic High School for Boys as a junior and the owner of two instruments, he was in a mood of high expectancy. It was quickly dashed. The place, he found, was a musical desert, its band a loud organization that was good for football games and little else. With his usual directness, he set out to rectify matters. After a few days at the school, he rounded up some of the less maladroit musicians, organized a dance band, and proceeded to write all its arrangements; he himself played the tenor saxophone. “I’m not too sure why I switched from clarinet to tenor,” he says. “One thing was that there wasn’t any other tenor in the school and there were a couple of clarinets. Then, hearing Coleman Hawkins’ recording of Body and Soul didn’t hurt any. I continued on clarinet, too, and admired Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman, and Irving Fazola. At first, I preferred Shaw’s playing to Goodman’s, because Shaw was more romantic, and had a mellower, bigger sound. As I came to know more about the workings of jazz, I grew to appreciate Goodman more, because there’s more real jazz in his playing. Artie’s playing never had that down-to-earth quality you associate with the older branches of jazz—the quality you can hear in Goodman. Fortunately, there’s room for both. Irving Fazola had such a beautiful tone and such a wonderful melodic line! He sounded as if he was really filling the horn. I’m always amazed that he’s bracketed with the Dixielanders. He’s not limited to their style at all. On alto, there was Johnny Hodges, with Duke Ellington. The tenors I liked were Coleman Hawkins; Corky Corcoran, with Harry James; and Ted Nash and his predecessor, Wolffe Taninbaum, with Les Brown. I was a fan of Ozzie Nelson’s band, too, because its arrangements included a lot of baritone work. The baritone saxophone fascinated me even then.” In the years since, Mulligan has learned to play all the saxophones and clarinets, including the poignant bass clarinet. He’s also a pianist with an assertively unorthodox style of playing, about which his colleagues hold widely different opinions. For some years, he rented a studio in Carnegie Hall, and its chief ornament, in his eyes, was a Baldwin grand piano, which he used for arranging. On one recent trip to Europe, he bought a trumpet and a Flügelhorn, and he can play them, too.

The job of putting the West Philadelphia Catholic High band through its paces did not absorb all of Mulligan’s musical energies. One day, after school, he went to see Johnny Warrington, the leader of the house band at Station WCAU, and proposed that Warrington try him out as an arranger. Curious, and no doubt a trifle flabbergasted, Warrington told the youngster to go ahead, and after a few rejections Mulligan finally sold him two arrangements, at thirty-five dollars each. Warrington, who now lives in New York and is himself a prolific arranger, remembers Mulligan less for his ability than for his stubbornness. Several years after their first meeting, Mulligan, desperately in need of cash, sold several arrangements to an outfit that must have been among the most clamorous in quasi-jazz history. Listening to a rehearsal of his work, he was horror-stricken; he flung down the money and demanded his arrangements back. “Mulligan came around and told me about the incident,” Warrington says, still somewhat astonished at such devotion to art. “He was real mad. He said the guys in the band could play the notes but couldn’t interpret them.”

—

During the war, it was fairly easy for musicians under eighteen find work, and in the summer of 1944, after his junior year in high school, Mulligan landed a job playing tenor with Alex Bartha’s band, which held forth at the Steel Pier in Atlantic City. At the time, one of his colleagues told him, “You’d better concentrate on writing. You don’t play your horn that well”—a bit of advice that, to his annoyance, he frequently received from musicians in later years as well. But he got on smoothly enough in the Bartha band, and when the outfit made plans to go on the road in the fall, he decided to go with it, school or no school. His family did not oppose him—largely because he would have been eighteen and autonomous before the school year ended anyway—and that was the end of Mulligan’s formal non-musical education. As things turned out, however, the Bartha tour never materialized, and Mulligan, out of school and out of work, began hopefully haunting the offices of booking agents. Within a few weeks, he got a job as an arranger of dance tunes and ballads for Tommy Tucker’s orchestra, and in October, still only seventeen, Mulligan went off on tour with the Tucker band, armed with a thirteen-week contract, at a hundred dollars a week.

Although Mulligan had been looking forward since grade school to his first road trip with a professional band, he made a point of showing no enthusiasm during the expedition. “I resolved to be as blasé as anybody else,” he recalls, “and I was.” The tour included a few one-night stands and theatre dates and a month at the Stevens Hotel, in Chicago. There, for the first time, Mulligan had a chance to hear some of the innovators of modern jazz—the Billy Eckstine band, with, among others, Dizzie Gillespie and Fats Navarro—and there, as a direct consequence, his relationship with Tommy Tucker foundered. “I was much impressed by the Eckstine band,” he recalls. “I listened to it, and afterward wrote for Tommy in a way that made his hair curl. When the thirteen weeks were up, he told me that our association had been mutually fruitful but that the band was no longer of any use to me, or I to the band.” On the tour, Mulligan was introduced not only to modern jazz but to marijuana; one of Tucker’s alto players, appointing himself the young man’s Mephistopheles, had started him on “pot,” as the musicians call it, and Mulligan had come to like the general euphoria it produced, though he was far from a frequent user.

Returning to Philadelphia, Mulligan got a job as a staff arranger with the WCAU band, now headed by a young pianist-arranger named Elliot Lawrence. Mulligan was eager to play as well as to arrange, but Lawrence rarely let him perform, on the ground that he was an amateur—an attitude that still rankles, fifteen years later. “My playing may have been amateurish, but it was different,” Mulligan says. “Most of the kids at that time were playing a hard, honking style of tenor, and were running all over their horn. My approach was gentler. I preferred to compose on my horn—to compose a real simple melody that came off.” In view of what Lawrence thought of Mulligan’s playing, and the fact that Mulligan made no secret of what he thought of most of his colleagues playing, it is surprising that he was able to hold on to his job with Lawrence, but hold on to it he did, for about a year. The end came as the result of a practical joke of which Mulligan was the butt. During an intermission at a dance held at a Catholic school—one of the rare occasions when he played with the band his colleagues passed around a bottle of whiskey at whirling speed, all pretending to drink heartily from it; the only one actually to take a swig each time was Mulligan, and he finally passed out. When he came to, he felt humiliated and coldly angry, and soon afterward he gave his notice. “Around this time, I began to be disillusioned about some musicians,” he recalls. “There had been this incident, and there were the stories they’d tell about their escapades on the road. They sounded like adolescent fools, and proud of it.” All in all, Mulligan has had his troubles with his fellow-musicians. In one episode, a year or two after the passing of the bottle, a powerfully built tenor saxophonist, outraged at the meagre solo space that an arrangement of Mulligan’s afforded him, seized the slim young arranger by the throat and banged his head industriously against a wall.

One of Mulligan’s most fruitful, if most unsettling, musical relationships was with the late Charlie Parker, a brilliant alto saxophonist, who was—and remains—-the most influential figure in modern jazz. The two men met one night at a jazz concert in Philadelphia’s Academy of Music, where Mulligan was playing with the Elliot Lawrence orchestra—the regular tenor had broken his wrist—and Parker was playing with Dizzy Gillespie’s quintet. Parker and Mulligan began to talk, and over the next couple of days saw a good deal of each other. Quickly realizing that Mulligan had received almost no encouragement in his playing, Parker invited him to come and perform with the Gillespie outfit at a Philadelphia night club—a signal honor for a young and untried saxophonist. “I was scared to death, but Bird got me up on the bandstand,” Mulligan says. “İ was delighted and proud.” Not long afterward, Parker left for New York, and Mulligan occasionally came up to hear him and other musicians play. One day, Mulligan went up to Parker’s room and got to know him better. “It was the first time I’d been around when he turned on—injected heroin into his veins,” Mulligan recalls. “He left me in the room with the funny papers and went into the bathroom. Some time later, he told me that he had become involved at thirteen or fourteen, when some older guy turned him on. He wasn’t any proselytizer. In fact, he didn’t want me around when he was turning on, and he would talk at length about the evils of drug addiction. Bird was often either in total misery, wallowing in self-pity, or completely exultant. He felt guilty about guys’ turning on because of him—kids who admired him so much musically that they wanted to do everything he did. I later came to understand that feeling of responsibility. But he himself never did try to get anyone to turn on. A lot of idiots just thought they could play the way he did if they went on junk.”

