1. Out Back of the Barn
2. Wallflower
3. Midas Lives
4. Noblesse
5. Sun On the Stairs
6. Curtains
7. Walkin' Shoes
8. These Foolish Things

May 9, 1995
Konzerthaus, Berlin

 LINER NOTES

It was also done with joy. I've never known a musician who was so eager to jam, to sit in with other players, wherever he found them. As the magisterial Coleman Hawkins - who invented the jazz tenor saxophone-said: "Gerry is full of the spirit."Gerry Mulligan was the complete jazz musician. As Dave Brubeck said, 'When you listen to Gerry, you feel as If you're listening 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."

It was also done with joy. I've never known a musician who was so eager to jam, to sit in with other players, wherever he found them. As the magisterial Coleman Hawkins - who invented the jazz tenor saxophone-said: "Gerry is full of the spirit."

I remember the irrepressible Mulligan presence at a jazz festival on Great South Bay, Long Island. Featured, was the reunion of the legendary Fletcher Henderson band, with such distinctive alumni as Coleman Hawkins and trombonist J.C Higginbotham. Gerry had bought a ticket for the concert by these jazz masters.

But as I wrote in my book, Jazz Is, "Gerry slipped into the shadows alongside the bandstand, and when the concert of the patriarchs got underway, he began playing softly. The cornetist Rex Stewart, long featured in Duke Ellington's orchestra, waved Gerry on to the stage; and standing between Hawkins and Higginbotham, Gerry played a powerful solo. Much later that night, the last the audience saw of Mulligan, he was walking out of the tent into the darkness, still playing."

This rare recording of Gerry presents the quintessential Mulligan - his warmth, fluent imagination, and his mastery of this challenging horn, the baritone saxophone, which he could play with a rollicking, infectious beat but also turn into a delicately lyrical Instrument And the setting clearly pleased him as you can hear him say to the appreciative audience, "It's a great pleasure to play in such an intimate old hall "

The spirit of jazz moved Gerry onto the road early. He was seventeen when he began arranging for the Tommy Tucker band, and then - as an arranger or saxophonist or both - he went with Claude Thornhiil and Gene Krupa. He became even more nationally and internationally known as a participant and principle arranger in the 1957 Birth of the Cool album with Miles Davis, Gil Evans, John Lewis and other explorers into the further supple and subtle dimensions of jazz.

Jazz stardom, for Mulligan resulted from the pianoess quartet he led with Chet Baker and then Bob Brookmeyer. Other Mulligan groups followed, including a big band. In whatever setting he created, his bands had drive, wit, lyricism and ingenuity. The performances were never routine. for Mulligan - whether a leader or sitting in as a sideman somewhere - ignited other players with his delight in surprising himself in the act of jazz.

As Rex Stewart, himself a compelling and witty player, said of Gerry. "He has soul, and he plays and talks like a man who enjoys life and people. I feel a kinship with him right away. If a man doesn't feel him, he must be dead."

On this May night at the Konzerthaus in Berlin, 1995 during his last European tour, Mulligan had attentive, compatible colleagues who, as in all Mulligan units, became an integral part of the proceedings - not just accompanists. And note the guest appearance of Dave Brubeck on "These Foolish Things."

Throughout, Mulligan illuminates the expressive range of the baritone saxophone and always the pulse of the jazz time that keeps the spirit moving. The spontaneity, the immediacy of Mulligan's resourceful imagination and skill courses through this memorable event. The playing further illuminates why he was welcome - wherever and whenever he wanted to play - by his peers in the pantheon of jazz

In his book, Jazz Lives (McClelland & Stewart), Gene Lees - historian, singer and lyricist - focuses on the essence of Mulligan's continuing impact: "Witty, funny, proud, restless, searching, eternally curious about music and life and books and linguistics and history and just about anything you could name."

When Gerry was in the third grade in a small Ohio town he recalled. "I was on the way to school when I saw the Red Nichols (a jazz cornetist) bus sitting in front of a hotel. That moment was probably when I first wanted to become a band musician and go on the road. It was a small, old Greyhound bus with a canopied observation platform, and on the bus was printed, 'RED NICHOLS AND HIS FIVE PENNIES.' It all symbolized travel and adventure. I was never the same after that"

And for the rest of his life, Gerry Mulligan brought listening adventures to people all over the world. He always exemplified what John Coltrane described as the jazz experience: "When you're playing with someone who really has something to say ...that electricity, that kind of feeling... a lift sort of feeling No matter where it happens, you know when the feeling comes upon you, and it makes you feel happy."

That feeling lifts the listeners too.

- Nat Hentoff