1. Go Home
2. Barbara's Theme
3. Theme From "I Want To Live"
4. The Red Door
5. Come Rain Or Come Shine - Meets The Saxophonists
6. Apple Core - Compact Jazz CD
7. Go Home

November, 1960

 LINER NOTES

The truth is that generalizing about audiences can be very misleading. There's no assurance that you're going to have a good or bad audience in any given city at any given performance. For that matter there's no assurance you'll have an audience of any kind!

For instance, on this tour it was our fortune to arrive in Pittsburgh on the day the Pirates won their first World Series in a hundred years! Those that turned out, or even could get there through the jammed streets, must really be considered "the faithful". Since there was no such thing as a taxi that night, I was more than an hour late, having had to walk the two or three miles from downtown to the Syria Mosque. All uphill!

So to be more specific-to me a good audience is one that gives something back to the band. Of course applause is the outward demonstration of approval and enjoyment, but it has become clear to me that there is a more subtle exchange that takes place.

In going over the tapes that were recorded on this tour, it gradually dawned on me that the band unconsciously reflected some attitudes and characteristics of the various audiences. For instance, our Berlin concert had a much more somber and thoughtful quality than the others. In Milan, on the other hand we sounded more emotional and uninhibited. Our Santa Monica concert had a driving quality that I think was in great part the result of the fact that the audience was loaded with many of our friends and fellow-musicians. Unfortunately for my research we only had tapes from these three cities to work from but the observation of this phenomenon gave me much pleasure through the long hours of auditing, editing, and mastering of these performances.

Maybe I ahould alter my definition of a good audience a bit and say that it is one that gives something of quality back and a bad audience is one that is disinterested or somehow just got into the wrong pew.

Sometimes there are audiences or segments of them that can destroy the quality of a performance by their very enthusiasm. Or overenthusiasm. Some of the European cities allow photographers to take pictures during a concert and between shutters clicking, people moving around and even flash bulbs going off, it's a wonder anybody can concentrate on anything. At the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam they have a compromise whereby they allow the camerabugs their freedom on the first tune only, then no more pictures. Since a good part of the audience is up behind the stage in this wonderful old auditorium, we found ourselves really surrounded. The shutter-fiends were so frantic this last time, popping out from under the piano, bumping stands, putting cameras in our horns and faces, and finally getting so entangled with us that we broke up all together and waited till they cleared the stage so we could finish the piece! In spite of this disruption I find that our Amsterdam concerts are usually among the happiest of a European tour.

In Paris we had to contend with a small but very noisy group of youngsters who began complaining even before we started to play. I never did find out just what it was they were against, but whatever it was they succeeded in making a rather dismal evening for everybody.

In Berlin we had a case of mild heart-failure when two-thirds of the way through the concert a rather large number of people got up and left as if on a signal. We were flustered and somewhat hurt until someone came out on stage and explained to me that these people were from East Berlin and had to return by a certain hour.

Before going on to the statistical details I want to acknowledge the tender loving care given by Tom Nola of Nola Recording Studios, New York, and Jim Davis of Verve Records, to the difficult task of assembling this album out of tapes recorded with widely varied equipment and placement, and under wildly variable conditions.

The majority of the numbers presented here feature our guest soloist, Zoot Sims. We've included two takes of one piece to illustrate how differently the same piece can turn out on two different occasions, almost to the point of becoming a new piece entirely.

- Gerry Mulligan