Cashbox : 04/13/1957

One of the mainstays of modern jazz, Gerry Mulligan, has brought his sextet around for another EmArcy LP inspection. Working with 6 jazz compositions (3 by Mulligan), the boys supply some unhackneyed, hard driving sessions. Aside from his piercing baritone sax work, Mulligan tries a deft hand at the ivories with tricky counterpoint with Bill Crow on bass (Blue At The Roots). Reliable jazz performances.

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Miami Herald
Fred Sherman : 03/31/1957

An easy swinging group, with Zoot Sims Bobby Brookmeyer and Bill Crow giving the baritone sax star a run for the honors. Mulligan sits down at the piano on one number and proves his versatility. A fine album.

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Playboy Magazine : June, 1957

Gerry Mulligan is back, with one he calls Mainstream of Jazz. Despite his modern ideas, Gerry digs hard at the roots of jazz, which makes for a pleasantly paradoxical effect, like the Queen of the Art Students’ Ball decked out in a Victorian shawl. Trumpeter Jon Eardley kicks like the ghost of Bix; Zoot Sims and Bobby Brookmeyer wander in and out, casually but with aplomb. Most informal, and most fun, is Blue at the Roots, for which Gerry sidles over to the piano and has himself a ball.

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Providence Journal
Philip C. Gunion : 03/31/1957

A new Gerry Mulligan album is always a delight, and Mainstream of Jazz, an EmArcy release, is no exception.

As the title implies, this is not a “way out” modernist session, but rather contains music which can be recognized and enjoyed by all who like jazz.

In addition to the excellent baritone sax of Mulligan (he also plays piano on one number) there is ample talent present with Zoot Sims on tenor sax; Jon Eardley and Don Ferrara on trumpet; the wonderful Bobby Brookmeyer on trombone; Bill Crow on bass, and Dave Bailey on drums.

There is no straining for effect and all the men play together with a definite feeling of unity. The program has Elevation and Mainstream, originals by Mulligan, Ain’t It the Truth, an old Basie number; some excellent blues and other choice fare.

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San Francisco Chronicle
Ralph J. Gleason : 03/28/1957

This corner has been in such a cantankerous mood lately that it’s about time we got around to telling you about some albums we really like. And there are a few, now and then.

Gerry Mulligan, the acidulous, wiry baritone saxophonist, is one of the most controversial figures in modern jazz. His peppery nature has made him almost as many enemies as it has friends – but his music has achieved a permanent place in the mainstream of jazz. His most recent album, which is called Mainstream and is on EmArcy, is an excellent example of his style. Six tunes, three of them by Mulligan, are played by a sextet.

The basis of Mulligan’s appeal is swing: the beat. Everything that he does swings. In fact he himself is fond of saying that he is a swing fan and an admirer of Bunny Berigan, a rather unusual admission for a modernist.

Mulligan is one of the three modern jazz artists whose records spearheaded the great boom in jazz a couple of years ago. The others are Dave Brubeck and Chet Baker.

Brubeck, despite his international fame and his undoubted success, has made little impression on his contemporaries as far as the impact of his own group is concerned. What effect his compositions will have could be quite another thing (they are just becoming available).

Baker, while a poll winner as a trumpet soloist and enjoying success as a singer, had some influence on young trumpet players but it was a swiftly passing phase. Mulligan, on the other hand, has had a definite impact on all of jazz both as a writer and a soloist.

The same criticisms which led me in the past to low rate him (wrongly, I feel now) after an initial shout of delight, are still present. There is a tendency toward sameness in structure and plane in his works and more than a hint that they are miniatures. But even if they are miniatures, they are superb ones. His tunes have achieved the status now of being quoted by other jazzmen in their own solos and Mulligan himself on occasion can slip in a reference to one of his earlier pieces. As a soloist he is excellent, with a remarkable rhythmic feeling that enables him to escape the lack of definition that sometimes mars the work of such modernists as Konitz and Desmond. He can stomp and he can swing, but he can also play with beauty and taste.

Each of the numbers in this album is an experiment in construction and each shows the virtues of planning. The other horn men, Bob Brookmeyer, Zoot Sims and Jon Eardley, for their part, contribute excellent solos, but it is Mulligan, both in his compositions and in his emotionally packed solos, who dominates the album.

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San Francisco Examiner
C.H. Garrigues : 05/26/1957

Mulligan, too, was a founder of the West school but just as Silver and Roach have grown cooler, so Mulligan has warmed up. Here he is not so insistent upon understatement; instead he rollicks – along with Sims, Eardley, et al.

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Saturday Review
Martin Williams : 05/11/1957

The talented and fanciful Mr. Mulligan again and a group which plays together with a praise-worthy kind of sympathy and cooperation. Bill Crow‘s bass seems tense and everyone (except Jon Eardley, present on two titles) appears nervously edgy, until a relaxed Blue at the Roots wherein creativity flows, especially from Mulligan – on piano, no less.

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Down Beat : 05/02/1957
Ralph J. Gleason : 5 stars

Although this album is an excellent compendium of the Mulligan composing and arranging style (two of the numbers are Mulligan compositions, and the rest are apparently arranged by him) it is as a soloist on the baritone and as a catalyst in the fulfillment of experiments in rhythmic excitement that he shines here.

Mulligan’s outstanding characteristic appears to me to be a solid grasp of form so that everything he does is marked with definition, whether it is writing or playing. His closely stitched arrangements, his biting, incisive, wry, and sometimes sardonic solos carry the same brand. It is impossible to sit still to this album, just as it is impossible not to admire the mere craftsmanship.