Mulligan was coming to New York so often that presently he rented an apartment here, and it was through some New York friends that, in January, 1946, he got his best job yet, as an arranger for Gene Krupa’s band, which was then playing in Los Angeles. Charlie Parker was playing there, too, at a club called Billy Berg’s, and on Mulligan’s second day in Los Angeles the two met on the street. Parker asked Mulligan if he had any marijuana. As it happened, he did have a small supply, though not on his person, and he offered to take some to Berg’s that night. “Be cool,” Parker warned. “This town is hot.” With the elaborate craftiness of a novice, Mulligan proceeded to hide two marijuana cigarettes in his fountain pen. Later that night, he and Parker reflectively strolled along Vine Street, sharing a cigarette, when they were picked up by a couple of young plainclothesmen. (‘”Those guys looked like real enthusiastic college football players, and not like fuzz at all,” Mulligan has since observed ruefully.) Parker, who had the cigarette at the moment, disposed of it skillfully, and a search revealed just one tiny seed of marijuana in his pocket—not enough to hold him. Things were tougher for Mulligan. One of the plain clothesmen opened his pen as a matter of course and found the other cigarette, and Mulligan was later convicted for possessing marijuana. The sentence was mild—a year’s probation in the custody of a lawyer named John Gluskin, who was part owner of the Krupa band Gluskin arranged for the young man to be permitted to tour with the band while on probation.

Mulligan spent a year with Krupa, not only arranging but often playing either the tenor or the alto saxophone. Meanwhile, the band travelled from one end of the country to the other, and Mulligan, who was beginning to loathe one-night stands, cheap hotels, and quick trips, found the pressure simply too much for him. Every now and then he blew up. One night in Chicago, Krupa turned over the drums for a few numbers, as he often did, to Joe Dale, the manager of the band, who was an ardently heavy drummer. Mulligan felt that Dale’s pronounced back beat destroyed the soul of his arrangements, and as the band was playing a Mulligan score, its author lost his temper, spun around, and yelled, “God, Joe, what are you doing?” Although Krupa, a firm leader, was disturbed by this breach of professionalism, he pretty much let the incident pass. But he was unable to ignore another Mulligan explosion, which occurred during a one-night stand in Wildwood, New Jersey. The band had been working and traveling phrenetically, and its playing, in Mulligan’s opinion, was shoddy. At the end of one set, he rose and, in plain hearing of the audience, upbraided the group in general, and then Krupa in particular for his inability or unwillingness to set higher standards. “I told them all to go to hell,” he recalls. The next day, at a meeting of the band, Krupa lit into the band first, and then into Mulligan specifically for inexcusable behavior in public. Krupa proceeded to fire Mulligan, but he holds no grudge against his former employe. “I had to admire the guy,” he said recently. “You get too much obsequiousness in this business. There was no obsequiousness to him, which I dug.”

The early part of 1947 was another period of odd jobs, false starts, and frustration for Mulligan. Back in Philadelphia, he tried studying harmony and musical theory under a private teacher, but he quit at the end of two weeks; he was too much of an empiricist to accept rules and formulas from books—especially since all the books were written by men with no background in jazz. In his gloom, Mulligan could not stay long in any one place. He shuttled between New York, where he did some arranging, and Philadelphia, where he had an audition with a society band leader that was a precipitate failure. Over the previous few years, he had acquired perhaps half a dozen instruments, and now he sold all of them except one—a baritone saxophone. He had scarcely ever played the big horn, and he set to work to master it. Ever since his childhood, he had been fascinated by the range, power, and capacity of the instrument, and he was not altogether uninfluenced by the practical consideration that the jazz world was swarming with young tenors and altos, while young baritones were extremely rare. As usual, he taught himself, and, as usual, he learned fast. In this one respect, at least, that spell of joblessness and despondency was by no means arid.

In the mid-forties, there were not many places in the United States where modern jazzmen like Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie could find any sort of encouragement—some night clubs on Fifty-second Street and in Harlem, and a few scattered pockets of rebellion in the Negro sections of other Eastern cities. The rest of the country, in the modern jazzman’s view, was a vast, square desert. Not long after his engagement at Billy Berg’s, Parker fed to New York. “Nobody understands our kind of music out on the Coast,” he told the critic Leonard Feather. “They hated it, Leonard. I can’t tell you how I yearned for New York…. As I left the Coast, they had a band at Billy Berg’s with somebody playing a bass sax and a drummer playing on the temple blocks and ching- ching-ching cymbals… and the people liked it! That was the kind of thing that helped to crack my wig.” Even New York was far from perfect, offering little steady work, but it did promise companionship. A musician who was unable to make much of an impression on the outside world could at least tell his story to an audience of his peers, and there were marathon jam sessions, sometimes lasting two or three days, in any apartment that happened to be available, or in a hall when the jazzmen could scrape together the money to hire one. “There was a spirit then, the pianist George Wallington recalls. “We were engrossed in what we were finding out, and we were inspired by each other. Everybody just loved to play. Most of the time, we didn’t sleep. We’d fall out for an hour or so, and go back to playing. It’s nothing like that today. Everybody’s going out on his own, trying to make a success.”

Inevitably, Mulligan, too, was drawn to settle in New York, and again, some time in 1947, he installed himself in an apartment here. (He calculates that, over the years, he has lived in about twenty places in the city.) He supported himself largely by writing arrangements for Claude Thornhill’s big band, and, as he says, he “aced” himself into any jam session he could find. At the sessions, there were heads of court who decided whether a newcomer would be admitted or barred, and Mulligan passed all crucial inspections, although some of his companions still had mixed feelings about his playing. As an arranger, too, he was making substantial progress, partly because he renewed what had been a slight acquaintance with Gil Evans, the head arranger of the Thornhill band. Evans, then about thirty-five and a stubborn, self-taught pragmatist, had evolved an intricate, richly tapestried personal style, and this had an important influence on Mulligan, among other youngsters. In 1947, Evans was living in a one-room basement apartment on West 55th Street, next to the Gotham Hotel, and that room became the birthplace of at least one major development in modern jazz. Arrangers and instrumentalists went there to play records and talk, and some of the discussions are now regarded as historic. The room and something of what it meant to Mulligan and the others have been described by the composer George Russell: “A very big bed took up a lot of the place; there was one big lamp, and a cat named Becky. The linoleum was battered, and there was a little court outside. Inside, it was always very dark. The feeling of the room was timelessness. Whenever you got there, you wouldn’t care about conditions outside. You couldn’t tell whether it was day or night, summer or winter, and it didn’t matter. At all hours, the place was loaded with people, who came in and out. Mulligan, though, was there all the time. He was very clever, witty, and saucy, the way he is now. I remember his talking about a musician who was getting a lot of attention by copying another. ‘A Sammy Kaye is bad enough,’ Gerry said. ‘A bastard Sammy Kaye is too much’. Gerry had a chip on his shoulder. He had more or less the same difficulties that made us all bitter and hostile. He was immensely talented, and he didn’t have enough of an opportunity to exercise his talent. Gil’s influence had a softening effect on him and on all of us. Gil, who loved musical companionship, was the mother hen—the haven in the storm. He was gentle, wise, profound, and extremely perceptive, and he always seemed to have a comforting answer for any kind of problem. He appeared to have no bitterness. As for Gil’s musical influence on Gerry, I think that Gerry, with his talent, would have emerged as a major force in jazz anyway. His talent would have surmounted his lack of formal education. But Gil helped. Gil was, and is, one of the strong personalities in written jazz, and I’m sure he influenced all of us. Gerry, however, was better able than any of the rest of us to channel Gil’s influences—including the modern classical writers, whose records Gil played—into mainstream jazz. Gerry was always interested in the way each of us felt about music, but he was impatient with anything that moved too far away from the mainstream.”

Out of the turbulence in the Evans apartment grew some extraordinary projects. Evans himself was strongly stimulated by Alban Berg, among other classical composers, and several times he and his friends, each carrying a score, trooped uptown to the Juilliard School of Music to attend rehearsals of a Berg composition, the “Kammer-konzert.” And—-what was of far more moment, from a jazz point of view—the discussions in the apartment eventually led to the Miles Davis Capitol recordings of 1949-50, which launched what was known throughout the world for years afterward as “cool” jazz. These records stemmed in part from the experience that Evans and Mulligan had had in writing for the Thornhill band, which made use of a wider and more varied range of instrumental colors than any other jazz orchestra of the time—French horns and a tuba among them. The records also stemmed in part from the daring conceptions of players like Parker, Monk, Gillespie, and the pianist Bud Powell—frontiersmen who had done a good deal of work in small ensembles that relied on improvisation and whose playing was aggressive, challenging, hot, frequently hard, and at tempos that were inclined to be unnerving. Now Mulligan and Evans felt that they could retain the searching spirit of the frontiersmen but make the music more subtle, more variously colored, and better organized. Discussions began in the apartment about the smallest number of instruments that could express the harmonic range achieved by the Thornhill band. Evans and Mulligan, recruiting other arrangers and instrumentalists as they went along—among them Miles Davis, a trumpeter who was developing an intensely introspective sound and style—proceeded to work out the problems involved. Eventually, they decided that the instrumentation should consist of trumpet, trombone, French horn, tuba, alto saxophone, baritone saxophone, piano, bass, and drums. Next, the players were recruited, and Davis, whose organizational abilities were vital to the whole project, was installed as the leader. Late in the summer of 1948, after some weeks of rehearsals in hired halls, the new ensemble opened a three-week engagement at the Royal Roost, at Broadway and Forty-seventh Street. Davis insisted that a sign be placed in front of the club reading, “Arrangements by Gerry Mulligan, Gil Evans, and John Lewis”—the first time that any experimental arrangers in jazz, except for Duke Ellington, had ever received billboard credit. At that time, the Royal Roost was probably the only night club in the country that would have taken a chance with this new and forbidding type of jazz, and even it failed to extend the Davis group’s stay after the first three weeks. The Davis outfit has never again appeared in public as a unit, but a few months after the engagement at the Royal Roost the players reassembled at the studios of Capitol Records to make the first of what turned out to be a series of single records. Representing a new approach to collective expression, the discs immediately caught on with modern jazzmen, but it took some time for the critics to grasp their importance, and it took the public even longer. Now reissued on a long-playing record, the experiments of Mulligan, Evans, and Davis constitute one of the most influential achievements in the history of jazz.

