Gerry Mulligan & his baritone sax

...And he did it with anybody who would join in: with the boppers, with rockabilly players, with Mel Torme, and even with-God save the mark- Barry Manilow...

...In Ira Gitler's indispensable collection of interviews, From Swing to Bop, Mulligan talks about his early years...

...but I've heard it so often in so many versions, over the years-and can still remember that first hearing so clearly-that I can tell you it was Gerry's own sinuous, swinging composition, "Line for Lyons...

...Well, turns out I was mistaken, or maybe God had been sending mixed signals-a notoriously bad habit of his...

...I didn't catch then the title of the tune they played...

...You need the damned thing in the reed section, to give a bottom, a foundation, to what the tenors and altos are doing...

...Dance music...

...you lead other versions of the quartet, and various large groups, for the next forty years, virtually defining the laid-back school of "West Coast Jazz" (although you, being sane, spend most of your life on the East Coast...

...So the big band got cut off from its own source, which is dance music...

...To me, entranced, it was the sound of happiness, of a limpid intelligence- of an unassailable gaiety...

...And Mulligan was born early enough to romanticize (as, of course, do I) that moment, and born late enough to witness its decay...

...And I think we've not yet begun to understand-to hear-how much his music has affected the way we think music is supposed to sound altogether...

...Okay, there were shadows, desert places: is there a truly human life without them...

...So you have to imagine Mulligan in the midst of all this...

...You'll be hearing a little bit of Mulligan...

...Dance music: he says that three times in about as many sentences...

...You can tune a chain saw...

...Serge Chaloff, aflame with genius but a junkie suicide in his early prime...

...It's worth quoting at length: By the end of the '40s the thing that was the most disturbing to me was that I could see that the bands, the dance bands, the name bands, were not going to survive...

...And that gaiety, for me, has remained Mulligan's great gift: the gift he had and the gift his music gave...

...That's what was really upsetting to me...

...MEDIA Frank McConnell MUSIC TO HAVE FUN BY Gerry Mulligan & his baritone sax I' ve been trying to remember a time when Gerry Mulligan-somewhere, somehow-wasn't on my mind, and I can't think of many...

...Why Mulligan chose bari as his voice is a fascinating question, to which I think I know the answer...

...Well, what you do, after writing killer arrangements for the last of the big bands (Gene Krupa, Elliot Lawrence), is: you collaborate with Miles Davis and Gil Evans in 1949 on a small band that features lavish, subtle orchestration and short, tight solos-the "Birth of the Cool" band-that changes the history of the music...

...By the late forties, the revolution fomented by Parker, Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk had already begun to establish jazz as "difficult," "challenging," even "angry...

...The baritone sax is a big, unwieldy horn, and playing it is as much an athletic event as an artistic one...

...When I first saw Mulligan, he had only recently kicked his heroin habit, and the brilliant, matinee-idol Baker was descending into his habit, which would make his next thirty years a woozy junkie's hell...

...a modernist who still yearns for the happy simplicities of Dixieland...

...Let me elaborate on the magnificent plangency of that...

...Anyhow, there was this artsy Sunday morning TV show on CBS, "Omnibus" (its theme was from Stravinsky's Firebird), and this one Sunday one of its features was a live performance by the Gerry Mulligan Quartet: the original Quartet, drums, bass, Chet Baker on trumpet, Mulligan on baritone sax with-revolutionary for the time-no piano...

...Legends are rife of Mulligan, at one jazz festival or another, prowling the rehearsal tents to find somebody, anybody, who would just like to go someplace and jam...

...It's a hoary musician joke...

...And, okay, in a Draconian cosmic reckoning, Mulligan, for all his wonderful facility as a player, wasn't one of the music's great innovators-not an Armstrong, a Parker, a Coltrane, or a Cecil Taylor...

...From the mid-thirties to the early fifties in America, jazz, in the form of big band music, was the American anthem...

...And, oh yeah: you singlehandedly change the sound of your horn, from a low grumpy burr to something as solid but frothy as the head on a glass of Pilsner Urquell...

...Never before or since has this, the only true national art form, enjoyed such an immediate, universal, and visceral connection with that loose and baggy monster, the public...

...And Mulligan, whether he was playing with one of his pianoless quartets or with Dave Brubeck or with his wonderful (and unsuccessful) Concert Jazz Band- or with any of the astonishing array of people with whom he recorded- thought of himself primarily as a big band player...

...it's no big disgrace, already, to be Miro or Chagall...

...and Mulligan...

...You keep the faith of the big bands that were your nursery, the faith that the music is always, even impossibly, gay...

...Boyish," in the best sense, is the word: and in the best sense he died a sixty-eight-year-old boy...

...Even the jazz press at times dismissed his music as too comfortable, too pleasant a decoction of postwar modernism-as "bopsieland...

...Man, I never thought about another thing-seriously, other than being a bandleader and writing music for bands...

...you've got to force a lot of air through that sucker even to get a blaat...

...Jazz was for dancing...

...So, you're not Picasso or Jackson Pollock, seigesund...

...and then you form your pianoless quartet, emphasizing clever writing and counterpoint as much as solos, making your version of "My Funny Valentine" the first million-record seller in jazz history...

...The next time you hear a jazzy music score, the next time you're in a little club with a half-decent band-hell, the next time you're riding in an elevator and the Muzak is listen-able-check out those open chords, those silences, that subtle and loping beat...

...And only if you understand what the big bands meant will you get what's behind his words...

...Mulligan kept the faith...

...However harmonically complex and stunningly inventive, it was also something that the kids, the community, the society, could move to, dancing their own improvisation back at the improvisations of the guys on the bandstand-a real festival, next to which even the best rock concerts seem sadly planned pieces of business...

...That revolution produced magnificent music, of course: but was there ever a revolution that did not destroy as many beautiful things as it created...

...Bass drum (the great-I'd learn later-Chico Hamilton) laid down that nice, easy and open groove that's the heart of the heart of the music, while the trumpet and the baritone stated the leisurely theme and then improvised on it, first trumpet with baritone counterpoint, then baritone and trumpet counterpoint, and then both returning to the main theme and coming to an absolutely satisfying, quiet rest...

...What's the difference between a baritone saxophone and a chain saw...

...A dance band lover watching the bands drop like flies around him...

...In 1953 I was eleven, had just discovered the saxophone and the glory of jazz, and had decided that playing that music was what God had made me for...

...The fact is that for fifty years Mulligan wrote, arranged, and played the music he obviously loved the way most folks can only love a husband or wife, and did it with a Toto-I-don't-think-we're-in-Kansas-anymore, wide-eyed passion that, itself, is almost the message of his art...

...a lanky guy with a winning grin, arrogant as hell about his talent, who nevertheless believes that, whatever else it is, the music should be fun...

...Which is why, in the history of jazz, there've been so few great bari soloists: Harry Carney, who spent his whole career with the Ellington orchestra, and who got pitiably few solo opportunities...

...Bari is a cumbersome axe for solo playing, but absolutely essential to big band arranging...

...Mulligan died on January 20 at the age of sixty-eight...

...What do you do...

...And how Draconian that is...