1. Funhouse - Funhouse 78
2. Ide's Side - Prestige 1318
3. Roundhouse
4. Kaper - Kaper 78
5. Bweebida Bobbida - Kaper 78
6. Mullenium - Funhouse 78 & Prestige 1318
7. Mulligan's Too

• Walter Bolden
• Allen Eager
• Jerry Hurwitz
• Phil Leshin
• Max MacElroy
• Gail Madden
• Gerry Mulligan
• Nick Travis
• George Wallington
• Ollie Wilson

 LINER NOTES

Before Gerry Mulligan went to California to found his pianoless quartet and find gold, there were many lean days in New York. Whatever his financial hardships were, Gerry always managed to keep active musically by jamming around town and rehearsing various size groups for gigs that never were even in the offing. The latter is a very difficult thing to do. Even when there is a tentative engagement in view, it's hard to round up the boys for a rehearsal. Getting them together to read just for the love of the music is really a problem. Gerry could always get them not because he was such a great organizer but rather on the strength of his music. Everyone was interested in playing his compositions and arrangements. When there were no studios to be had, Gerry improvised. One afternoon he took a big band down by the lake in Central Park. It was an ideal, location but the police thought otherwise. Out of these rehearsals grew his first tentette, heard here in six selections all written and arranged by Gerry.

The second side of this LP is an example of the sessions which Gerry participated in during this period. He combines swinging and thinking very effectively, and the composer in him Is evident in that as he improvises, he constantly constructs lines which are food for new compositions. The general informality, and relaxed interplay between Gerry and Allen Eager reveal a climate of jazz not often caught on record.

notes by IRA GITLER

FROM"Mulligan Plays Mulligan: Banner"

Following Mulligan's involvement with Miles Davis's nonet, this was his own like-size unit. Instead of tuba and french horn, however, there is an extrs trumpet and baritone Sax. Gail Madded, who later influenced Gerry toward the piano-less rhythm section, is on maraca. Gerry, Allen Eager, and George Wallington jam the blues on "Mulligan's Too," which takes up te entire B side.

FROM"Historically Speaking"

I've always wondered how much difference a technical knowledge of music made in affecting the 'pleasure level' of the listener. Watch the audience at both jazz -and classical concerts; there is the same concentration, the same involvement, the same pleasure on both groups of faces. And in both groups you see the musicians nodding, smiling at an especially clever phrase, and in jazz, laughing out loud in appreciation of a surprise. But the layman does this too, though possibly not as frequently . . not always at the same place.

Somehow the sustained but complex rhythm of jazz holds more surprises, more participation than any other sound in music. Jazz goes back in musical time, extemporizing as it did thousands of years ago, yet utilizing also the best of the tonality system developed by the great classic composers.

You don't see large numbers of ,people standing in front of a picture for 'hours, reacting to the statement made by the artist . . . and reacting together. But jazz with its basic, almost universal appeal will hold listeners spellbound for hours. Maybe it's the element of surprise; possibly part is the truly primitive aspect of good jazz; surely a good portion of the fascination lies in the 'instant' composing done live for the listener. Whatever the reason, however much or little musical knowledge you possess, the equation of good jazz is pleasure.

There is nothing simple about the Mulligan equation. Even his most disinterested scrutiny turns up something new; from the first pianoless quartet to his immense present popularity, every note Mulligan has pulled in and made his own has something to say. Whatever the mood, his is the adequate mode of evocation. This man takes little notice of the many concessions required of most jazz expression.

Other musicians know this about Mulligan; they like to play his music . . . it constantly renews and extends possibility. His arrangements flake the available material and, in obviously relaxed and comfortable terms bring forth some fine, fine sounds.

This recording is pure pleasure. Nothing selfconsciously "progressive" here. This effectively spontaneous solidly textured jazz. Whether playing a simple series of notes or a more elaborate counterpoint, Gerry's group, with George Wallington at the piano on the first side, 'have plenty to say . . . and they make sense.

The second side is one long cut, MULLIGAN's TOO. Gerry's taste and talent as a composer shows directly in this work, and the response between he and Allen Eager is a special one. Right here's where I run out and need to try to explain Mulligan . . . he just doesn't need explanation . . . just listening . . .

