The Essential Gerry Mulligan
Jazz 'Round Midnight

The Essential Gerry Mulligan
essential
  1. Theme For Jobim - Butterfly With Hiccups
  2. Big City Life - Concert Jazz Band
  3. Summer's Over - A Concert in Jazz
  4. Le Plus Que Lente - A Profile Of
  5. Sweet And Lovely - Presenting the Sextet
  6. Manoir De Mes Reves - The Concert Jazz Band
  7. Tell Me When - Night Lights
  8. Lost In The Stars - Quartet 1962
  9. Davenport Blues - Something Borrowed, Something Blue
  10. Go Home - Meets Ben Webster
  11. What's It All About notes Meets Johnny Hodges
Jazz 'Round Midnight
round_mid 		1 = Bob Brookmeyer, Bill Crow, Dave Bailey, Gerry Mulligan

June 25, 1964

2 = Gene Allen, Bob Brookmeyer, Eddie Caine, Bill Crow, Willie Dennis, Don Ferrara, Jim Hall, Gus Johnson, Gerry Mulligan, Gene Quill, Jim Reider, Doc Severinson, Tony Studd, Clark Terry, Nick Travis

December 19, 1962

3 = Gene Allen, Bob Brookmeyer, Bill Crow, Willie Dennis, Bob Donovan, Don Ferrara, Mel Lewis, Gerry Mulligan, Gene Quill, Alan Raph, Jim Reider, Doc Severinson, Nick Travis

July 10 or 11, 1961

4 = Dave Bailey, Bob Brookmeyer, Bill Crow, Jon Eardley, Gerry Mulligan, Zoot Sims

January 25, 1956

5 = Dave Bailey, Bob Brookmeyer, Jon Eardley, Peck Morrison, Gerry Mulligan, Zoot Sims

September 22, 1955

6 = Gene Allen, Wayne Andre, Bob Brookmeyer, Buddy Clark, Conte Candoli, Don Ferrara, Mel Lewis, Dick Meldonian, Gerry Mulligan, Gene Quill, Alan Raph, Jim Reider, Zoot Sims, Nick Travis

July 25 or 27, 1960

7 = Art Farmer, Bob Brookmeyer, Bill Crow, Jim Hall, Gerry Mulligan

October 3, 1963

8 = Bob Brookmeyer, Bill Crow, Gus Johnson, Gerry Mulligan

May 14 or 15, 1962

9 = Dave Bailey Warren Bernhardt, Eddie Gomez, Gerry Mulligan, Zoot Sims

July 19, 1966

10 = Mel Lewis, Gerry Mulligan, Jimmy Rowles, Leroy Vinnegar, Ben Webster

November 3, 1959

11 = Buddy Clark, Johnny Hodges, Mel Lewis, Gerry Mulligan, Claude Williamson

November 17, 1959

 LINER NOTES

"Smiling to Keep From Crying," the bittersweet title of an album that brought together saxophonist Lester Young and trumpeter Roy Eldridge, could well serve as an epigraph for this collection, which reflects Mulligan's moods and atmosphere. A baritone saxophonist, Gerry Mulligan also plays tenor sex and sometimes the clarinet, and is, in addition, an arranger, composer, pianist, and leader of all kinds of bands. An actor, as well, he was in Vincente Minnelli's "Bell s Are Ringing" and "The Subterraneans," where he played the role of . . . priest.

Throughout his musical career he has consistently maintained a paradoxical equilibrium inherent to the entire tradition of jazz and blues: a serious theme, immediately announced and emphasized by the baritone, is balanced by the offhand and casual. the tragic lies just beneath an almost perky surface of redistributed melodies and rhythmic elements. Seemingly uneventful music, virtuoso playing and writing that could be thought little more than light entertainment, all are part of an overall philosophy of artistic creation, shared by musicians and poets alike to tell the most essential, the most literally terrible things, without seeming to touch them.

The same elegant allusion and equivocation, the same deelicate rewriting of emotion, these are found in the best composers of Brazilian melodies (Antonio Carlos Jobim), in the sophistication and ambiguity of Claude Debussy ("La Plus que Lente," arranged by Gil Evans), in Bix Beiderbecke's "misty" compositions and, of course, in the indelible smile of the blues. This may help explain the delightful shock experienced by the first audience to hear Gerry Mulligan's quartet without piano: an exquisite inner sensation of euphoria in an environment of glacial modernism (the Cold War and McCarthyism of the mid-'50s). It was as if the instrumentalist-composer had preserved and adapted a certain soothing, reassuring power of the music . . between yesterday and today, between one night fall and the next in the uncertain hours around midnight.