Before the records were made, Gerry Mulligan reached one of the lowest of all his low points, and it involved something far more painful than the economic obstacle course of modern jazz in the late forties. Not yet sure of his direction in music, and with his nerves keyed to a high pitch, Mulligan became addicted to heroin. Today, not having taken the drug for several years, he talks about his addiction candidly, without bravado or self-pity. “The tension had grown inside me, ” he says. “I started reacting more to the situation in town. When I first came to New York, I’d been in contact briefly with some of the seamier elements, including those involved with pot and junk, but I’d never spent much time with them. I was young and naive, and completely wrapped up in music. But life gets more complex as you mature. Besides, just making a living became harder. Anyway, I had my first hard stuff—heroin—in 1947 or ’48, about the period of the discussions at Gil’s. It was a one- or two-time affair. A friend of mine thought I’d like to try the stuff. The first time I had the needle, I jumped ten feet, and felt that was the end of that. The next time, I liked it. Those were the days of widespread use of junk around town. I knew some of the guys were in bad shape, but I didn’t associate their condition with junk. I figured they were in bad shape anyway. None of us really seemed to know what we were doing or where we were going. Junk could bring you a dream world. The daily process of living was dull and dreary; you had to scrounge for an income when you just wanted to play your horn. In a way, I suppose, we were pretty idealistic. It was all music with us. Junk seemed to help us through a bad time. Well, a few months after that first shot I was well hooked, physically and mentally. Within a year, it had become a tremendous problem. Junk had a sedative effect on me. I had had a lot of energy, and it had been hard for me to sit still. I was a slow writer, and wanted some way to be able to sit down and think clearly, but heroin didn’t do the trick; after a while I couldn’t concentrate at all, and then I got to the point where I couldn’t finish an arrangement. I did manage to play, though. Otherwise, I might have been dead.”

As Mulligan got deeper into the heroin habit, he became increasingly bitter, unruly, and disheveled. He wore a ragged beard and what one of his friends called “a Prince Valiant haircut.” Occasionally, he would get a job, and would try to pull himself together, but inevitably the end would be catastrophic. In November, 1948, for instance, Benny Goodman, who was then organizing a modern-jazz band and had heard the Davis outfit at the Royal Roost, asked Mulligan for some arrangements. Mulligan not only agreed to supply them but asked for a job in the band, and Goodman gave him one. For two weeks, Mulligan took part in rehearsals, but he was plainly growing glummer and glummer, and finally Goodman took him aside and asked him what was wrong. Mulligan plunged into a diatribe on the mediocrity of the band, and asked how so expressive a musician as Goodman could endure it. “It must have been a painful experience for him,” Mulligan says now. “I guess he lacked confidence at that moment, which was why he was trying to start a modern band in the first place. And then to have this kid calling him on something that he felt had been his particular skill—shaping a band—was too much.” Too much or not, Goodman, a taciturn man, refused to be drawn into a discussion, but the next day he fired Mulligan. Before that, Mulligan had completed four arrangements, and now Goodman decided to keep only one of them—another blow to Mulligan’s already tottering ego. Moreover, there was some delay in the payment for that arrangement, and one afternoon when the Goodman band was auditioning for a group of people at a studio of the Music Corporation of America, Mulligan broke in and shouted, “Dig this cat with two million dollars and he doesn’t want to pay me for one lousy arrangement!” Several years later, after Mulligan himself had had some experience as a leader, he spoke to Goodman about the incident, and was relieved to find that Goodman harbored no rancor. Eventually, Mulligan grew so thoroughly disgusted and shocked with himself that he went to Washington, where his mother and father were living, and rented a room near their house. There he forced himself through a week of “cold turkey”—-straight-out withdrawal, which is perhaps the severest of all ordeals for the narcotics addict—and then got a job in a bank. After he had worked there for a few days, he went out to lunch one noon and didn’t come back, and a few days after that he dropped in at a friend’s house and resumed his addiction. At this time, a rescuer appeared in Mulligan’s life. Gale Madden, a tall, dark-haired woman of Messianic determination who had been a model and pianist on the West Coast, had decided some years earlier that her mission was to release creative artists from alcoholism and narcotics addiction. Setting up a project called Creative Research, she found a backer and went out looking for patients. In Hollywood, Charlie Parker told her that Mulligan had become an addict; she came to New York in search of him, and tracked him down in Washington. She persuaded him to return to New York with her, and for the next two years he was her sole patient. An untrained believer in the power of suggestion, she would attempt to influence Mulligan in his sleep, repeating assurances that he no longer needed heroin and that he could rediscover and reanimate himself in his music. Mulligan responded to this sort of treatment and gave up heroin. Soon he was reviving old arrangements and writing new ones. Among the latter was his first that did not include the piano—an experiment that he came to look back on fondly, for in his small combinations he has almost never included a piano. Miss Madden, who had a strong practical streak, assembled a rehearsal band to play the arrangements and hired halls for them to rehearse in.

Late in the summer of 1950, though, Mulligan and Miss Madden ran out of money. The resourceful therapist had another idea. Mulligan was then living in the West Seventies, and one fine afternoon the members of the Mulligan rehearsal band assembled at the West Seventy-second Street entrance to Central Park. Lugging their instruments, they trudged up a hillside to a slight eminence overlooking a big pond. There they had a respectable rehearsal, attended by children, dogs, and other passersby. Back at the same stand the following afternoon, however, the band was dispersed by authority, in the person of a park attendant.

Seven years later, in the summer of 1957, Mulligan and his current quartet, in formal dress, were among the headliners of the first jazz concert in the Theatre Under the Stars, in Central Park, not far from the scene of the earlier rout. An announcer introduced him with the usual deferential clichés, and Mulligan managed his men, himself, and the audience with the quick, sensitive skill at communication that has become characteristic of him. Afterward, a friend asked him whether he had been amused or embittered by his welcome back to the Park. “I almost made several appropriate comments,” Mulligan replied, with an ambivalent smile that has also become characteristic, “but, manfully, I controlled the impulse.”

—

One of the most remarkable things about the remarkable form of expression known as jazz, which in the past sixty years has become familiar in the remotest regions of the globe, is that its collective history has been made by hundreds and thousands of fiercely individualistic players. This history has consequently been a full one, marked by skirmish after skirmish on constantly shifting terrain, yet because it has been so brief, we still have in our midst survivors of every one of the campaigns. The eldest of these veterans, who started out working by day as longshoremen, cigar makers, and the like, and playing jazz by night—as much for pleasure as for money—in a style that was often personal and erratic, are seldom heard from nowadays, however. And the succeeding generation-professionals from the start, more sophisticated and more resourceful but no less fiery—have had hard going in recent years; in the thirties most of the best of them played in large jazz bands of a sort that has almost ceased to exist, and some of their triumphs are recorded in those hagiological listings called discographies. Quite a few of these musicians were sweepingly proficient soloists, able to express through improvisation a range of ideas and emotions that made many a music student eye his textbook and teacher with skepticism, and in general they showed that an organization of perhaps fifteen men could swing with a drive exhilarating to players and listeners alike. In the course of time, though, these musicians gave way to the first phalanx of what are known as “modern jazzmen”—somewhat more self-conscious musicians who worked at expanding or renewing the harmonic and rhythmic language of jazz, and in doing so tended for a time to drop melody into third place. Inevitably, the Jacobins-—men like the late alto saxophonist Charlie Parker, the trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, and the pianist Bud Powell—were themselves followed by a generation with even newer ideas. This second phalanx of modern jazzmen, while admiring the sometimes craggy advances of their immediate predecessors and doing their best to consolidate them, felt that it was possible, and agreeable as well, to concentrate on melodic lyricism again, and some of them are profitably working along that line today, though they, too, are being challenged by newer forces—principally by insistently exploratory soloists, on one side, and increasingly adventurous composer-arrangers, on the other. All these groups, and others, coexist, though their fortunes vary; it is as if Palestrina, Bach, Mozart, Debussy, and Webern were alive at the same time. Many young jazz musicians, however, derive no satisfaction from this extraordinary state of affairs; far from honoring their elders, the young in jazz often know little about them, and care less.

