For most of its early days, the baritone saxophone was the Cinderella of the saxophone family. Even its booming cousin, the bass, managed to invest itself with more glamour, mainly because of the abdominal rumblings of Adrian Rollini. There were logical reasons for this. It was not really practical to regard the baritone as a possible solo voice because of the difficulty in articulating coherent phrases. The tone would be so muddy that the listener would have trouble telling which way the soloist was trying to go. The argument against this is that if Adrian Rollini managed it on the bass, why couldn't somebody else manage it on the baritone. There is no answer to this argument, and critics are always happier if nobody asks it.

The baritone, on the other hand, has always been invaluable in a saxophone section, because it lends resonance to the texture. The only drawback here was that in the earlier days of jazz there was no such thing as a saxophone section, which meant that the baritone was still prevented from playing its rightful role. The new departures of Duke Ellington first made a baritone saxophone indispensable to a jazz ensemble, and for twenty years Harry Carney, who joined Ellington in 1927, was the only baritone saxophonist in the entire world with any kind of celebrity status in jazz.

Carney blew the baritone as Hawkins blew the tenor and Hodges blew the alto, and the tones of the three men were closely related. It was a full, romantic sort of tone, the kind that commentators always used to refer to as 'hot'. As Hawkins was a 'hot' tenor player, so Carney was a 'hot' baritone player, so outstanding, in fact, that he was even granted the accolade of a solo on small group pick-up sessions in the 1930s with the Billie Holiday-Teddy Wilson team.

Then came the event which turned the saxophone world inside out. Lester Young introduced a new way of blowing the tenor. Instead of making a 'hot' sound, Lester produced a kind of honk that was lighter, more metallic sounding than the norm. Thousands of tenor players were to be influenced by this revolution in saxophone tone, and today many of the greatest players in the field are Lester-followers, particularly Stan Getz and Zoot Sims.

The reader may be justified in asking at this stage, are these the wrong programme notes? So far half-a-dozen saxophone players have been introduced into this text, and none of them has been Gerry Mulligan. But the preamble has been necessary, because to understand Mulligan's position in the jazz world and his contribution to it, one has to understand the status quo of that world before he came along. In a nutshell, Gerry Mulligan did the same thing as Getz, Sims and several other contemporaries, only he did it with a baritone instead of a tenor. He applied the lessons of Lester Young to his own technique, managing therefore to overcome the terrible problem which faces every baritone saxophonist, which is to contrive somehow not to make the instrument sound like a badly-mixed pudding.

Mulligan was the first baritonist in jazz history to make the instrument sound light and malleable enough to be regarded as an authentic front-line instrument. It has been suggested that the real reason why Mulligan won this status was that his keyboard technique was finer than that of any predecessor. That is untrue. With due respects to Mulligan, who is one of the great saxophonists of jazz history, I doubt whether his technique is better than Harry Carney's. It is simply that the diluted tone creates the illusion of swiftness of flight. I experienced this peculiar situation myself some years ago, when, after being a proficient tenor player for some years I switched to baritone and found myself sounding like a man with two broken legs. My technique had not suffered, but the deeper resonance of the new instrument made it seem as if it had.

All this may sound like musical hairsplitting, but it is the root of Mulligan's remarkable facility as a soloist. He can literally make the baritone saxophone sound weightless. Even at the fastest tempo, the notes fly into the ether, cleanly articulated, beautifully defined, forming shapes whose clarity of outline is most rare for the instrument on which they are being executed. And none of this would have been possible had not Mulligan grasped the significance of Lester Young's tonal innovations and applied them successfully to an instrument which at first sight, might not seem favourable to the Young methods.

Mulligan was born in New York in the year 1927, the heyday of Bix, the time of the Hot Five, the period when the Ellington Orchestra was emerging as a cohesive musical unit. It was also the time when Hawkins was establishing the saxophone as something more than a vaudeville joke. I mention these facts to establish that Mulligan belonged to the generation which grew to maturity in a period when the virtuoso in jazz was already a reality, and that Mulligan himself became a coherent voice at about the time when Parker and Gillespie were beginning a new era in jazz harmony. Mulligan's first successes were scored as an arranger. His saxophone playing seems to have matured later than his ability to write for large orchestras. His writing for the Elliot Lawrence Orchestra, which performed regularly over a local Philadelphia radio station, was the dominant factor in the rise of Lawrence's group to something more than a local unit. In 1946 Lawrence-moved to New York and Mulligan moved with him. Gradually other leaders became aware of Mulligan's arranging abilities. It was early in 1947 that Gene Krupa recorded a composition of Mulligan's called Disc Jockey Jump, which for many of us was the first contact with the name Mulligan.