Notes, Les Davis

MULLIGAN-BAKER

"The Perennial Guest"

When the redoubtable Charles Mingus brought a Iarge orchestra to New York's Philharmonic HaII in the winter of 1972, one of the sidemen - unannounced - was a bearded, relaxed, alert baritone saxophonist who was enjoying the proceedings as least as much as anyone in the audience. He grinned approvingly during solos, particularly those of Gene Ammons; plunged zestfully into his section work; and occasionally had some buoyantly resourceful solo statements of his own to make.

The man demonstrating such manifest pleasure in the act of making music was Gerry Mulligan. A few weeks later, appearing with Dave Brubeck and Paul Desmond at Carnegie Hall, Mulligan - sharing top billing this time - was just as persistently enlivening. This "perennial guest... gave the evening its high point," John S. Wilson observed in the New York Times.

Through the years of Mulligan's presence on the jazz scene - and they span more than a quarter of a century - his adaptability to many different kinds of playing contexts particularly characterizes him for me. That, and his willingness, his eagerness, to jam. When the jazz festival scene, for instance, got to be more and more routinized and all too predictable, there was always Mulligan after hours - at Newport, at Monterey, wherever. Some of the most joyous music I remember on the festival circuit had Mulligan as its after-hours catalytic center - improvising and spurring other players in open-ended sessions that cut across categories of style, age, background. It was just the music that was happening that counted - the telling of stories right then.

Mulligan is also capable of considerable discipline with attendant concern-extraordinarily sensitized - for dynamics. Witness the Mulligan-Baker Fantasy sides in this set. And from time to time, though never for long enough to satisfy this listener, he has revealed his skills as a writer-player who, had he stayed at it, could have metamorphosized certain big band traditions into further dimensions of having a ball through music.

That's what Mulligan is centrally about - pleasure in the present. He can be a sensuous romanticist as he makes ballad lines just taut enough to bear more nightdreaming; and he can also stomp, swing, and just plain float on the natural high of being able to make his horn say a lot of things that speech doesn't get anywhere near.

It's not that Mulligan hasn't had any grim times along the way. His life hasn't all been Huck Finn sampling jam. There were some bleak, searching times - with no one involved quite knowing the question - and the 1951 Mulligan music here, originally released on Prestige, comes out of that kind of experience.

Then came the marquee years - with Chet Baker- also represented here. Soft and cooly disciplined music for listeners during a decade of privatism in which " the end of ideology" had been proclaimed. Looking back, the illusions most Americans had then about their country and themselves were bizarrely askew. But as in all periods, the inward-turning as well as the collectively turbulent, some music of durable value transcended the Zeitgeist. And Mulligan's shapes and sounds were among those that have value beyond their time of generation. (By contrast, for instance, with much of the "west coast" jazz that followed in his wake but has since submerged deeper than Atlantis.)

Mulligan remained diversley active in the 1960's - challenging combos, even doing some acting. His kind of music was no longer setting directions for others, but he had learned what he wanted to say - and he kept doing just that without attempting to reshape his style and sensibility to meet the priorities of others. In that sense, Mulligan has been like Pee Wee Russell or Thelonious Monk having found his musical purpose, he has continued to mine its possibilities with scant regard for being trendy.

In recent years, Mulligan has worked on occasion with Dave Brubeck, and in various other settings such as the Mingus concert. He is no longer in the ascendancy, as he was when the recordings in this album were made; but he's not an anachronism either. Mulligan, having created his own musical microcosm, lives there quite comfortably. And since its borders are flexible, he still fits easily and ebulliently into a wide range of musical situations. I doubt hat Mulligan will ever be a museum piece. Melodists of his quality and of his spontaneous inventiveness are always rare - as are musicians with so supple and energizing a beat. Jazz has no more passed him by than it has Vic Dickenson. No matter what the dominating idiom is in any period, there remains a place on board - not in a parlor car though - for those who have survived intact. For some of them, anyway. We are not yet sufficiently musically civilized to make it possible for Dickie Wells, let's say, to leave his day job. But some of the less than young jazzmen are still telling nocturnal tales.

Remembering Gerry during the years represented in this set, it's startling, in a way, to realize that he's forty-five. But then Mingus is forty-nine; and Roy Eldridge, at sixty-one, holds down a gig six nights a week. Hell, Mulligan's got a lot of playing time left. And watching him dig everything that was going on at the Mingus concert at Philharmonic Hall, I had no sense of any diminution of energy or sureness of direction with which to contrast the Mulligan on these sides and the Mulligan of the present. Quite the contrary. He's got it all together, and the rest is playing it natural.