How little they care became evident one Saturday evening two summers ago in a large tent at the Timber Grove Club, on Great South Bay, Long Island, when, in the course of a jazz festival, a group of aging musicians met to put on a special kind of revival meeting. The musical director of the festival was Rex Stewart, a middle-aged cornettist who is an alumnus of Duke Ellington’s orchestra and now performs with Eddie Condon’s outfit; he had reassembled as many members of the Fletcher Henderson unit of the nineteen-twenties-—one of the world’s first large jazz bands——as he could, filling the remaining positions with jazzmen of the same era, or a slightly later one. The musicians looked forward to playing together again, especially since the world of jazz had been treating them badly; as a rule, night-club owners, bookers, and record-company executives feel that there is no public for jazz musicians in their forties and fifties, and some members of the reconstituted band had become post-office workers, bank guards, or taxi-drivers. Others had jobs with minor rhythm-and-blues bands. A very few-like the tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins—had done better, but even they had remained in jazz under less than optimum conditions, artistic or financial.

If a reunion of a great classical group—the Thibaud-Cortot-Casals trio, say—had ever been held at Great South Bay, or anywhere else, young classical musicians would have arrived in swarms. For the Great South Bay Festival, which brought together such eminent jazz musicians as Hawkins, the trombonist J. C. Higginbotham, and the alto saxophonist Hilton Jefferson for the first time in years, only one prominent modern jazzman made the two-hour trip out from New York—a tense, skinny, red-headed young man named Gerry (Gerald Joseph) Mulligan, who is a strikingly successful composer, arranger, and baritone saxophonist. Then thirty, Mulligan had already played a decisive part in one of the most recent waves of jazz reform—the wave that has led to a reemphasis on melody and, with it, multilinear collective improvisation. Among other things, he had been one of the chief arrangers for an unusually influential set of recordings, made by the trumpeter Miles Davis and a nine-piece ensemble in 1949 and 1950, which launched what was long to be known to the world as “cool” jazz—a more cohesive, suppler idiom than had been achieved in modern jazz before, with a wider range of dynamics and a lighter attack. Later, he had gone on to organize and lead small, severely rehearsed combinations of his own, which did much to create the large audience that now exists for modern jazz. Then, too, Mulligan, a tart, voluble man who has no trouble getting his ideas across to his fellow-players or his audiences, had been one of the most articulate exegetes of the new movement. Yet even though he was in the forefront of the innovators, he had continued to listen to and to learn from the older traditionalists. Modern jazz, in his view, was not—and is not—a revolution against an ancien régime that would be better off buried. He saw it as a natural evolution of the old jazz language, and he has great respect for his musical ancestors.

That Saturday morning, Mulligan, wearing a sports shirt and tailored shorts, left his midtown apartment and drove out to Great South Bay in a light-blue Jaguar. He went to listen, but, since he always hopes to find a jam session, he took his saxophone along. When he arrived at the tent, a loosely swinging hand, led jointly by the bassist Bob Haggart and the trumpeter Yank Lawson, was performing in a style that might be called swing-era Dixieland. For a moment, Mulligan stood listening, and then he got into a conversation with Louis Lorillard, who in 1954 had become the founder of the first and largest of the American jazz festivals—the one at Newport. Lorillard has consistently admired Mulligan’s intelligence, taste, and candor, and that afternoon he asked him what improvements he might suggest for the Newport Festival, which had attracted increasingly large audiences each year but had declined precipitously in prestige among musicians. Characteristically ready with a strong opinion, Mulligan replied that the Newport Festival had been crowding too many units into each of its programs; no one group had enough time to relax, build, and relax again. Spread things out a little, he advised. Then, having made his point, Mulligan was visited by a compulsion to play—a compulsion on which he almost always acts. He picked up his horn and moved up to the bandstand, to the evident satisfaction of the other players. This was the first time he had ever played with either Lawson or Haggart, but he sounded as if he had rehearsed with their unit for weeks. Meanwhile, Rex Stewart was basking on the beach, resting up for the Fletcher Henderson revival meeting in the evening. Somehow, word reached him that Mulligan had come and was playing, and Stewart, who feels for Mulligan a wholeness of devotion that he extends to few other young jazzmen, hurriedly changed his clothes, ran for his horn, and moved onto the stand. He and Mulligan had never played together, and this was an experience Stewart had been looking forward to for months. The instantaneous, hot rapport between the pair fired all the musicians on the stand into a booting ensemble rideout.

That evening, during the Henderson reunion, there was an extra baritone saxophone in the band. Mulligan, still in sports shirt and shorts, and still carrying his horn, had bought a ticket and filed into the big tent with the rest of the customers. Then he had slipped into the shadows alongside the bandstand, and when the concert of the patriarchs got under way, he began playing softly. At a wave from Stewart, he moved onto the stand, took up a position between Hawkins and Higginbotham, and played a strong solo. The old-timers seemed pleased to have him there, and he was pleased to be there. The last the audience saw of Mulligan, much later that night, he was walking out of the tent into the darkness, still playing.

—

“There’s no other young musician who can fit anywhere into jazz, the way Mulligan can,” an observer noted not long after that performance. “He’s at home all along the line from Dixieland to Thelonious Monk.” (As a matter of fact, Mulligan did record with Monk, a uniquely advanced modernist, a month after his performance at Great South Bay.) Certainly, Mulligan takes a singular pleasure in his roots as a jazz musician, and he is frequently eloquent on the subject, both in conversation and in articles that he writes for the jazz press. For instance, in a piece that appeared in Down Beat a few years ago, called “The Importance of Jazz Tradition,” he came out powerfully in favor of “the musician who not only knows why he’s blowing but the history of the language he’s using,” and went on to list the principal influences on his own work. These included not only Parker and Gillespie, as might have been expected, but a host of other musicians, with widely divergent styles, backgrounds, and intentions, among them Duke Ellington and many of his soloists, notably the baritone saxophonist Harry Carney; the alto saxophonist Pete Brown, whose attitude toward his instrument Mulligan likes (“He’s a big man, but… he plays with a tremendous sensitivity to the horn”); the late tenor saxophonist Lester Young; and the drummers Dave Tough and Sonny Greer. “One result of being affected by musicians on all instruments,” Mulligan wrote, “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 I learned from. ” In conclusion, Mulligan described a project that has long appealed to him. “There is one plan I have in mind with regard to the jazz tradition and its continuing cross-influences,” he said. “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…. But first I’d want the group to 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.” The project has yet to be carried out—many musicians would find it unthinkable to unite old and young in a regular band—but if it ever is, Mulligan is likely to be its leader.

As an exponent of both the traditional and the modern, Mulligan has inevitably been caught in a cross fire of criticism. Jazz enthusiasts of the traditional persuasion often argue that modern jazz, with its harmonic and rhythmic refinements, is not jazz at all, and a few of them excommunicate not only most of Mulligan’s contemporaries but Mulligan himself. On the other hand, some purist partisans of modern jazz feel that certain elements in Mulligan’s work—the occasional suggestion of the old-time two-beat rhythmic feel, and even a pervasive humor—indicate indecent roots in Dixieland. Mulligan doesn’t seem much concerned about traditionalist criticism, but his attitude toward the modern purists is one of defiance. “I’m not at all ashamed of my Dixieland past,” he recently told a critic. “I partly grew up on that kind of music.” Sometimes he is even willing to confess to a Dixieland present. In England, a couple of years ago, he met a British musician named Chris Barber, who said, by way of introducing himself, “I’m a Dixieland leader.” Mulligan answered, “So am I.”