Today Disc Jockey Jump is all but forgotten in the march of progress, but twelve years ago, to be a semi-professional musician was to look forward on Saturday nights to the moment when the leader called out Disc Jockey Jump; the piece was so obviously streets ahead of the normal kind of orchestration that it was obvious that Mulligan was a name to watch for. In 1948 Mulligan joined the Claude Thornhill band in the dual role of baritonist-arranger. Now the Thornhill band was something of a freak. For one thing, it sported TWO baritones, and used french horns and tuba. It was, in other words, the ideal toy which an ambitious young writer might feel like playing with, and indeed Mulligan was not alone in his playroom. Gil Evans and George Russell also wrote for Thornhill, and it is interesting to consider that ever-present point in jazz criticism, who influenced who? Whatever the answer to this strictly academic question, what is more to the point is that Miles Davies was attracted by the kind of sound that men like Evans and Mulligan were creating with Thornhill. Before the end of the year Davis had moved into the Royal Roost and Mulligan had gone with him, as baritonist-arranger once again. From this moment on, Mulligan became a recognised baritonist for the first time, while his writing career had already been flourishing for some years.

The Miles Davis band, whose work is often referred to by the imbecilic label 'Birth of the Cool', was a landmark in the development of modern jazz, because of the tone colours achieved by those who wrote for it. The orchestral textures were surprisingly rich for what was after all no more than a big small band, and the way in which the individual voices were blended into an identifiable sound was a remarkable triumph for the men involved. Mulligan composed and arranged Jeru for the Davis group. Soon after, Venus de M/'lo followed. The point about Mulligan at this stage is that his writing was still far more advanced than his saxophone playing, even though he was already becoming acknowledged as an instrumental master, which at this stage he was not. It was yet another of those premature reputations which make it so difficult to praise later work which really deserves praise. In 1952 the issue became still more complicated. Mulligan made a sudden astonishing break-through, one of the most dramatic ever achieved by a modern jazz musician, although the use of the word 'modern' in connection with Mulligan the saxophonist is one that needs considerable qualification, as we shall see in due course. Mulligan moved out to the West Coast, struck up a friendship with Chet Baker and developed a sudden, and in retrospect, unjustified dislike of pianos. His contention that the absence of a piano lent the soloist greater freedom was based on no sound logic, but the accident of Mulligan's whim helped to create a quartet sound which seemed almost spectral in its effect. The music seemed to be floating a foot or two above the ground.

The success of the Gerry Mulligan Quartet established its leader as a personality in the world of modern jazz. His true fame dates from this period, but it is tempting to insist that the solos he played with Baker and without a piano are inferior to many he has since recorded and which have attracted no particular acclaim. The Quartet was followed by a series of other groups, each slightly larger than the other, and eventually Mulligan found himself fronting what was billed as a Tentet, a group which reflected the same tight textures and orchestral subtleties that had been so intriguing a feature of the Miles Davis recordings. So far as local musicians were concerned, Mulligan's reputation as an originator of jazz themes and writer for orchestra stood at its highest around the time of the Tentet releases in Britain. In 1953-54 any musician who did not know of this work was behind the times, and although this kind of intense interest in one man never lasts very long, and is always superseded by other gods, the detailed attention that working musicians give to certain new figures as they make their way in the jazz world is usually an indication that there is something new about that work.

Since then, Mulligan's reputation has changed from that of boy wonder to established figure, and while there have been times when his writing talents seem to have been lying fallow, his saxophone playing has without doubt improved almost beyond recognition in the last ten years. I remarked earlier in these notes that the description of Mulligan as a 'modernist' needed qualifying, and the reason why is" of vital interest to all students of jazz style. Mulligan's mastery of harmony in his writing is not the kind of mastery that one thinks of in connection with, say, Dizzy Gillespie. Neither is his saxophone playing very closely related to ultra-modernists like Rollins of Coltrane, or even earlier figures like Dexter Gordon. Although the tonal concept inherited from Lester Young is essentially a modern one, Mulligan's jazz has its roots in pre-Parker methods. His improvisations are eminently literate, but there is about them a certain basic simplicity which surprised many of us when we first heard him in the flesh on his first British tour of 1958. Like many of the great pre-war players, Mulligan's jazz is filled with evidence of his liking for tunes which move in more conventional harmonic patterns than those which appeal to fiercely adventurous players like Rollins, and the evidence is clear on many recordings Mulligan has made.

