1. Nuova Civilta
2. Fertile Land
3. Rio One
4. Champoluc

• Giancarlo Barigozzi
• Sergio Farina
• Enrico Intra
Gerry Mulligan
• Pino Presti
• Tullio de Piscopo

October 16 & 17, 1975

 LINER NOTES

As a sometime chronicler of Mulligan's life and music over the past 25 years, I went to hear Gerry at hopper's on the same day I first heard this recording. Live, as on the record, Gerry still has all of the excitement he has customarilty generated. But there is now an added depth - a fuller mellowness of sound and a further, more thoughtful lyricism in his conception. Also still present ar ethe Mulligan wit adn that basic, infectious liveliness which led Rex Stewart, long ago, to say about Gerry: "He has soul, and he plays and talks like a man who enjoys lif and people. If a man doesn't feel him, he must be dead."

Lively as Gerry is, it had appeared to some, however, that Mulligan had become semi-retired. The thought surprises and annoys him. Like Duke Ellington Mulligan's automatic reaction is - "Retire to what?" Actually, as Gerry points out, he has been more active (particularly in composing) during the past couple of years than for some time previously. But since much of Gerry's last two years has been spent in Italy, there were some American writers who mistakenly thought Mulligan Had become a jazzman emeritus.

I asked Gerry about the apparently regenerating effect of Italy, so far as his music has been concerned. "It's a place," Gerry said, "that I find stimulating and yet it's also so easy to relax there. That's why Italy has turned out to be a good place for me to write. And it was about time. For years, I'd been saying to myself that I'd get back to writing when I got through with other things that were more pressing. It's as if writing was a luxury that would wait. But it's not a luxury. It's very important to me. So finally I just went ahead and wrote. And I'm still writing.

There's only one Mulligan origianl on this set, the samba-like Rio One, which represents the light-hearted, easily swinging, limber dimension of Gerry's musical temperament. The others are compositions by pienist-composer-leader Enrico Intra.

Mulligna was much pleased to collaborate with Enrico and Giancarlo Barigozzi (saxophone and flute), Sergio Farina (guitar), Pino Presti (bass), Tullio de Piscopo (percussion).

"They're good imaginative players," said Gerry, "and we all fitted well together." As the music manifestly makes clear. Both the initial two tracks, Fertile Lands and Champoluc are unusually evocative lyrical pieces, long-lined and developed with supple inventiveness. Mulligan's baritone saxophone playing on these, and the other numbers, reveals that added depth of sound and conception I mentioned before. Always able to transform that usually cumbersome instrument into a quite astonishingly graceful, flexible horn. Mulligan has become even more commandingly personal on the instrument, easily the most wide-rangin baritone saxophonist in jazz.

And as a writer himself, mulligan clearly understands the developmental requirements of improvising in such an extended piece as Nuova Civilta which takes up the entire first side of this set. "In Italy, as elsewhere in Europe and the United States," Mulligan observes, "the fashion now is for a lot of free-style blowing in what are called, but aren't always, extended forms. This composition is different. It's much more carefully thought out, and actually, with its diverse themes, it could be called a suite." As for the rather connotation of the title, Mulligan isn't so sure. "It may be kind of tongue-in-cheek," he says. "The end, for instance, sounds rather bleak to me. Sort of like the wind whistling through atomic-strewn cities."

In part of that last piece, and also in a lead saxophone part of the end of Rio One, you can hear the newest extension of Mulligan - the soprano saxophone. He uses the small, curved model rather than the long, straight saxophone that was identified with Sidney Bechet. Gerry soars on the little horn with a fullness and roundness of sound that presages much more playing of the soprano by Mulligan. He obviously enjoys what he gets from the instrument, adn judging from the more edtended soprano solos I heard him take in New York, he is close to being as authoritative on that horn as he is on the baritone.

When John S. Wilson of the New York Times reviewed Gerry Mulligan's New York stand shortly after Gerry had returned from Italyand from the making of this album, he wrote that in gerry's playing, "There is a steady flor of action, excitement amd avriety." The characterization applies as well to his work on this recording. And there is something else in his music - a remarkably full and balanced sense of the continuum of jazz. Back in 1959, Dave brubeck said, "When you listen to gerry, you feel as if you were lsitening to the past, present and future of jazz, all in one tune, and yet it's done with such taste and respect that you're not ever aware of a change in idiom."

Actually, not all of the present avant-garde or the putative future of the music is in Gerry's work. Some of it he does not like. He prefers, by and large, music that swings, however softly; and music that has clarity, inner logic, and a momentum that builds inexorably from what has gone before. He does not groove on chaos or seeming chaos. But Gerry does always keep his ears open, and so, although his music has a most distinctively personal set of characteristics, he has never allowed it to become frozen in time. Accordingly, one still hears the very present force of the mainstream, and some advance tributaries, Gerry's work.

Whitney Balliet, the persistently perceptive jazz critic of The New Yorker, writes of the current Gerry Mulligan that with "his long hair and huge, fiery beard, he looks like a patriarch." But he is a most-high-spirited, sometimes antic, and almost magically youthful sort of patriarch. Kind of like a veritable playfulspirit of jazz itself. And Balliett also points out that at the core of Mlligan's playing is his contribution as "an inspired and often ingenious conservationist who has spent his career pursuing and reshaping the traditional beauties of jazz."

I remember, years ago, talking to Coleman hawkins about Gerry Mulligan. The magisterial Mr. Hawkins was never quick to praise but he told me with enthusiasm, "That Gerry, he is full of the spirit."

And it is that spirit which makes this set so enlivening and provocative an experience. Gerry has been spreading that spirit for a ong time; but these nights he somehow sounds to me more fresh and more likely to surprise than he did a quarter-century ago. I do believe the best of his already remarkable career is ahead.

- Nat Hentoff