If Mulligan has his detractors, he also has more than his share of defenders. It is generally agreed, for instance, that, more than any other musician except the pianists George Shearing and Dave Brubeck, who have organized immensely popular small combinations, he has been responsible for enlarging the jazz public in the past decade. He appears to have been especially successful among devotees of classical music who had previously regarded jazz as a swamp inhabited by lachrymose pop singers and Lombardo-like bands. A few years ago, record-store owners here and on the West Coast began observing that customers in the habit of buying classical records, particularly chamber music, were getting interested in the Gerry Mulligan quartet and were then going on to investigate units like the Modern Jazz Quartet and the Jimmy Giuffre 3. Mulligan commands the middle ground, and, for one, the young and decidedly experimental jazz composer George Russell honors him for it. “Gerry has a quality of uncluttered thinking that allows him to absorb any influence quickly and apply it to mainstream jazz,” he has said. “Gerry has proved that it’s possible to be an original synthesizer. He is a kind of reservoir of all the influences, but the music he plays and writes becomes his own distinctive addition to the language.” George Wein, who is the musical director of the Newport Jazz Festival, the owner of the Storyville night club in Boston, and a pianist himself, refuses to classify Mulligan. “Gerry is a jazz musician, not a modernist or a traditionalist,” Wein says, “He doesn’t have to search for roots. He’s never, for example, pseudo-funky. [In current jazz argot, “funky,” which once meant malodorous, is a term of final approbation, meaning earthy, unpretentious, and rooted in the blues.] And he is also a complete leader. That’s his greatest attribute. He’ll be the leader of any group he sits in with, and his own unit is a complete reflection of his personality. They play his moods and yet ex- press themselves. That’s the way it is with Duke Ellington, too. In fact, Gerry is the personality closest to Duke Ellington existing in modern jazz. Musically, he’s not yet of Ellington’s stature, of course—he hasn’t fully matured. But he has the potential. I know hardly any jazz musicians, colored or white, who don’t respect Mulligan as a musician. In fact, he’s one of the few white musicians that Negroes do respect. As a writer-player, he is not an experimenter in the sense that he is consciously trying to be different, but he is also never satisfied and is constantly concerned with developing his music. He works through the tradition, however, not against it—another way he’s like Duke. Physically, too, Mulligan stands out, just as Duke does. He doesn’t have to wear a beard. He is concerned with clothes, as Duke is, and he chooses material and cuts with a slight but distinguishable personal flair. Many of the modernists have taken to wearing Brooks Brothers clothes, but Gerry’s apparel, although often in that idiom, is just a little different.”

Wein’s assistant in charge of public relations, Charles Bourgeois, is a crisp arbiter of taste in sartorial matters, and thanks to him many young jazzmen, arriving in Boston in comfortably casual attire, have paid a visit to the Andover Shop in Cambridge and emerged demonstrably chastened. Yet even Bourgeois can find no fault with Mulligan’s taste in clothes. “Gerry doesn’t wear the Brooks-Andover style like a uniform,” he has declared. “He’s an eclectic. He’s taken the best from that school of haberdashery and made it conform to his needs. He buys a bolt of green gabardine in Europe, for instance-—a shade Charlie Davidson, of the Andover Shop, would never have stocked—and he has Charlie make a suit from it. The suit is just right—just the right contrast with his hair.”

—

Mulligan has not always been so attentive to his clothes, and for a time in the late nineteen-forties, when existence was hazardous and grubby for jazz musicians, he did, in fact, wear a ragged beard. Back then, as he is quick to point out, he was an extremely troubled person, and often an extremely difficult one to get along with. The youngest of four brothers, brought up in what he feels was a narrow, conventional, and authoritarian Irish Catholic home, he had a driving interest in music before he entered kindergarten, and in the course of a highly peripatetic childhood (his father, a management engineer, was obliged to move about the East Coast and the Middle West) he learned, with almost no formal help, to play the clarinet and the various saxophones, as well as to arrange and compose. Breaking away from his family in 1944, at the age of seventeen, he left high school in Philadelphia to take a brief traveling job as an arranger with the Tommy Tucker band, and over the next several years, as he describes it, his life was characterized by intermittent musical progress and fairly steady psychological deterioration. After the expedition with Tucker’s outfit, he had a series of jobs as an arranger or a saxophonist, or both, with various small and large bands, including Claude Thornhill’s and Gene Krupa’s, but he was sharp-tongued, willful, and intolerant of bad playing, and he had one calamitous run-in after another with his employers. Meanwhile, though, he was moving ahead rapidly as a musician, mastering the old and new idioms of jazz and developing his own style, and in 1947, settling down for a while in New York, he joined a group of like-minded young jazz instrumentalists and arrangers in the experiments that led to the historic Miles Davis recordings.

Throughout this period, his morale bounced up and down—farther down each time. Sometime in the late forties, he became addicted to heroin (an addiction he has often discussed openly), and by the end of the decade, though he still could, and did, play his saxophone, he was unable to concentrate on composing or arranging. Finally, after trying with no success to break himself of the habit, he met a temporary savior in the person of Gale Madden, a tall, dark-haired woman from Los Angeles, whose two chief interests—encouraging musicians to experiment, and curing creative people of drug addiction, by the power of suggestion—complemented his own. Concentrating on Mulligan, Miss Madden persuaded him to arrange again, hired rehearsal bands to try out his scores, and actually succeeded in getting him to give up heroin. But the scratching for existence in New York was as painful as ever, and in the summer of 1950 Mulligan headed for the West Coast. It was a turbulent journey. In Reading, Pennsylvania, where he stopped to visit one of his brothers, the police picked him up, and he learned that his parents, fearing that he was still an addict, and believing that he might be cured in jail, had been responsible for the arrest. When Mulligan was examined and no new needle marks were found, he was released, and he proceeded to hitchhike to Albuquerque, where he played briefly in a steak house, and then on to Los Angeles, where, under Miss Madden’s wing once more, he landed a job arranging for Stan Kenton’s band.

Although Kenton, whose musical tastes ran to massive, blaringly complex effects, was anything but beguiled by Mulligan’s relatively simple, lean, flowing, multilinear writing, the musicians in the band were delighted, and their approval kept the young arranger on the payroll long enough for him to write ten arrangements and an original composition, Young Blood, which quickly became-—and still is—one of the most popular numbers in the Kenton repertoire. With the money Mulligan made from these scores, he and Gale Madden rented a studio and began to assemble a rehearsal band. At this time, Mulligan was fascinated by a device that has since become one of the hallmarks of his various quartets and sextets—that of eliminating the piano from the rhythm section. (The notion, Mulligan recalls, originated with Gale Madden, who had tried it in one of the rehearsal bands she recruited for him in New York.) He plunged into the experiment with enthusiasm and kept at it well into the spring of 1952. Then the rehearsals ended. Miss Madden simply dropped him, and he once more fell into despair and self-doubt. Though he managed to secure occasional playing jobs, he didn’t have the will power to keep the rehearsal band going. Again, he started taking heroin.

That same spring, Mulligan met the man who eventually became his Hurok—a quiet, intent twenty-five- year-old intellectual named Richard Bock, who was studying English literature, philosophy, psychology, and anthropology at the City College of Los Angeles. In 1947, Bock had dropped out of college to take a job with Discovery Records, and in the next few years he had recorded Dizzy Gillespie, Red Norvo, and other musicians. Though some of these recordings were lauded by jazzmen and critics, sales hadn’t amounted to much, and in 1950 Bock had returned to college, with the idea of becoming a teacher. In his spare time, to support himself, he had begun working as a press agent for a small Los Angeles night club called the Haig, where Red Norvo’s trio was playing six nights a week; on Monday, Norvo’s night off, Bock produced special programs there. He was familiar with Mulligan’s records, and had long been impressed by his work both as a player and as a writer. When the two men got to know each other, he was further impressed by Mulligan’s quick intelligence and the fact that he knew what he wanted to do and was determined not to compromise. Shortly afterward, Bock hired Mulligan as a soloist for the off-night productions at the Haig, and within a month Mulligan had organized a pianoless quartet, with himself on baritone; Chet Baker, a lyrical young player, on trumpet; Bob Whitlock on bass; and Chico Hamilton on drums. At first, the quartet puzzled practically everybody. The two horns tried to improvise simultaneously for relatively long stretches of time—a feat that was a good deal harder than the usual procedure of having one solo while the other provides background riffs or is silent. At first, the spontaneous counterpoint sometimes faltered and only the bass and drums were heard, but the quartet quickly fused into an unusually flowing unit. “The feeling,” Bock says, “was as if they were talking to each other on their horns, interweaving vocalized lines.”

In June of 1952, Bock made a decision that was to end his incipient career as a teacher and Mulligan’s career as an itinerant and economically insecure jazz sideman. Scraping together a few hundred dollars from a couple of friends and converting another friend’s living room into a makeshift studio, he recorded the Gerry Mulligan quartet playing Lullaby of the Leaves and Bernie’s Tune, and issued a single disc under the label of Pacific Jazz. Only a thousand copies were made, but they sold fairly well, and Bock soon went on to record the quartet on a ten-inch LP This record, which was released in time to catch the Christmas trade, had a fairly rapid sale, and over the years it has attracted thirty thousand buyers—a startling total even today, when there is a much wider market for jazz. (The average jazz LP has a sale of under five thousand.) Bock quickly put his pedagogical notions behind him once and for all, and has remained the head of Pacific Jazz—or, as it has since been renamed, World Pacific Records-which is now a moderately venturesome company specializing in jazz but also recording Hindu music and cosmic talks by the philosopher Gerald Heard. These days, Mulligan records for several companies, but, out of gratitude to Bock, he tries to make at least one recording a year for World Pacific.

