1. Chelsea Bridge - Gerry Mulligan Meets Ben Webster & 2
2. Tell Me When - GM Meets BW & 1
3. Sunday - GM Meets BW & 2 (not on CD)
4. Who's Got Rythm - GM Meets BW & 1 (not on CD)
5. Bunny - Gerry Mulligan Meets Johnny Hodges & 1
6. Shady Side - GM Meets JH & 1(not on CD)
7. 18 Carrots for Rabbit - GM Meets JH & 2
8. Come Rain or Come Shine - CJB On Tour With Zoot Sims
9. Red Door - CJB With ZS
10. Blues In Time - Gerry Mulligan and the Paul Desmond Quartet & 1 (not on CD)
11. Body and Soul - GM and PDQ & 3
12. Fall Out - GM and PDQ & 2 (not on CD)
13. Battle Hymn of the Republican - GM and PDQ & 2 (not on CD)
14. Standstill - GM and PDQ & 1 (not on CD)
15. Line For Lyons - GM and the PDQ & 3
16. Scrapple From the Apple - Stan Getz Meets Gerry Mulligan in Hi-Fi
17. This Can't Be Done - SG Meets GM & 2
18. Too Close For Comfort - SG Meets GM & 1 (not on CD)
19. That Old Feeling - SG Meets GM & 2 (not on CD)
20. A Ballad - SG Meets GM & 1 (not on CD)
21. Let's Fall In Love - SG Meets GM & 3(not on CD)
22. What's It All About - GM Meets JH & 3 (not on CD)
23. Go Home - GM Meets BW & 3 (not on CD)
24. Anything Goes - SG Meets GM & 3 (not on CD)
25. BackBeat - GM Meets JH & 3 (not on CD)
26. Winter Song - GM and PDQ & 3 (not on CD)
27. Cat Walk - GM Meets BW & 3 (not on CD)

1, 4, 23 = November 3, 1959
2, 3, 27 = December 2, 1959

July, 1960 (November 17, 1959)

1960

1960

10 & 11, 26 - August 2, 1957
11-15 = August 27, 1957

16 - 21, 24 = October 22, 1957

 LINER NOTES

Many of Gerry Mulligan's finest outings for the Verve label featured the great baritone saxophonist in unique meetings with other star saxophonists. On these recordings, Mulligan's playful, adventurous style both complemented and challenged the other players and their work similarly affected him. This collection features ten tracks from these brilliant collaborations - with Ben Webster, Johnny Hodges, Stan Getz, Paul Desmond, and Zoot Sims.

VOLUME 1

Making good conversation is among the most civilised of pursuits. And it can exist in a musical as well as a verbal context, with the gifted participant bringing out the best in others as well as in himself. Such a musician is Gerry Mulligan. Perhaps his instrument, the baritone saxophone, lends itself to this kind of give and take, able to be brusque and amiable all at once, giving a phrase the kind of gravity that turns it into an epigram. On this LP Mulligan exchanges musical ideas with a bevy of fellow saxophonists: two alto Players, Johnny Hodges and Paul Desmond, and two tenor players, Ben Webster and Stan Getz.

The partnership of Mulligan and Desmond had its beginning one evening in 1954 at Carnegie Hall, when Mulligan sat in with the Dave Brubeck Quartet. Desmond wanted them to get together on a record rightaway, but contractual problems held things up for three years. If the resulting music sounds closer to that of the Mulligan Quartet than to Brubeck's, it is partly because there is no piano, partly because Desmond's range and albino tone conjure up memories of Chet Baker's trumpet. Standstill, based on the chords of My Heart Stood Sill, brings out the quiddity of bath soloists, but it is Blues in Time - all 43 choruses of it - which allows the two musicians to converse at length before going into their separate solos. (A feature of Mulligan's solo is the five stop-time choruses - choruses 28, 30, 31, 38 and 39 to be exact - and the relish with which he lunges through them.)

Mulligan the composer comes to the fore in A Ballad, its bar-structure slightly out of the ordinary for jazz - 12-12-8-12 - but allowing scope for some of Stan Getz's most wistful playing. Gez and Mulligan are almost exact contemporaries (Getz was born to February, 1927, Mulligan two months later) and they rose to prominence during the 1950s, when cooler, more reticent jazz became fashionable. Both musicians developed individual personae early on, which makes it intriguing to hear them swapping instruments in Too Close For Comfort. The idea was Mulligan's, who deploys the tenor saxophone in his usual staccato, slightly gangling way, just as Getz brings to the baritone his legato phrasing and turtle-dove tone.