"Lyricism in Limbo" It used to be said - and usually accurately - that when a musician left Duke Ellington, an essential part of him (a strength that Duke had focused on and nurtured) somehow disappeared. A number of the exiles, temporary and permanent, certainly kept their strikingly individualistic thrust - Rex Stewart, for instance, and Ben Webster now. But most of those who departed Duke returned to ordinary lifesize. Or less.

In a smaller way, and for a brief time, Chet Baker found his optimum musical setting - in the collaboration with Gerry Mulligan that can be heard echoing through the years in this collection. For all his occasional attempts later to play hard, Baker was at his most persuasive in gently lyrical, introspective improvising. Mulligan provided complementary strength both in terms of rhythmic propulsion and coloristically. He also had an organizing strength that pretty much determined and held together the musical identity of the quartet.

Working with Mulligan, moreover, gave Baker the space within which his particular kind of musical imagination could best function. The tempi, even on the quartet's more outgoing numbers, did not strain his ability to have his technique keep up with his ideas. And in all that the quartet played, there was never any crowding. A primary distinguishing characteristic of all groups for which Mulligan has set policy is that space - silence - becomes an integral part of the music. Accordingly, Baker, who is most individualistic and affecting when he's in an ambience that lets him reflect as he improvises, reached his creative peak during his brief time with Mulligan.

His career went largely downhill afterwards, although indications at first were otherwise. When the Mulligan-Baker Quartet first recorded for Fantasy - at the insistence of Dave Brubeck - few musicians and observers of the jazz scene would have predicted the swiftness and extent of its success. (The first prescient writer about the group was Ralph Gleason, who spread the news in Down Beat.) But when the quartet became so unmistakable a "hot property", the illusion took hold of both Baker and certain record company executives that Baker on his own would be just as profit-making as the quartet. Even more so. The quartet's My Funny Valentine, after all, had scored unprecedentedly - the first "cool jazz" recording to find a huge and wide popular audience.

Columbia, therefore, beckoned, and Baker was heard with strings and as a singer. (His vocal prowess, though it had a short vogue, was such as to make Rex Harrison sound like a bel canto virtuoso.)

Going out on his own, Baker toured Europe, the United States, and then settled in Scandinavia and Italy for a time. But infrequent compelling performances notwithstanding, there was less and less of a center of gravity in Baker's work. The nurturing gestalt of the musical relationship with Mulligan was never equalled for Baker. Eventually, he went into limbo; and although he reappears from time to time, his prospects as a player have not appeared to be sanguine for a long time. This is not to say that it's impossible for him to climb back, but the odds are long.

The dwindling odyssey of Chet Baker is an intriguing, and rather poignant, illustration of how swiftly transient the experience of "making it" can be. Even if Baker had stayed with Mulligan, the quartet would have eventually dissolved - for reasons both of changing audience tastes and divergences of temperament between Baker and Mulligan. (The Modern Jazz Quartet's capacity all these years to retain a durable public, particularly abroad, and not explode in internal dissension is extremely unusual in jazz history.)

But Mulligan, even though tastes did change, has found ways to remain a functioning part of the jazz scene - though much less prominently than before - and on his own terms. Baker has not; because unlike Mulligan, he needs to be part of a whole that is not only greater than himself but that can also provide that particular kind of collective support his small but potentially quite expressive talent needs. And he never found a way to construct that whole after leaving Mulligan.

Yet Baker did leave a legacy, much of the best of it in this set. For that quick period, he was much more than a sideman and not yet a drifting leader. His experience is that of the young novelist who writes one or two books that last, and spends the rest of his career wondering why it never happened again. But at least there were those books, as for Baker there were these quartet recordings.

They stand up - permanent elements in the evolution of what can be called jazz chamber music. The graceful, sinewy interweaving of vocal-like horn lines; the flowing time; the transmuting of "standards" into wholly jazz epiphanies - it all did come together, however briefly. And an index of the impact of these recordings is that so many listeners who grew up during that decade consider these sides to be part of their own autobiographies. And they wonder occasionally whatever did happen to Chet Baker. It may not mean all that much to Baker, but a lot of people still do think about him. And more will, now that these performances are available again.

Nat Hentoff