On the impetus of the first single record, Mulligan’s group was soon filling the Haig on the off nights, and not long afterward it was booked there full time. First, though, Mulligan and his men went to San Francisco to play a two-week engagement at the Black Hawk night club, and there the outfit received its first taste of national fame. In the October 22, 1952, issue of Down Beat, Ralph Gleason, San Francisco’s reigning jazz authority, wrote a rave review of the quartet’s performance, under the headline “MR. MULLIGAN HAS A REAL CRAZY GERRY-BUILT CREW.” The quartet, he said, was “certainly the freshest and most interesting sound to come out of jazz in some time,” and he continued, “They have worked out a book of originals, ballads, and sundry other numbers [and] given them a fantastic, fugue-ish, funky, swinging and contrapuntal sound that is simply wonderful. … Mulligan, whose original mind must be credited with the group’s musical personality, plays baritone, swings like mad, and will be a good front for the group with a little more experience.”

As the unit’s popularity increased, some listeners and critics began to wonder whether the absence of a piano might not be merely a gimmick, with no real musical justification. Mulligan angrily dismissed such talk, and he took great pains to explain his purpose in a long note he prepared for the first Pacific Jazz LP—an essay that has since stirred up a good deal of debate among musicians and jazz critics in America and Europe. He wrote, in part:

The idea of a band without a piano is not new. The very first jazz bands didn’t use them (How could they? They were either marching or riding in wagons). … I consider the string bass to be the basis of the sound of the group, the foundation on which the soloist builds his line, the main thread around which the two horns weave their contrapuntal interplay. It is possible with two voices to imply the sound of or impart the feeling of any chord or series of chords, as Bach shows us so thoroughly and enjoyably in his inventions. When a piano is used in a group, it necessarily plays the dominant role; the horns and bass must tune to it as it cannot tune to them, making it the dominant tonality. The piano’s accepted function of constantly stating the chords of the progression makes the solo horn a slave to the whims of the piano player. The soloist is forced to adapt his line to the changes and alterations made by the pianist in the chords of the progression. It is obvious that the bass in a pianoless quartet does not possess as wide a range of volume and dynamic possibilities as the drums and horns. It is therefore necessary to keep the over-all volume in proportion to that of the bass in order to achieve an integrated group sound.

Mulligan went on to develop the same polemic theme wherever he could—in letters to Down Beat, for instance, and in conversation—but the pianoless quartet was doing very well on its own. (Though Mulligan has not changed his views, his quartet sometimes uses a piano nowadays; in fact, he plays it himself.) The Haig, which could handle only ninety customers, was full almost every night, and on weekends lines of people waited outside. Most of the jazz musicians in the area came often, and the quartet grew fashionable with some of the younger actors and writers and what one jazz observer called the “nouveaux buffs.” There was a report on the quartet in the February 2, 1953, issue of Time, and Mulligan began to receive offers for a national tour.

—

Several years earlier, in New York, Mulligan had come close to marrying a girl named Arlyne Brown, the daughter of a songwriter, but she had been frightened off by his drug addiction, and they had stopped seeing each other. In February, 1953, shortly after the article in Time appeared, he did get married. His wife, the former Jeffie Lee Boyd, was an exuberantly beautiful girl who had been a student at the City College of Los Angeles and was a friend of Richard Bock’s. Bock had got her a job as a waitress at the Haig, and there she and Mulligan had become acquainted. When they were married, she had just turned nineteen, and, as she looks back on it, the marriage was a bewildering one. “I was very taken with him,” she recalls. “But I wasn’t strong enough to know what he needed. At that time, he used to say that he was sure of himself, and for a while he convinced me that he was. He always had his head up, even if he only had one shirt. Now that I’m older and know a little more, I realize he wasn’t that self-assured. He needed a lot of support.” One reason Mulligan was not self-assured was that he was trying to withdraw from heroin and was having no success. At about the time of his marriage, he consulted several doctors, but they refused to help him, for fear of the law. One doctor suggested that he turn himself in to the police, but he rejected that idea. “I couldn’t see how I could be cured in jail,” he has explained.

A few months later, he did go to jail. At the time of his arrest, the Mulligans were sharing a small apartment with Chet Baker and his wife. Baker had got into the newspapers previously over troubles with marijuana, and one evening, while the men were playing at the Haig, the police raided the apartment and found some marijuana cigarettes that belonged to him. When he and Mulligan got home, they were stripped and searched. Marks on Mulligan’s arms indicated that he had been taking heroin, but no heroin was found in the apartment. Mulligan had buried a supply of the drug out in the yard, and now, dispirited and believing that he might be sent to the federal hospital in Lexington, Kentucky, for a cure, he voluntarily dug it up, and, since it looked as if the case against him could not be worse, took the blame for the marijuana, too. When Mulligan and Baker came up for a hearing in April, the judge observed, with deep disapproval, that Mulligan was the least credible witness he had ever seen in court. (“At that time,” Jeffie Boyd says, “you could push Gerry in any direction, except musically. In every other way, he was like a lost ship.”) At all events, Baker was released unconditionally and Mulligan was released on bail until September. The California legislature was in the process of passing a law that would permit probation for narcotics offenders, and Mulligan, with his lawyers’ encouragement, continued playing at the Haig, certain that, at worst, he would be put on probation for a year or two. Meanwhile, his marriage to Jeffie Boyd ended in an annulment, and in June, 1953, he married Arlyne Brown, the girl he had known in New York. She had been following his career closely, and upon hearing the news of his arrest she had taken a plane to the Coast, arriving at dawn. Mulligan had met her at the airport, and the two had talked non-stop all through the day.

In September, Mulligan appeared in court again and was sentenced to six months in jail and three years’ probation. Through the efforts of his wife, his lawyers, and a former Los Angeles policeman named Joe Crunk, who was trying to start a Narcotics Anonymous group in Los Angeles, he was released, on probation, after three and a half months in jail. Those months, however, were the most grinding experience of his life. He has described them as follows:

“First, I went into isolation for a week, because I’d been arrested as an addict and had been out on bail. I was only mildly addicted when I went in, and while I was sick the first week in jail, that was due more to isolation than to the effects of withdrawal. The cops, though, interpreted my being sick as the result of having had to kick the drug, which indicates how astute they were as observers of narcotics patients. After a couple of weeks, I was sent to the honor farm—it’s only a name—in Saugus, California, about thirty miles out of Los Angeles on the road to San Francisco. I began in the minimum-security compound, and the first week I went out with the work crews. There was a great, arid piece of land loaded with rocks that we had to clear out. I did an awful job. One of the guards, however, was a jazz fan, and he and the captain soon descended on me to write music for shows the inmates would put on at Thanksgiving and Christmas.

“Suddenly, therefore, within a week—completely without precedent—I was made housemother, a position of respectability in the barracks. You had to keep the place clean. Prisoners didn’t usually attain this high social status until they’d been there quite a while. I’d get through my duties and go over to the recreation hall to work on music. I wrote a couple of arrangements for the prison band, and rehearsed it a couple of times a week.

“Another guard looked dimly on my getting preferential treatment. He was waiting for me to slip. I was late one morning getting to breakfast on the early shift, to which the housemothers were assigned. That guard told me to go back and eat with the regular shift. I mumbled something not especially friendly, and he marched me down to the sergeant’s office. I was transferred to maximum security.

“For nineteen or twenty days, I went through the inferno. It was a fantastic experience. I’d been working on music and was in a highly charged state of mind, and also I’d been having a fair amount of freedom. Now I was stuck in a cell about four feet wide and six feet long with two other guys. There were two bunks, and one of us had to sleep on the floor. We had one partial meal in the morning, another in the evening, and nothing at midday. No mail, no visitors, nothing to read, and any time the guard came, we had to jump up and stand at attention. We went to the showers once a week and spent the rest of the time in the cell, which contained the two bunks, a john, and a sink.

“The first couple of days, I flipped periodically, banging my head against the wall. Then I finally fell into a how-long-can-it-go-on desperation. It was sheer torture. There was nothing I could do. I was absolutely helpless. In time, I just got numb. One guard did dig I was really flipping, and tried to get the captain in charge of ‘care and treatment’ to give me some privileges, but they were afraid to show me any additional preference, since the first time hadn’t worked out. I was surprised through all this that, with all the hostility I felt, I couldn’t blame the guards. That was the way the system was. They were doing their career work, and didn’t really know the effects of the system they were part of or that the job was an outlet for the sadistic side of their temperaments.