One of the surest signs of a player's addiction to older jazz methods is the way in which he will instinctively strike out for the note in a seventh chord which is called the Third. It is this note which tells the ear whether the chord in question is major or minor, and the fact that players like Mulligan keep landing on the third at focal points in their phrases is by no means intended as a criticism. Players like Getz and Zoot Sims, and indeed Lester himself, were and are prone to the same mannerism, and the full effect of this stylistic habit is to evoke in the mind of the listener memories of the 1930s.

That is why, when many of our own musicians heard Mulligan in London five years ago, they came away and said with pleased surprise, 'He is a far more brilliant, forthright, natural jazz player than his records would lead you to believe. He is an old-fashioned swinger, and there is almost a Dixieland clarity of construction about his solos'. The musicians who said this were paying Mulligan the very highest compliment it is possible to pay a jazz musician. They were trying to say that Mulligan was more than a precocious orchestrator and a cunning manipulator of the baritone. They were saying, in effect, that he was that rare thing, a wholly natural improvisor who would have been prominent, no matter what era of jazz he happened to have been raised in.

And this is the acid test of a jazz musician. Would he have been equally outstanding in earlier styles? Or is he limited to the current conventions of modernism? There have been times when I have suspected that Mulligan would have been one of the giants of theSwing Age had he been born fifteen years earlier than he was. The first time this obvious truth sank into my somewhat thick head was when his album with Annie Ross was released in this country at the end of 1959. In Give Me the Simple Life', Mulligan followed the vocal, and in his very first four-bar pattern struck out for the tell-tale third of the chord, constructed a beautifully lucid little phrase, whose most fascinating aspect was that it might easily have been coined long before the world ever heard of Charlie Parker.

Mulligan, in fact, belongs to that school of old-fashioned modernists whose work bears evidence of the coming of Parker, but whose fundamental harmonic conception is relatively much simpler. Getz is in this division. So is Zoot Sims, so it is quite obvious that to play in this style has nothing to do with limiting oneself or being a less rich player than one might have been. It is merely a question of which harmonic set of rules one adheres to when playing jazz, and Mulligan's rule book happens to be less contemporary than it might. None of this prevents Mulligan's solos from ranking among the finest of his era.

Further evidence that Mulligan is aware, subconsciously or otherwise, of what happened in jazz before he grew up, is contained in several of the scores he contributed to the book of his own big band, billed on record covers as The Concert Orchestra. The formation of this band was one of the most interesting developments in jazz of the past two or three years. The economic facts being what they are, it is very rare today that a new big band ever gets to be born. Mulligan's new venture has proved to be a superb musical triumph, and not the least gratifying aspect of his working methods has been the way in which he has turned to at least one of the pre-war musicians in his search for material.

It is one of the great overlooked truths of jazz that many themes which were originally cooked up just for busking purposes, did in fact contain sufficient musical value for them to deserve a fuller life. Bix's In a Mist, Armstrong's Struttin' with Some Barbecue, Redman's Chant of the Weed are obvious examples, and Mulligan did us all a great service when he worked back to the guitar fragments of Django Reinhardt. His Concert Orchestra scores of Nuages and Manoir de mes Reves were loving reconstructions of two of the most beautiful jazz themes of the 1930s, and Mulligan's own extended solo on Manoir de mes Reves, with its anglicised title of Django's Castle, is among the best solos he has ever recorded.

The Concert band albums emphasis one point about Mulligan that has been there to see ever since he started writing for the Miles Davis group in 1948, and that is that he is the kind of artist who needs to be a leader all the time, not for egocentric reasons, but because he has the kind of musical fertility that thrives best when he has a group to hand which can put his ideas into musical action. In this sense, although in no other, is he in the same category as Ellington. Because a big band is not an economic reality in these inflated times, Mulligan has not always been in the happy position of having the required musical organisation at his fingertips. But he needs it, all the same, because when he gets a small musical world of his own, one with some permanence, the results are always worth listening to.

I believe that as a saxophonist he received much extravagant praise in the early days, praise which he frankly had not earned. At the time of the quartets with Chet Baker, he simply was not the giant that many critics said he was. The natural reaction away from this kind of hysteria is the complete reverse, underrating. Today Mulligan is about as good as the reviewers said he was twelve years ago. Only today, many of them no longer say it. No matter. The final test of a saxophonist is the opinion of other saxophonists. And during this British tour of Mulligan's, long overdue, every audience will be sprinkled liberally with people like myself, who, after years of wrestling with a saxophone keyboard, have some idea of the problems facing a saxophonist, and especially a baritone saxophonist. We will all watch Mulligan like hawks, because he is one of the tiny minority of men who completely mastered their instrument.

