1. Black Nightgown
   - Night Watch/Wingding/Portrait
2. Theme From I Want To Live - Sax Giants
3. Night Watch - Night Watch/Wingding/Portrait
4. Frisco Club - Night Watch
5. Barbara's Theme
6. Life's a Funny Thing Portrait

 LINER NOTES

There has never been a jazz album quite like this one.

It is the product of a combination of elements that have never occurred in conjunction before - some of them have simply never occurred before at all. Because of their very special nature, they are not likely to occur in conjunction again.

Among these elements are a staggeringly powerful film played out against a background of jazz, the use of the music and reputation of one of the greatest living jazz musicians to project the characterization of the girl about whom the film revolves, the creation of new music to fit these conditions and the actual performance of this music by the musician himself under circumstances in which he cannot help being aware that he is putting his reputation squarely on the line.

To get down to specifics:

The film is I Want To Live. It is about a girl sliding furiously downhill in the big city jungles of the West Coast, a girl who is, according to a psychologist, "totally amoral, a compulsive liar with no regard for law or order or the conventions of society." She falls, sometimes willingly, sometimes unwillingly, into almost everything on the wrong side of the law except murder. But it's on a murder rap that the law finally takes her.

The girl, Barbara Graham, moves through an atmosphere in San Francisco and San Diego where jazz hovers constantly in the background. One of the few stabilizing things in her life is her interest in jazz and, particularly, in the music of Gerry Mulligan.

Building on this foundation, the entire score of I Want To Live has been written by Johnny Mandel on a jazz basis. The bulk of his score is played by a big band made up of top West Coast jazzmen (their exciting sound track recordings make up Johnny Mandel's great jazz score from I Want To Live! United Artists UAS-5005. But, to fill out the characterization of Barbara Graham, Mandel also wrote some small group charts to pinpoint her specific interest in Gerry Mulligan. Played by Mulligan and a brilliantly compatible group of sidemen, these arrangements crop up all through the picture, emerging in a very natural way when a radio is turned on or a record drops on a phonograph, or subtly rising over the subdued murmur in a bar.

What results is a new dimension in the use of jazz in films. We are accustomed to isolated jazz sequences, to the exploitation of jazz devices in otherwise non-jazz scores. There has even been an entire score written by a jazz musician, John Lewis, and played by a jazz group, the Modern Jazz Quartet. But the film in which it was used, "No Sun In Venice," had no essential relationship to jazz - I Want To Live does have that relationship and because it does, it provides Johnny Mandel with an unprecedented opportunity for writing a jazz score.

However, the use that Mandel and producer Walter Wanger have made of the Mulligan small group goes far beyond the normal concept of film scoring. Here, for the first time, is a highly purposeful integration of jazz into a film. It serves as the evocative musical background that is expected of any good score - the customary, passive role that seasons and accents but does not distract attention from the visual part of the film. But at the same time jazz also plays an active role in this case as it takes an acute grasp of the viewer's awareness in the character delineation of Barbara Graham and, through the musical presence of Mulligan, becomes an explicit part of the story development. (In a meaningful scene, Barbara Graham, listening to a radio in her cell in the death house, remarks, "That's Gerry Mulligan." "How do you know?" an attendant asks. "I have all his records," says Barbara).

For both Mandel and Mulligan the situation posed a provocative challenge. Mandel had to write in terms of the needs of the picture and at the same time in a manner that would be thoroughly in the Mulligan mode (which is, fortunately, a broad one). Moreover, Mandel had to write for a musician who usually writes most of his own stuff and whose reputation as a composer and arranger is just as great as his reputation as a performer.

For his part, Mulligan was in the position of being cited by inference in the picture as one of the jazz greats and, through his playing in the film, of making that estimate valid even for people with only a vague knowledge of jazz. There was the inescapable knowledge that both the high citation and his performance were permanently locked together on the same strip of film, a huge potential target for the knockers' darts, and that the very validity and dramatic effectiveness of the entire film could be shattered if his performance were the merest whit below his highest capability.