“I finally found out that the way the brand of torture that was being applied to me works is that if you can come to stand it, your time is less. Mine was finally diminished, though, evidently through the intercession of Gene Norman, a Los Angeles disc jockey, concert promoter, and record-company owner, who apparently was a friend of the sheriff. Gene Norman and Joe Crunk, who was later to get to talk to the judge and explain the background of my case, had been the only people allowed to see me. Norman came in with a proposition. He wanted to feature me in a concert, and had obtained permission for me to be taken to the concert by guards and returned to jail immediately afterward. I turned the offer down. It was more than I could face. I guess he interceded for me anyway, because I was soon released from maximum security. I put the experience out of my mind as quickly as I could, but in some ways I expect I’ll never recover from those nineteen or twenty days. “I had about two weeks more of road gangs—policing the area and picking up rocks—and then I went to see the judge again. When he let me
out, I was stunned. I couldn’t really believe it. I still had just over two and a half years of probation, and that ended in 1956. My probation was to Joe Crunk, in addition to the regular authorities. I was allowed to leave California, though I had to mail in a report once a month. You usually have to stay in the environment that helped cause your addiction. It’s illuminating—or should be—that the first thing many guys want to do when they get out of jail on a narcotics sentence is to get back on narcotics. It’s an ineffectual but deeply hostile gesture of protest against the stupidity that put them in jail to begin with.

“I haven’t used heroin now for a long time, and I don’t intend to. It’s a terribly dangerous drug. But I’m still very much concerned with the laws and with the police approach to narcotics. I believe, as Joe Crunk and many psychiatrists do, that a man whose only crime is addiction belongs in a hospital, not a jail. And I strongly believe that we need a system whereby an addict, as in Britain, can obtain treatment during gradual withdrawal under supervision of a doctor. In this country, getting the drug from illegal sources results in your not knowing what you’re getting, and besides, in contacting those sources you’re thrown into being a criminal, and that creates a lousy mental state. Our laws and police don’t distinguish between the addict who does commit crimes like holdups to get the stuff, or who pushes it, and the addict who is a medical problem only and cannot be helped by being jailed.”

—

Mulligan was set free on Christmas Eve, 1953. He had intended to continue leading his old quartet, but he almost immediately got into a financial squabble with Chet Baker, and decided to form a new group and start from scratch. “By this time, I wanted to have as little as possible to do with California and Californians,” he recalls, “so I got on the phone to New York and recruited some musicians.” As a result, the valve trombonist Bob Brookmeyer, the drummer Frank Isola, and the bass player Bill Anthony took a plane to Los Angeles, and a week after Mulligan’s release the unit made its first appearance at the Embassy Theatre there. The place was jammed, and the audience responded to the music with such sustained enthusiasm that after the concert Mulligan felt he was ready to try the road. First, the quartet went up to San Francisco for a short engagement, and then it moved on to Philadelphia. Mulligan’s next date was at Storyville, in Boston, and while he was there he signed a contract with the Associated Booking Corporation, the largest agency in the jazz field. Mulligan has since become one of the agency’s more important assets, but he is disconcerting to the bookers in residence, because he refuses to overwork either himself or his men. He turns down most engagements that call for arduous overnight trips between dates, and there are long periods when he will not work at all.

For a time after Mulligan was released from jail, his wife served as his business manager, and she proved a hard bargainer. (After five years, during which she attended to business while he attended to music, the couple separated. They have a two-year-old son, Reed Brown Mulligan, who lives in New York with his mother and whom Mulligan sees frequently when he is in town.) Over the years, his price has risen steadily. He began at $1,250 a week for himself and his three sidemen, or $750 for a one-night concert date. The group now averages $2,500 to $3,000 a week, or $1,000 a night, with exceptions in special circumstances. He has grown steadily more selective, refusing to play certain rooms because he doesn’t feel they are set up for a predominantly listening audience, and he has also become increasingly unsympathetic to touring “package” shows, although he plays them now and then. His objection to these anthologies is that, like the Newport Jazz Festival, they usually contain so many units that no one group is allotted sufficient time to work up its own momentum. Mulligan feels that his unit, like touring classical units, is best presented by itself, and he would rather play in the small auditorium of a local art museum than in the sort of large, echoey arena that is usually used for basketball and hockey games. One of Mulligan’s basic business policies is not to get tied up in any long-term deals. He wants to be free to indulge his restlessness. A few years ago, he signed an exclusive recording contract with Mercury Records, but he got out of it as soon as he could, largely because Mercury was not always ready to record when Mulligan was ready to record. Since then, he has freelanced on records, and has turned down a guarantee of $25,000 a year that a major record company offered him in exchange for his services as musical coordinator for the firm’s jazz output. He was offered complete freedom to record his own group, or any other, and thus he would have been able to fulfill a long-time ambition—to record as leader of a big band. But the offer required his exclusive services, so he decided that it was not for him.

For all his popularity, Mulligan may not play in any single New York night club for more than three consecutive days—a source of annoyance to his booking office and of anger to him. A city regulation requires anyone working in a cabaret or dance hall where liquor is sold to obtain a permit from the licensing division of the Police Department. If the applicant has been convicted, or even arrested, anywhere in the country, he may be turned down, or forced to wait indefinitely, or granted a temporary permit that can be terminated at the Department’s whim. Mulligan, with two arrests on narcotics charges, would also have to produce a doctor’s statement certifying that he was no longer an addict and affidavits dealing with his character. Two or three times, Mulligan has begun collecting the necessary documents, but each time he has given up in disgust at what he considers a humiliating procedure. He agrees with most New York musicians and a growing number of laymen that since the regulation further penalizes musicians who have already served sentences, it is unconstitutional. So far, however, no one has mustered sufficient funds and determination to fight the regulation through the courts.

In any case, there is more work outside New York than Mulligan can, or will, accept. He has from time to time disbanded his group and spent several weeks or months either attempting to compose or just resting, insofar as he is able to rest. A vacation in Bermuda a couple of summers ago quickly proved so unnerving that he got in touch with musicians on the island and from then on played at jam sessions four nights a week. His compulsion to play, however, is invariably tempered by his insistence on being in control of when and where he plays. “I’ve seen too many people get carried away by money-making and by trying to cash in quickly on success,” he told a Down Beat writer in 1955. “They got carried away from themselves and became tied down to a formula. I didn’t want to fall into that. I would just as soon be on top in a kind of background way than in the performing limelight. I think you can stay longer that way.”

Mulligan’s doubts about himself have not vanished altogether in the years since 1953, but his attitude toward his men has softened considerably. In his early days as a leader, he tended to be autocratic and vainglorious, in a defensive way, and, according to one of his former sidemen, would go into temper tantrums that frequently lasted for two or three days; sometimes, recalling a poor performance by one of his men weeks before, he would suddenly light into the culprit and go on nagging at him for hours. That still happens, but not nearly so often. “The last time Gerry really exploded was after a concert we did at M.I.T. a few months ago,” one of the men in his present quartet has said. “It didn’t come off well at all. Some classical composers—friends of Gerry’s—were in the audience, and he was particularly annoyed with us because we weren’t up to standard while they were there. The next week, in Milwaukee, we started to play very well, and he got furious at us because we hadn’t done it in Cambridge.” Another musician friend of Mulligan’s thinks that he has come a long way from the old habit of domineering. “A lot of the insistence on having his own way was really grasping at straws,” this man says. “His personal problems were so severe that they took all the energy out of him, and the only thing he could hang on to was a very slender ego. If he wasn’t right—or, rather, if he couldn’t prove himself right—all the time, the world seemed to be coming to an end. He’s a lot calmer now, and can even admit he’s been wrong.

Mulligan can be stern with his audiences as well as his men, though in this respect, too, he has mellowed over the years. Still, he cannot abide people who talk loudly while he plays, and he is inclined to lecture them. Charles Bourgeois, the Storyville sartorial expert, who is himself renowned among musicians for his cold disdain for talkative clients, said not long ago, “Gerry has often told customers that he doesn’t know why they come to a place and pay an expensive minimum to listen to music and then make so much noise that neither they nor anybody else can hear. That speech usually gets applause, but there are some nights when it seems that nothing can calm the chatter, and then he may bark at the most offensive tableful, ‘Why don’t you get your check and leave?’ A few times, he’s been so harsh with the room that he’s apologized at the end of the set.” If an audience respects music, however, Mulligan can be far more amiable than most jazz leaders. He often delivers little monologues between numbers, and these may include slightly sardonic references to a current political subject, to some aspect of jazz—to, in fact, anything that comes into his head.