On the two other sessions Mulligan was partnered by musicians of an earlier vintage, both of them at various times - Johnny Hodges, with only one break, right up to his death, Ben Webster for a potent span in the early 1940s - mainstays of the Duke Ellington orchestra. Mulligan composed Bunny and named it in honour of Hodges, whose nickname was "Rabbit"; almost a quintessential Hodges-type riff theme, it presents the alto saxophonist at his most poised and benign. The fact that performers of this calibre can swing at even the laziest tempo gets proved by Shady Side, concocted by Hodges above the chords of a 1930s pop-song - On The Sunny Side Of The Street - that he always enjoyed playing. Duke Ellington may not actually have been present at the teaming-up of Mulligan and Ben Webster, but the music testifies to his impact on those two jazzmen. For a start, Mulligan's tune, Tell Me When

, slow and yearning, is cast very decidedly in the mould of an Ellington composition, evoking from Webster some characteristically romantic yet restrained improvising. Who's Got Rhythm, another of Mulligan's themes, employs not surprisingly in view of its title - the chords of I Got Rhythm; exactly the same sequence, in fact, that Ellington used for Cotton Tail, a composition which launched one of Webster's most renowned solos. That solo was obviously still at the back of the tenor saxophonist's mind as he moved through the familiar harmonies. History got remembered as new history was being made.

VOLUME 2

There are moments when the historically-minded critic feels like comparing the middle years of jazz - certainly the 1930s, 1940s and at least the early 1950s - with the heydays of the Holy Roman Empire. For just as an educated man in that far-off period could communicate with anyone else in Europe, simply by talking Latin, so those classic decades of jazz witnessed musicians of different vintages and persuasions being able to sit down and perform together. And one soloist who always went out of his way to ignore stylistic categories is Gerry Mulligan, a man for whom "sitting in" might have been invented, who has rarely seemed happier than when exchanging musical ideas up on a bandstand.

On this LP Gerry Mulligan can be heard consorting with a selection of his peers, all of them fellow saxophonists, and two - Paul Desmond and Stan Getz - belonging to his own generation. Stan Getz was born in February, 1927, Mulligan only two months later, so both men grew up against a similar musical background. Both were key-figures in the transition from 1940s bebop to the reticent, cool jazz of the 1950s. And the performances here are typical of the use that soloists of the middle years made of "standards", those onetime pop-songs which survived their popularity. Paul Desmond - three years older than Mulligan - happens to be an obsessive musical conversationalist himself. The daintiness of his style is deceptive, for he can suddenly indulge in spurts of aggressiveness. Both sides of this musical persona emerge in Fall Out,. an "original" by Mulligan, built above the chords of Let's Fall In Love, and Battle Hymn Of The Republican, written by Desmond, using the chords of Tea For Two.

Johnny Hodges and Ben Webster - born, respectively, in 1906 and 1909 exemplify an earlier generation of jazz virtuosi. And both were, in their way, exponents of high romanticism. Ben Webster's treatment of Billy Strayhorn's Chelsea Bridge has a marvellous sumptuousness about it, with the soloist balancing tension against richness. (Webster, of course, took part in the original 1941 recording by Duke Ellington's Orchestra.) In Sunday, on the other hand, Webster contrasts sensuality - the chorus immediately after Jimmy Rowle's piano solo, for instance - with a buzzy-toned vigour, both entirely typical of the musician who Leonard Feather once described as "the Clark Gable of the tenor saxophone, at once a brute and a hero". During his stint with the Duke Ellington band, Webster learnt a great deal from Johnny Hodges, especially the ability to float a melodic line. 18 Carrots For A Rabbit, a fairly archetypal Mulligan theme, illustrates the bouncier side of Hodges' style. Mulligan proves an ideal foil and companion here, but drops out. entirely in What's The Rush composed jointly by Mulligan and Judy Holliday (his wife at the time) which very successfully evokes the more reflective aspect of Johnny Hodges'playing.

CHARLES FOX