Concert In The Rain

rain
  1. Broadway notes
  2. Theme from "I Want To Live"
  3. You're Clear Of Out Of This World
  4. Manoir Des Mes Reves
  5. Eighteen Carrots (For Rabbit)
  6. Walkin' Shoes
  7. Sweet And Slow
  8. I'm Gonna Go Fishin'
  9. Blueport
  10. The Anthillnotes
1 - 7 = Gene Allen, Wayne Andre, Bob Brookmeyer, Conte Candoli, Buddy Clark, Don Ferrara, Mel Lewis, Dick Meldonian, Gerry Mulligan, Alan Raph, Jim Reider, Gene Quill, Phil Sunkel

July 1, 1960

10 = Bob Brookmeyer, Dave Bailey, Bill Crow, Art Farmer, Jim Hall, Gerry Mulligan

July 5, 1963

 LINER NOTES

This welcome addition to the Mulligan Concert Jazz Band discography was recorded six weeks after the band's debut single "I'm Gonna Go Fishin' Parts 1 & 2" and three weeks before they recorded their first album. In the five years that Mulligan fronted the band until their final engagement at Birdland on New Year's Eve 1964, five albums were recorded for Verve which showed that Mulligan's unique approach to small band writing was successfully extended to the larger ensemble. The Concert Jazz Band has rightly been called a 'small' big band, reflecting the leader's firm policy with his arrangers that the inner voices should be clearly heard. In a recent conversation, long time Mulligan bassist Bill Crow told me "We tried to keep our dynamic level from very soft to medium loud and in a 1964 Down Beat interview with Harry Frost Mulligan said "When you overblow the tone quality goes. Our band shouts but it doesn't scream". The inner voices are beautifully apparent on the two ballads played here; "Manoir De Mes Reves" and "Sweet And Slow", and the band certainly I shouts' on Bill Holman's exciting arrangement of "I'm Gonna Go Fishin"'. Although this concert was recorded and videotaped by the U.S. Information Service during a drenching rainstorm it is quite clear from the audience reaction that they were enthralled by the band's performance. After the introduction by Willis Connover, Gerry Mulligan takes over as M.C. and gives suitable credit to the arrangers and soloists, except on "Walkin' Shoes" which features Gene Quill, Don Ferrara and Bob Brookmeyer, "I'm Gonna Go Fishin"' with Ferrara, Jim Reider and Brookmeyer and "Sweet And Slow" with Brookmeyer again. The leader of course, is featured on all selections.

Bob Brookmeyer's importance to the band cannot be overstated, because after Mulligan he was the chief soloist, arranger and straw boss - the hirer and firer. He recruited Conte Candoli, Buddy Clark and Mel Lewis, and in Lewis with his relaxed and laid back sense of time they had the ideal drummer for the band.

In the final two years of the Concert Jazz Band's life big band bookings were sometimes hard to find, so Mulligan also worked with either a quartet or sextet, and it is the sextet that we hear on the final selection.

This is the second live recording of Mulligan's Concert Jazz Band to be discovered in the past couple of years, the other having been a Paris concert and it is a continuing testimony to the quite different sound of this short lived band.

Gordon Jack - March 1996