It is generally agreed among the musicians who knew Mulligan during his bitter times in New York in the late forties that success has accounted for much of his new ease as a leader. Another source of confidence for him is his conviction that his work on the baritone saxophone has improved considerably over the years. Some musicians respect Mulligan more as a writer and leader than as a player, but others who used to share that attitude now believe that he has become an excellent improviser. He himself says, “It’s only quite lately that I’ve been really controlling my horn and have been able to express myself immediately without scuffling with it. I even have a few days every once in a while when I feel all the time that I have a direct line between my imagination and my fingers.” He is not nearly as happy, however, about his career as a composer. In fact, he frequently complains about being less productive than he wants to be. “Actually, he told a friend glumly some months ago, “although I have a reputation as a writer, I haven’t written much since the Miles Davis sessions. Oh, I’ve done some arrangements, of course, but lines for the quartet have never cost me much work or thought, and many of them evolved out of our improvising on the job. What I’ve done in the fifties is not really new writing; it’s based on what I wrote for Miles. That was the first time—except for my initial tries at writing when I was a kid—that I wrote arrangements that weren’t commissioned, and I’ve done almost no writing for the sake of writing since. I hope soon again to get into a frame of mind where I can write just to write.”

A professional summary of Mulligan’s achievement in jazz up to now was recently given an inquirer by Gunther Schuller, a young composer of classical music, the first French horn in the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, and a dedicated jazz expert, who himself played in several of the Davis-Mulligan recordings. “As Mulligan has matured—and he’s grown swiftly in recent years—his work has indicated that he has analyzed himself and the world of jazz until his playing and writing are considered statements, not just instantaneous emotional cries,” Schuller said. “There are some who have definite objectives but still meander. He doesn’t. One striking contribution he has made is to bring back the contrapuntal way of playing jazz into naked clarity. He has taken away the harmonic background of the piano, which usually veiled multilinear writing for horns in jazz, and he hasn’t fallen into the obvious snare of writing classic fugues—of using the classical forms of counterpoint as a basis for his originals and arrangements. His is simply clear linear writing in jazz terms; he has shown that contrapuntal designs can swing. Previous attempts in modern jazz to emphasize polyphonic writing and playing had bogged down, because of the self-conscious stiffness of the players. Where others went out of the jazz field to take forms from classical music and then returned to try to put them into jazz, he has eliminated that step, and thereby eliminated stiffness in multilinear jazz playing. He has also brought humor back into modern jazz. Jazz, which had been so happy a music in the thirties, had become quite serious, and even at times sickly, during the development of the modern idioms. Mulligan has brought back a happy, relaxed feeling, because he is able to relax completely while playing. Sometimes he relaxes too much. But it is this ability to relax that permits him to play with all kinds of groups, in any conceivable jazz context, and that makes him the big catalyst that he is.” Another critic, Martin Williams, co-editor of the Jazz Review, has written a monograph on Mulligan that appeared in a British journal called Jazz Monthly in May, 1958, and that contains, among other things, these views: “The Mulligan groups play together, listen to each other, work as a group. … Also they get a complexity and density of texture out of their instruments. Listening to [a] Debussy trio in Town Hall … I wondered if jazzmen would ever get to the point where they could produce such fullness and variety of sound out of a few instruments. … The Mulligan groups seem very aware of such possibilities. Mulligan has (like Morton, Ellington) a music to offer, not himself (like Hawkins, Armstrong) and not a music he has to get others to provide him with (say, Basie, currently).” On the negative side, Williams expresses a reservation as to whether Mulligan is too concerned with “opening the curtains” effectively on a number to develop his arresting introductions further. “Mulligan is a man in whom the musical sensibilities are still all mixed up with the entertainment and showmanship,” Williams goes on, “so that we often get a toying with notes, motifs, and effects in a way that is not really musical but a show which happens to use musical devices.”

Still another assessment of Mulligan’s stature has been made by Bob Brookmeyer, who observed to an interviewer for the British magazine Melody Maker, “Gerry is a warm, swinging, and inventive musician. I think in time he’ll rise to the stature of people like Duke Ellington. … Gerry is so full of fire and inspiration, it’s ridiculous to describe him as ‘cool.’ All these words like ‘cool’ and ‘hot’ and ‘bebop’ are just cheap words. … Of course, jazz is an art! And I don’t just mean modern jazz. Guys like Sleepy John Estes, the blues singer, Sidney Bechet and those boys! Remember those Mezz Mezzrow-Sidney Bechet records? The feeling they had for each other’s playing? Well, that’s one of the timeless things in jazz. Gerry and I are doing the same thing in a different way.” A while ago, at his apartment in Greenwich Village, Brookmeyer became more coherently enthusiastic. “Gerry wants to live,” he told a visitor. “He has a positive life attitude, in contrast to the suicidal perspective—the Charlie Parker complex—that was prevalent among many postwar musicians. Parker was so impressive musically and personally that he set some standards he hadn’t meant to. Gerry came as a life-giving current of air to young musicians who had been stifled emotionally and intellectually by the idea of death. And in his music he proved that a whisper at times can be more effective and piercing than a shout.”

In Europe, and particularly in France, Mulligan has been the subject of much critical dispute, but he has usually conquered the public. In June, 1954, he was invited to make his first overseas appearance—a week at the Salle Pleyel, in Paris. Charles Delaunay, who was promoting this venture, was not notably sanguine about it, but he took the gamble because Mulligan’s records had been selling well in France. Delaunay’s pessimism stemmed from what had been, up to that point, the short, brutal history of modern jazz in France. When jazz concerts began again in Paris after the war, the audiences had been hostile to modern jazz, preferring Dixieland and other older forms, and they had been consistently hostile from then on to American all-white units, of whatever idiom, believing that only Negroes could create original jazz and that the few white jazz musicians of any capacity were not creators but apt pupils. Moreover, Mulligan had been preceded at the Salle Pleyel over the past eight or ten years by the large, powerful bands of Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, and Count Basie, and Delaunay doubted whether a pianoless quartet could make much of an impression against these memories.

Mulligan arrived in Paris even tenser than usual—a result of friction within the quartet, his own fears about his reception by the volatile French, and an unnerving tumult at the airport, during which he had been mauled by photographers, broadcasters, and reporters—but he managed to collect some composure in time for the first concert, and waited worriedly in the wings as he was announced:

“Maintenant … voici Gerry Mooligan quartet!“

Through the applause and whistles as the group made its way onstage, the master of ceremonies continued, “… avec Frank Isola à la batterie … Red Mitchell à la basse … au trombone Bob Brookmeyer … et … Gerry Mooligan!“

The four men bowed. Then Mulligan blew a long, sustained tuning note and beat off the tempo briskly, and the quartet leaped into Come Out Wherever You Are. The audience listened intently as Brookmeyer swung through the melody, with Mulligan developing an eager counterline. The listeners paid such rapt attention to the music that they rarely applauded for individual solos, but at the end of each number they expressed their approval ringingly and excitedly. Delaunay said later, “I have never seen such a communion in Paris between a white band and an audience, almost never between a modern band and a French audience, and hardly ever between any band and any audience.” Henri Renaud, a young but weary-looking French pianist who had been trying for years to develop a French audience for modern jazz, said, “He has helped all of us; maybe they will now come to realize that French musicians can play jazz, too, even if they did have the accident of being born white.”

—

There are days when Gerry Mulligan’s self-doubt and depression become so strong that he does nothing until it is time to play at night. But there are also days when he is seized by enthusiasm. One such day was December 31, 1958. Mulligan’s quartet was playing at Storyville, opposite a six-piece band that included three members of the preceding jazz generation whom Mulligan particularly admires—the trumpeter Buck Clayton, the trombonist Vic Dickenson, and the clarinetist Pee Wee Russell. Although these men were by no means unacquainted with written arrangements, they had learned, through many years of experience with pickup groups, to play in a freewheeling way, with informality and spontaneity, and without rehearsals. Shortly after Mulligan woke up that morning, he became obsessed by a new idea; he wanted to hear the two bands play together, and he wanted to hear them play Auld Lang Syne.” He immediately went over to the deserted night club, sat down at the piano, and spent the rest of the day working out a new arrangement of the old song and getting the individual parts on paper. While taking care not to alter the melody, he juggled the harmonies in such a way that each man would have a rich, singing line to play. That evening, when the older musicians were told about the unexpected première, some of them grumbled a little—after all, New Year’s Eve should have been an even more casual night than usual—but Mulligan’s earnestness impressed them, and they agreed to try out the score. “If the man was willing to spend all day on this,” Russell said, “the least we can do is give him a little of our time.”

A quarter of an hour before midnight, the two bands got their one chance to rehearse Mulligan’s arrangement, in an unoccupied hall off Storyville’s main room. The room was dimly lit, but the musicians dutifully peered at the music, and played it through once swiftly. Then they went back into the night club. Some of them put their parts on the floor, others held them in their hands, and one man attached his part to the microphone. Vic Dickenson’s part simply got lost—it was later found on a chair, when a customer stood up—and he improvised his lines happily. The richest part of all had been given to Pee Wee Russell, who hadn’t brought his spectacles and had to do a good deal of hard squinting. Nevertheless, the unorthodox number was tremendously popular with the customers, who called for a repeat. After that performance was over, Gerry Mulligan relaxed and grinned. It was as if he personally had brought the New Year into being.