Night Lights (CD & 2LPs)
Broken Noses (Video)
Festival Minor/Night Lights (CD)

night night-2 festive-night
  1. Night Lights(1963) notes - Broken Noses
  2. Morning of the Carnival (Black Orpheus)
  3. In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning notes
  4. Prelude in E Minor notes
  5. Festival Minor
  6. Tell Me When notes
  7. Night Lights(1965) notes
 broken
1 - 6 = Dave Bailey, Bob Brookmeyer, Bill Crow, Art Farmer, Jim Hall, Gerry Mulligan September, 1963

7 =Jond Grey, Jimmy Bond, Hal Blaine, Pete Jolly, Gerry Mulligan - 1965

 LINER NOTES

Jazz people look for beauty and offer love. Listen to the Cinderella songs they prefer. My Funny Valentine, for example: hidden for years and barely nourished by the gentility this perfect maid, this dream of a cook, was first rescued and introduced around by Gerry Mulligan. We knew she was pretty, but Gerry saw her soul. The early Mulligan Quartet's Valentine is mother of the six performances here. Morning of the Carnival, from Brazil; Prelude in E Minor, from Poland, in Brazilian dress. In the Wee Small Hours, from the solitary side of the swinging Sinatra; Tell Me When, from the honey pocket of the salty Ben Webster. And Gerry's own two originals: Festive Minor, the last set at the club; and Night Lights (Gerry playing piano), back home. Each from a different seed; all related. Whatever they were, now they are songs of love. Musicians know of rooms around the world where lights are low, and tables too. They find them when the gig is through, to talk and drink and smile. The sandy sounds of dancing feet are the loudest in the room.You know the scene. Remember, once, a room so dark the street outside the window glared by contrast? Doors were locked, the air was sweet, the cigarette was shared. And maybe there was Thornhill's Snowfall, Dusk, by Ellington, Our Waltz by David Rose, or Moonlight Serenade.

The bands are not the same. The songs are new. But nothing's really changed.

Willis Conover

P.S.
This may come as somewhat of a surprise, but for the nearly twenty years that Gerry Mulligan has been a ranking baritone saxophonist whose forte has been a unique ability to communicate melodically with the most varied of audiences, he has never recorded with string backgrounds. What is even more surprising is that only once before, and that briefly, has he been heard playing clarinet on record. Both of those gaps in Mulligan's career have been filled with Night Lights, a Gerry Mulligan composition, one that he recorded a couple of years ago. The difficulty came in getting him to record it again so soon, but it was pointed out that it would be an entirely different version if played on clarinet with orchestral backing...