How well both Mandel and Mulligan have succeeded is evident in this album (and how much their success adds to the portrait of Barbara Graham is equally evident in I Want To Live). The root of their success is that understanding interplay which is so crucial to jazz creativity. It starts, in this case, with the empathy that has long existed between Mandel and Mulligan, an empathy which guided Mandel in his writing and which gave Mulligan advance assurance that he was moving into a fully sympathetic situation. Actually, Mulligan discovered that it was far, far more than that once he had seen what Mandel had written and had had the exhilarating experience of playing it. He found the entire musical concept of the film so stimulating and became so anxious to have a part in creating the entire score that he offered to work with the big band (he had been signed only to play with the small group) - and he would have if the geography of prior commitments had not made it physically impossible.

In the playing, this basic empathy between Mandel and Mulligan was doubled and redoubled and multiplied innumerable times in the cross currents of inspiring reaction that flowed among the musicians Mandel grouped around Mulligan - Art Farmer, the vital alternate horn in Mulligan's current Quartet; Bud Shank, eerily counterpoising his flute behind Mulligan's baritone sax on Barbara's Theme and pouring out a surging flow of alto lines on the other pieces; the volatile, exuberant trombone of Frank Rosolino; and a rhythm section made up of Pete Jolly's fluent piano, the superbly firm bass of Red Mitchell and that ne plus ultra of the drums, Shelly Manne.

The music they play goes the whole route from a loose, easy framework for individual blowing on Frisco Club to a carefully developed mood setting in the I Want To Live Theme which is almost entirely an ensemble piece aside from a glowing muted solo by Farmer and some equally muted drumming by Manne.

This is one of those rare instances in which a firmly established creative artist deliberately sets out to top himself - and succeeds. If Gerry Mulligan had not already gained the musical reputation he wears in the script of I Want To Live, his playing in these selections from the sound track of that film would earn it for him.

WILLIAM JOHNS

FROM THE CD

An acclaimed motion picture of its timeI Want To Live! earned six Academy Award nominations including Best Actrees (Susan Haywar), Best Director (Robert Wise), Best Screenplay (Nelson Gidding and Don Mankiewicz), Best Cinematography (Lionel Linden), Best Editing (William Hornbeck) and best Sound (Samuel Goldwyn Studio Sound Department). A category that Oscar voters conspicuously overlooked, however, was the film's music, which broke all the rules with a uniquely all-jazz score. Not part jazz, not pseudo-jazz, but pure jazz.

Composer John (Johnny) Mandel was born in 1925, and started out as a trombonist and trumpet player. He took early lessons in arranging from bandleader Van Alexander ("A Tisket, A Tasket") and as a teenager was already playing some dates with violinist Joe Venuti. Mandel was educated at the Manhattan School of Music and at Juilliard. Starting out in big bands, he worked with COunt Basie, Buddy Rich, Jimmy Dorsey and, later, Artie Shaw. When he wasn't performing, he spent a lot of time composing, or cooking up band arrangements.

In 1949, Mandel gravitated to radio and relevision, composing background music for G.E. Theater Of The Air and Sid Caesar's Your Show Of Shows. He did copious session work in New York and Los Angeles with Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Chet Baker, Peggy Lee, Mel Torme and others. His only film work, however, was as an arranger for the 1955 Dean martin vehicle You're Never Too Young.

Andre Previn recognized Mandel's talent and mentioned him to Robert Wise, who was set to direct the story of Barbara Graham, a notorious convicted murderess executed in the San Quentin gas chamber in 1955. United Artists Records executive Jack Lewis approached Mandel. From the outset the music was envisioned as two LPs issued simultaneously, one featuring original jazz numbers and the other the underscore.

Mandel, only 32, had qualms about composing for the screen. "I was really very nervous," the composer explained in an interview., "until I realized, after I learned the language and how to sync everything, that essentially that is what I'd been doing for a long time and just didn't know it. It married all the things I'd been doing previously.

Mandel was answerable primarily to Wise, a Pasionate music lover - named, in 1997, the first recipient of ASCAP's Opus Award, recognizing film directors who made music an integral part of their films - and Walter Wanger, the distinguished producer of such films as Queen Christina, Stagecoach and Riot in Cell Block 11. Wise gave Mandel carte blanche.

