1. Jive At Five
2. Four For Three
3. 17 Mile Drive
4. Subterranean Blues
5. Spring Is Sprung
6. Open Country

December 11-12, 1962

 LINER NOTES

You know, this romantic picture by a third-rate F. Scott Fitzgerald almost fits.

Gerry Mulligan wasn't born, he was made up. Only the syntax is changed to protect the innocent.

Oh, a few of the facts are different, too. For instance, Gerry never looks at girls from the bandstand, he ignores them; it's more effective. The answer to the question "What do you think about when you're up there playing?" must be phrased delicately.

Gerry is the answer to the novelist's prayer, maiden or otherwise. He was a sideman with the big bands of Gene Krupa, Elliot Lawrence, and Claude Thornhill, He wrote some of the best numbers those bands ever played. He created a remarkably economical new approach to small-band writing and playing, with the Miles Davis group in the late 1940s and with his own quartets since then. He wins countless polls, as group leader and as baritone saxophone soloist.

He has acted as well as played in movies. Because he doesn't look like, talk like, or have a name like most jazz musicians, they'll probably make his life into a jazz movie someday, blowing it by giving the part to Pat Boone. Gerry may contribute the revelation that he was the only musician ever to play a jam session on a bus. The obligatory Concerto at Carnegie Hall, with the old couple nodding through happy tears ("It isn't the Devil's music after all!") is taken care of by the musical comedy score Gerry is now writing.

How many of his younger listeners know that this young Galahad was a jazz legend long before they heard their first Dukes of Dixieland disc? Why, even Hugues Panassie lists him. Now, that's going back some.

Girls who walk around in shorts today owe their freedom to the original Bloomer Girls who had to fight their battles to get that far. Gerry wasn't the first girl to wear bloomers, musically speaking; but sometimes people forget that he did fight a number of significant battles, and is therefore entitled to the fruits of his victories. The challenging young apprentice is now the satisfying young master, polishing his own hard-won woodwork inside and out, flushing only an occasional termite while others are stirring up nests of hornets, or Ornettes.

Gerry's approach to his first Philips recording is light and airy. His perfectly controlled impetuousness invites sardonic commentary from Bob Brookmeyer's valve trombone, punctuated with smears of Vic Dickenson, groans of Bill Harris, and roars of Bert Lahr. Here, one plus one equals three; when Mulligan's headlong elan coexists with Brookmeyer's wry cosmology, they create a third man between them, a third soloist with a double voice of extraordinary suavity, as baritone and trombone lines fluidly cross and recross like streams of mercury joining and separating.

The Mulligan quartet plays a numbers-game on Side One: Harry Edison's Jive at Five, a good Basie opener; then Gerry's own Four for Three, most of the way a fast jazz waltz; and Gerry's Seventeen Mile Drive, named for the scenic drive down through the Monterey peninsula. "The tempo is wrong for the title, though," Gerry says. "If you drove this fast down that road, you'd wind up in the ocean."

Side Two begins with a chance to compare piano styles. Gerry and Bob both play piano, like some airplane pilots, by the seat of their pants, and the fresh trajectories are fascinating. Their usual baritone and trombone playing is by now so polished that a kind of overtone to their real personalities is often shown. Their piano-playing, however, reveals more of the inner self. Brookmeyer seems to be laughing ironically from behind a screen. Mulligan is before the screen, delightedly thumbing his nose.

Bob warms the bench first in Subterranean Blues, Gerry plays next in Spring Is Sprung. The side closes, as Side One did, with wind in the hair: Brookmeyer's Open Country, an old favorite of mine.

WILLIS CONOVER