Some of the same reservations which led me once to low-rate (wrongly, I now believe) Mulligan’s contributions after an initial shout of pure joy, are still present. There is a suspicion of limitation to his emotional form in writing. But even if his writing is the creation of miniatures, the miniatures are exquisite and his solo playing has no such limitation. It is, in fact, a glorious celebration of freedom, a testament to the oneness of his mind and his emotions and his horn. He now has reached the stature where he can quote from himself without fear.

The sextet perhaps may be the ideal form for Mulligan to work with. His seminal researches into rhythmic devices, evident in the quartet, have been developed to a greater extent here and in a much freer form than with a big-band book. There are times, usually as an interlude toward the end of a number, when he is able direct the horns into a boiling and bubbling stew which can raise me right off the floor. I have heard no one else but Dizzy Gillespie do this particular thing successfully.

Throughout the playing of the six numbers, there is continual evidence of Mulligan’s canniness, his wise and sometimes cunning direction of the flow of all horns. This is particularly noticeable in Blue wherein he plays piano.

As further evidence of his structural proficiency, his second chorus on piano in Blue seems to me to be an almost classic example of construction, moving, as it does, from simplicity to full complexity without once loosing definition.

I was particularly struck by Eardley’s trumpet Ain’t It the Truth and by the difference in the solo statements when Mulligan was on the baritone and on piano. You will not want to miss this LP.

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Liner Notes by Unknown

Mainstream may seem to be an unlikely title for this album. The fact is that its use is a significant and encouraging illustration of the progress jazz has made during the past decade; for the very music and musicians that were considered by many critics in the middle and late 1940s to be part of a side-stream or even an unrelated whirlpool can now claim to have entered the main body of the direction in which jazz is flowing. Their innovations, far from the abstract and dissonant distortions that they seemed to be not so many years ago in the ears of some of their less perceptive audiences, now seem like a very natural part of the essence of contemporary jazz.

Gerry Mulligan‘s attitude toward music is in line with these developments. Though an uncompromising modernist, he has always remained firmly rooted in the harmonic and rhythmic origins of jazz and its improvisational elements. As an organizer for big bands, he has often displayed characteristics that seem to stem from the best of the swing era writers. It is significant that his vote in the “Musicians’ Musician” poll in The Encyclopedia Yearbook of Jazz named Duke Ellington, Ralph Burns, Gil Evans, Bobby Sherwood, Eddie Sauter and Bill Finegan as his favorite arrangers. Similarly in improvisation his tastes and knowledge reflect an awareness of the entire history of jazz rather than simply the recent developments. Red Nichols ranked side by side with Dizzy Gillespie among his selected trumpet men, just as the late Irving Fazola shared Gerry’s clarinet vote with Benny Goodman.

The present sextet represents, in Gerry’s view, the outgrowth of a lengthy and time-consuming effort to get the right feel with a group of this kind on records. “We tried for a year and a half,” he recalls, “to get what I was really looking for with the sextet. That kind of feeling between the men only comes after a while.”

The format and general approach of the sextet is similar to that of the previous long play, MG 36056. Members of the group are as follows: Mulligan, baritone sax (also piano on Roots’ Blues); Zoot Sims, tenor sax; Jon Eardley, trumpet on Mainstream and Ain’t It the Truth; Don Ferrara, trumpet on other titles; Bobby Brookmeyer, trombone; Bill Crow, bass; Dave Bailey, drums.

Elevation, the opening tune, is the perfect prototype of what Gerry was aiming at, and succeeded in accomplishing, on this date. The opening and closing theme is a 12-bar blues which he wrote during his ‘teens in Philadelphia. It was later featured by the Elliot Lawrence band when Gerry first came to New York. In this new performance, as Gerry points out, “We got into a real stomping feeling and all the guys feel into the right groove, that jukebox-Saturday-night sort of mood.” Gerry’s role as Pied Piper in some of the ensemble choruses here produces from the group a remarkable quality of sounding spontaneous, yet arranged; riff backgrounds develop and soloists come and go as if this were a party held in the hi-fi equipped apartment of a group of professional minded readers.

Mainstream, another Mulligan original, opens with a similarly astonishing counterpoint between Gerry and Zoot. “Jon played especially well here,” recalls Gerry. It is interesting to note, incidentally, the “old-time modern” sound of Eardley’s horn, which may sound to some like a resuscitated Bix. Brookmeyer’s burry sound and inimitable phrasing are again in evidence, making a major contribution as they do throughout the set.

Ain’t It The Truth, which closes the first side, is a simple, swinging original written some fifteen years ago by Buster Harding, an arranger with the old Count Basie band.

Igloo was composed by Jerry Lloyd, a trumpeter heard around New York recently with the Zoot Sims combo.

Root Blues is a completely informal performance in which Gerry goes over to the keyboard to swing with a rolling, headshaking beat that he communicates brilliantly to his cohorts. Weaving in and out of the solo spotlight, he focuses it on all the horns as well as on bassist Bill Crow, then takes over himself again for a fadeout ending. This intimate blues portrait enables you almost to see the musicians’ minds at work.

Lollypop is a composition credited to two west coast musicians, drummer Chico Hamilton and pianist Gerry Wiggins. Taken at a bright tempo, it has a wonderfully loose feel both in the horn solos and in the walking bass. Drummer Dave Bailey has a couple of effective snare breaks here.

One important overall impression that you may derive from listening to these sides is that Gerry Mulligan will never be a captive of formalized, over-pretentious jazz. Any situation in which the musicians have to worry about reading the music correctly than about developing an interrelationship, common ensemble mood, would be repellent to him; for individuality, rather than any contrive ingenuity, is a sine qua non of mainstream jazz.