Barbara Graham's true story had been pieced together by Edward S. Montgomery, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist for the San Francisco Examiner. Hollywood writers were then drafted to fachion a dramatic script. While unusually grim and gritty, the script to pains to treat Graham sympathetically, assertin her innicence for the brutal slaying for which she - and two accomplises - were found guilty. The film ends, as events did in real life, with the governor's refusal to pardon her - and her execution.

Jazz giant Gerry Mulligan had been built into the script from the beginning. For one thing, Graham was a self-proclaimed "good-time girl" who reveled in the nightlife and party scene of the West Coast. More importantly, Graham was actually a big Mulligan fan. She even played the abritone saxophonist's records while in the death house. In the film, as she listens to a radio in her cell, Graham remarks, "That's Gerry Mulligan." "How do you know?" asks a prison attendant. "I have all his records," she declares.

Mulligan, at the apogee of his reputation, was hired to appear on camera with other musicians in the opening club scene and to play all of the source music, which in the film endlessly emanates from barrooms and alleys, turntables and radio broadcsts.

Johnny Mandel had the challenge of writing for a musician whose reknown as a composer and arranger was as formidable as his brilliance as a performer. Moreover, Mulligan was widely admired as a lyrical improvisor, so the source music, however carefully composed, had to keep the feeling of his spontaneity and invetiveness.

Ths waas however not a problem, as Mandel knew Mulligan well. "We'd been through a lot of bands together," remembered the composer. "I first ran into Gerry when he was with Gene Krupa and I was with Buddy Rich. This was in '46. 'Disk Jockey Jump' had just come out and somehow Mulligan and I and a whole bunch of us were thrown together in the New York nightclub and session scene. We remained good friends, right to teh end."

Mandel designed the source music for a "little big band," anticipating Mulligan's own evolution from a quartet to the larger Concert Jazz Band. The sidemen rounded up were not Mulligan's usual bandmates, except for Art Farmer, the adaptable alternate horn from his current unit. Besides Farmer, the West Cost septet fronted by Mulligan included the proficient alto saxophonist Bud Shank (who also doubled on flute), trombonist Frank Rosolino, and an outstanding rhythm section made up of Pete Jolly on piano, bassist Red Mitchell and drummer Shelly Manne.

Mandel's familiarity with Mulligan led to compositions with "a heavy Mulligan presence." wrote Jerome Klinkowitz in Listen: Gerry Mulligan: An Aural Narrative in Jazz. "Some songs, like the snappy "Life's A Funny Thing," with its division of lines and pauses for effects, sounded like they "could have been penned by Gerry himself."

The six selections recorded in May of 1958 included music not heard in the film to fill out the Jazz Combo companion album. They have long been rated, even by purists, among Mulligan's best. In Klinkowitz's view, I Want to Live! was a particular benchmark in Mulligan's career, the first of his projects "to display such a broad range of sounds and dynamics, all the more remarkable when coming from just a seven-piece group."

HIghlights include "Black Nightgown," with Mulligan and Farmer "snapping off little honky-tonk tag lines in the Dixieland manner," in Klinkowitz's words. And if "Black Nightgown" puts "all the horns up front for some classis toe-tapping," wrote Klinkowitz, on its heels came "the spooky title song on which Shank's flute and Mulligan's bari interweavein a counterpoint of contrasts, supported by brief echoing fills from muted brass."

The other songs were all "straight-ahead swinging and rousing ensemble effects," wrote Klinkowitz, with Mandel's "forever active interplay of lines" adding to the biting attack. Indeed, Mulligan liked the Mandel composition well enough to recycle "Blakc Nightgown" and the film's main theme in future recordings by his Concert Jazz Band.

Mulligan was absent from the score itself, which borrowed Frank Rosolino, Red Mitchel and Shelly Manne from the septet. A full orchestra of 26 musicians played the film ,usic, with the lead taken by Bill Holman on tenor and baritone saxes; Joe Maini, alto, Jack Sheldon, trumpe, Russ Freeman, piano, Larry Bunker, vibes and drums;Harry Klee, flute and piccolo; Abe Most, E flat clarinet; and Al Hendricksen, guitar.

The really radical decision was to stick with jazz for the underscoring, which traditionally, in Hollywood, was all-symphonic. Scoring is typically more of a technical job of cuing the audience's emotions. The music underneath the scene is intended to complement and not overwhelm the visual image, the dialogue, and the special effects.

