1. Blueport
2. Body And Soul
3. Black Nightgown
4. Come Rain Or Come Shine
5. Lady Chatterley's Mother
6. Let My People Be

Sunday, December, 1960

 LINER NOTES

"Working in front of an audience," Mulligan continue , "has a markedly different effect on a band. It can - as it has with us - result in a confidence as a unit that's a marvel to see, hear and feel."

Mulligan feels that his band is enjoying a steadily growing realization of its own identity. In this regard, Mulligan was asked his reaction to comments that this writer has made in magazine articles which questioned whether the band's arrangements were "adventurous" enough. "First of all," Mulligan answered, "I want the band to find itself, to find its own meaning within existing forms. Many of the guys looking for 'new forms' don't understand the old ones. Secondly, my conception of a band is that of a group which can communicate an emotion that comes from the interaction between its members as a unit. A band can do that only if it enjoys what it's playing. And we do. We have fun as we work, and when things are really going well, we get a spirit going like 'let the good times roll.' That is what I want."

"Too many 'avant-garde' composers," Mulligan went on, 'write for each other, not for the players. By contrast, I want material which the men take pleasure in playing. This band is developing both as a framework for soloists and as a vehicle for writers, but not 'far out' writers. So far as my own participation is concerned, my stamp is on the band and I'm the featured soloist, but up to now I've been more of a supervisor of the writing than a very active contributor. But all of what we do is based on my conviction that music is to be enjoyed, by the player as well as the listener.

The opening Blueport began as an Art Farmer original for the Mulligan quartet. Al Colin's orchestration is based in large part on the way the quartet is used to play the tune. This approach is literally true at the beginning of the arrangement and then other parts are gradually added. After Mulligan's lithe solo over the firmly integrated and flowing rhythm team of Bill Crow and Mel Lewis, trombonist Willie Dennis takes a briskly inventive solo of considerable emotional thrust over complementary patterns from the band. The driving tenor is Jim Reider. Bill Crow's bass solo leads into a crackling series of exchanges between Gerry Mulligan and Clark Terry. Mulligan first takes the four-bar breaks with eight-bar answers from Terry. The process is then reversed. The dialogue is a contest of wit as well as quick-fingering imagination, and there are a couple of places where the two jousters nearly break each other up.

Body and Soul is a Bob Brookmeyer arrangement with Mulligan indicating his impressive capacity for lyricism and a tenderness that is sensitive without being sentimental. The other soloist is the uniquely expressive Brookmeyer who has become, to my taste, the most freshly imaginative and thoroughly personal of all contemporary jazz trombonists.

Black Nightgown is from John Mandel's score for the film, I Want to Live, in which Mulligan appeared both on screen and throughout the sound track. Solos are by, Mulligan, Brookmeyer and Clark Terry. The buoyant mood is an effective counterpart to the force of Blueport and the reflective gentleness of Body and Soul.

Come Rain or Come Shine is a Gerry Mulligan arrangement. On tour, the solo has often been taken by Zoot Sims, but Gerry has come to enjoy the tune so much that he elected to include his interpretation in this set. It is an exceptional illustration of Mulligan's ability to sustain a romantic mood while keeping it resilient and unsaccharine. Lady Chatterley's Mother (which is also known as Mother's Day, though not to too many mothers) is an Al Cohn original. Al also did this arrangement. The line is light and crisp and is played accordingly. First solo is by Bob Brookmeyer (note the variety of reed figures behind him). Clark Terry leaps into the foreground after which Gerry Mulligan takes a characteristically loping, logical, warm solo. When Mulligan returns for his final solo, there is a cumulatively exciting dialogue between him and the band (sometimes as a whole and sometimes in sections).

The final Let My People Be features Mulligan on piano. The written parts for orchestra are Bob Brookmeyer's but the arrangement is basically a "head"; and as of this Sunday afternoon, it became continually changed in the playing. "We got into a real Count Basie-style 'head' ensemble," says Mulligan, "and things got romping like mad. By judicious use of hand signals, we skipped a lot of the written material at the end and continued, as we were going." There's a pungent, witty, irrepressible solo, by Brookmeyer; Jim Reider is on tenor; and a quasi-talking solo by Clark Terry that is one of his more unfettered on record, building through a series of climaxes with the reed section laying down a steadily more insistent background riff. After Terry, the brass section opens up in counterpoise to the reeds and the band creates a swirling finale that is infectiously joyful.

Drummer Mel Lewis - a musician of consistent taste who propels the Mulligan ensemble with a rare combination of lightness and strength - has summarized the reason the musicians in this band are so enthusiastic about the Mulligan orchestra. "Every time we play something," says Lewis, "it's different from the last time we've played the number. That's the way it's supposed to be. This is a real jazz band."

And so it is. Its virtues are much more apparent in this second album, partly because of the stimulation provided by the audience and also because by this point the band had been together for some time and had, in Mulligan's phrase, been finding its own identity.

-NAT HENTOFF