BOB BROOKMEYER

Although widely regarded today as one of the most melodic of jazz trombonists, Brookmeyer is in fact, two musicians in one, and began his musical career as a pianist. He was born in Kansas City, which is the right kind of home town for anybody who wants to be a jazz musician, and studied clarinet and trombone at Kansas University, though his piano studies had begun much earlier. It was as a pianist in fact, that he procured his first job with a name group, when in 1951 he joined the Tex Beneke band.

For a while Brookmeyer did the usual round of the touring orchestras, moving from Beneke to Ray McKinley, and from McKinley to Louis Prima. It was when he moved on to the Claude Thornhill Orchestra that he made his first appearances in the record books as a trombonist, for Thornhill used him in both roles. So did Terry Gibbs, who was Brookmeyer's next employer. By the time he did his short spell with Woody Herman in 1952, Brookmeyer was already beginning to be considered primarily as a trombonist.

In 1953 Brookmeyer joined the Stan Getz Quartet, a group where a more intense light was naturally shed upon him. From now on he began to become more and more prominent in the reviews of informed critics. In the following year he moved over to the Gerry Mulligan Quartet, thus beginning what has proved to be a spasmodic but long-standing musical partnership. It was in that year that he appeared at the Paris Jazz Fair.

The honours were already beginning to come in by now. In 1953 he had been voted New Star of the Year in the Downbeat Critics' Poll, and in the next two or three years continued to win many votes in various polls. In 1956 he was in the Mulligan Sextet that toured France and Italy, and since then has continued to align himself with similar-sounding groups and individuals. The fact that much of his professional career has been spent, at least in the last few years, in the company of players like Mulligan, Stan Getz and Zoot Sims, shows him to be yet another of those old-fashioned modernists who employ modern phrases and patterns while still retaining much of the older chord basis as used in the late 1930s. Like Mulligan, Getz and Sims, Brookmeyer has a relatively simple harmonic approach, and like the three other men, the interest of his jazz, which is considerable, has its roots in the engaging melodiousness of his improvisations. Brookmeyer is one of the most pleasing of trombonists in jazz. His technique is good enough to have ironed out the natural crudities of the instrument, and the smoothness of his delivery, allied to a clever, at times ingenious musical brain, helps to produce recorded performances which are packed with melodic insight. British audiences will take to him immediately.

The unusual consistency of pattern of musical environments continues throughout this programme, and in the following brief autobiographical notes the same litany of names is repeated, thus proving that use of phrases like 'complete musical sympathy' is not merely sleevenote puffery. The musicians on this tour really do think alike.

DAVE BAILEY

Born Portsmouth, Virginia, February 1928. Raised in Philadelphia, where he received musical tuition at the hands of the musical Bailey family. The inevitable move to New York came in 1947, where Dave studied at the Music Centre Conservatoire under the G.I. Bill. From 1951-53 worked on drums with the Herbie Jones band.

In 1954 began his long spell with name groups, which included those led by Al Sears, Johnny Hodges, Lou Donaldson, Charlie Mingus, and Horace Silver. In 1955 began a long association with Gerry Mulligan, and in the next four years Bailey made no fewer than four European tours with the Mulligan group. In the spring of 1959 he found himself working on an Italian film in Milan in the company of Lars Gullin among others, but before that he had completed further spells in New York with Ben Webster, Billy Taylor, and the Art Farmer-Benny Golson Jazztet. Returned to Mulligan late 1959.

Bailey, who is generally recognised as one of the most sympathetic small-group drummers in jazz today, lists as his favourites Art Blakey, Max Roach, Ed Thigpen, and Philly Joe Jones. His taste is excellent and his experience vast. He and Mulligan are old allies.

BILL CROW

Born Othello, Washington, December, 1927. Began at school as a trumpeter, and in later school bands played baritone horn, alto and drums. His versatility was stretched even further in the Army dance band which used him as a drummer who doubled valve trombone. On his discharge, Crow played mainly drums in various orchestras which specialised in society work, and it was not until the summer of 1950 that he began playing the bass. Then he reverted back to trombone in the bands of Bumps Blackwell and Buzzy Bridgford in Seattle.

The pattern finally resolved itself in 1952, when he joined Teddy Charles and then Stan Getz as bassist. Remaining on bass, he moved to Claude Thornhill in 1953, Terry Gibbs, 1954, Marion McPartland, late 1954, before joining Mulligan in January 1956. After a year he returned to the McPartland group, and then in 1958 came back to Mulligan. He lists as his favourite bassists Oscar Pettiford, Ray Brown and Percy Heath, and also branched out in a rather different direction tow or three years ago with some pungent reviewing of books and records in the pages of "Jazz Review". It was this writing which stamped him as a very strong-minded musician indeed, one who knows what he likes, and tries to reproduce those preferences in his own playing.