In this case Mandel decided to risk "a lot of unusual sounds with unusual instruments and odd combinations." He employed familiar instruments in freak registers, while writing the lead parts for such decidedly offbeat instruments as the E flat clarinet, contra-bass clarinet, contra bassoon, bass trumpet and bass flute.

Drums represented the forces of law and order always hovering in the background. "Stakeout," leading to "Barbara's Surrender," was all percussion, with Larry Bunker on rhythm logs, cowbells and claves; Mel Lewis handling a scratcher and cowbells; Milt Holland playing chromatic drums, cowbells, Chinese and Burmese gongs; and Mike Pacheco banging on bongos and conga drums. "What I was trying to do with that whole scene," explained Mandel, "was to drive it forward to its conclusion. I was using the music as propulsive force, to speed up what you were seeing on the screen."

The "Nightmare Sequence" was also performed with a lot of percussion, but with the addition of a contra bassoon that was sounded hauntingly from the depths.

The "Death Scene" offered a problem. Director Wise, who went to the lengths of observing an actual execution, insisted on some kind of musical background. Mandel had to come up with a jazz idea that would add to the moment without being redundant. "What I didn't want to do is get very dramatic," Mandel explained. "When you see somebody die in a gas chamber, it's not like being electrocuted, it's more like the life seeping out of you as the cyanide takes over. It's anticlimactic. I had to concoct something that felt like the scene looked. What you saw on the screen were clouds of smoke, so I used instruments weaving in and out of each other, creating an impressionistic texture. The instrument playing the melody in this case was something you never hear - a piccolo in its bottom register. It makes an eerie sound. You'll notice that it doesn't even sound like a piccolo... almost like someone's dying gasp."

After I Want to Live!, Johnny Mandel went on to an illustrious career as a Hollywood composer, winning an Oscar for "The Shadow of Your Smile" from The Sandpiper, and writing music for a long list of films that includes The Americanization Of Emily, Harper, The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming, Point Blank, M'A*S'H, The Last Detail, The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea and The Verdict. He works in motion pictures less frequently nowadays, while continuing as a composer and arranger of jazz. In the 1990s he has worked on recordings by such diverse musical personalities as Michael Jackson, Michael Feinstein, Natalie Cole and Shirley Horn.

Looking back on a score he composed over forty years ago, he recalls how serendipitous it all was; there was no interference, no resistance. I Want to Live! is remembered today as much by music lovers as by film lovers. Now both can listen to and appreciate a truly one-of-a-kind experience on CD.

- Patrick McGilligan

All Johnny Mandel quotes are from an interview with Patrick McGilligan in September, 1998.

The original notes from the two I Want To Live! albums (Johnny Mandel's Great Jazz Score & Gerry Mulligan - The Jazz Combo) by John Tynan and William Johns respectively were also used as a source.

"NIGHT WATCH"

Outstanding performances by two of the finest Jazz musicians, together with their individual combos, is the basic ingredient of NIGHT WATCH, and while the great Mulligan sax sound, and Brookmeyer's exciting trombone are the featured attractions, the balance of the cast is indeed All-Star in every regard.

For the Mulligan portion of the program, music from the great "I Want To Live" sound track, is featured, and among the men who are heard, along with Gerry, are such legendary figures as Shelly Manne, drums; Art Farmer, trumpet; Bud Shank, doubling on alto sax and flute; Frank Rosolino, trombone; Pete Jolly, piano, and Red Mitchell, bass. Each is an artist of note in his own right - together, this is a musical experience seldom found and even more infrequently caught in the grooves of a record for continued enjoyment.

Bobbie Brookmeyer's contribution includes highlights from the "Kansas City Revisited" album, and stars such performers as Al Cohn, tenor sax; Paul Quinichette, tenor sax; Nat Pierce, piano; Jim Hall, guitar; Addison Farmer, bass; and Osie Johnson, drums.

Here, then, is a Jazz concert for your listening enjoyment, a concert featuring two of the finest groups around the Jazz scene, a concert we are sure you will never grow tired of hearing during the "NIGHT WATCH" hours.