BN-LA-532-H2

Gerry Mulligan/Lee Konitz - Revelation

Released - 1975

Recording and Session Information

"The Haig", Hollywood, CA, January 23, 1953
Chet Baker, trumpet; Lee Konitz, alto sax; Gerry Mulligan, baritone sax; Carson Smith, bass; Larry Bunker, drums.

Too Marvelous For Words
PJ-236 | ST-2006 Lover Man
I'll Remember April
These Foolish Things
All The Things You Are

Los Angeles, CA, January 30, 1953
Chet Baker, trumpet; Lee Konitz, alto sax; Gerry Mulligan, baritone sax; Carson Smith, bass; Larry Bunker, drums.

ST-2007 Almost Like Being In Love
PJ-235 Sextet
Broadway

Phil Turetsky's House, Los Angeles, CA, February 1, 1953
Chet Baker, trumpet; Lee Konitz, alto sax; Gerry Mulligan, baritone sax; Joe Mondragon, bass; Larry Bunker, drums.

PJ-237 I Can't Believe That You're In Love With Me
PJ-238 Lady Be Good

NYC, December 4 & 5, 1957
Lee Konitz, alto sax; Allen Eager, Zoot Sims, tenor, alto sax; Al Cohn, tenor, baritone sax; Gerry Mulligan, baritone sax; Freddie Green, guitar; Henry Grimes, bass; Dave Bailey, drums.

Four And One More
Crazy Day
Turnstile
Sextet
Disc Jockey Jump
Venus De Milo
Revelation

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Disc Jockey Jump	G. Krupa-G. Mulligan	December 4/5 1957
Almost Like Being In Love	A. J. Lerner-F. Loewe	January 30 1953
Too Marvelous For Words	J. Mercer-R. A. Whiting	January 23 1953
Crazy Day	G. Mulligan	December 4/5 1957
Side Two
Revelation	G. Mulligan	December 4/5 1957
All The Things You Are	J. Kern-O. Hammerstein	January 23 1953
Venus De Milo	G. Mulligan	December 4/5 1957
Sextet I	G. Mulligan	January 30 1953
Side Three
Four And One More	G. Mulligan	December 4/5 1957
Lover Man (Oh Where Can You Be)	Davis-Sherman-Ramirez	January 23 1953
I Can't Believe That You're In Love With Me	C. Gaskill-J. McHugh	February 1 1953
Turnstile	G. Mulligan	December 4/5 1957
Side Four
Oh, Lady Be Good	G. Gershwin-I. Gershwin	February 1 1953
Broadway	Bird-Woode-McRae	January 30 1953
Sextet II	G. Mulligan	December 4/5 1957
These Foolish Things	Link-Marvell-Strachey	January 23 1953
I'll Remember April	Raye-DePaul-Johnston	January 23 1953

Liner Notes

GERRY MULLIGAN LEE KONITZ

In the 1950's, the presence of Bird of course, pervasive. He had, after all, discovered a new hemisphere, some musicians, whatever horn they played, tried to be Bird. others, fusing what he had taught them with their own backgrounds and aspirations, tried to find their own musical selves. Miles Davis had gone that route in the late 1940's with what carne to be called his "birth of the cool" recordings. Among other diverse searchers were Lennie Tristano, Charles Mingus, John Lewis, and the musicians in these 1953 and 1957 performances. The music in this set had a briskly fresh impact at the time; and now, it turns out, the music had staying power as well.

The two key conceivers were Gerry Mulligan and Lee Konitz. Gerry's special originality was as the creator of a thoroughly distinctive small combo gestalt (particularly the quartet with Chet Baker but also in terms of the quintet and the larger ensemble here). There was a collective Mulligan sound and interweaving mobility that tended to be cool on the surface, hot at the center, and unusually deft in the aura it often conveyed of highly poised wit (sort of like a younger Fred Astaire, had he been a jazzman).

Central to the highly original Mulligan ambience — it comes through as original now as it did two decades ago — was Gerry's writing: the arrangements, the originals, and the "heads." He had, and still has, a remarkably resilient sense of linear invention and continuity. His scores are spare and all of a part. That is, they keep building toward, and finally achieve, an authentic whole — and that's a quality which explains why musicians like to play in a Mulligan combo or big band. He neither overly constricts them nor leaves them so free that they get lost. I've always wished Gerry had written more in recent years, but at least we do have his work of the 1950's to indicate how organically he was able to have writing flow into improvising so that each buoyantly enhanced the other. There is also Mulligan the soloist, of which more anon.

Lee Konitz's jazz odyssey has been one of the more justifiably stubborn in the history of the music. He first impressed musicians with his work while in Claude Thornhill's band (1947-48). Even then the Konitz sound was like no one else's and the conception, while shaped in part by Bird, was going somewhere else. Then came Konitz's long association with Lennie Tristano, a period during which he learned a great deal about stretching, refining and distilling harmonic language as well as about extended linear improvising. Tristano is a very powerful force, and yet Konitz finally moved out of his orbit as well. Now, in the mid-1970's, Konitz is one of the most consistently original, challenging and continually surprising soloists in jazz. He is, in Duke Ellington's term, beyond category.

In view of Lee's present stature, which is bound to grow even higher, it is all the more arresting to hear where he was in these recordings. An illuminating guide to the thinking then of Lee — and other Tristano colleagues — is a statement by bassist Peter Ind, himself part of the Tristano group. He didn't write this about Lee specifically, but it applies to Konitz during these years:

"We can follow an idea as it develops and echoes, sometimes in multiple rhythm, rolling over the basic time, like a ball on an ocean breaker. As this occurs, so also does the original idea change, subtly confirming the underlying harmonic flow. As [the] line flows it indicates also the plasticity of the underlying harmony, sometime so far as to almost lose the inexperienced listener — but always resolving, often in a most unexpected way."

As you'll hear in nearly every Konitz solo in this set, the unexpected is just about the only predictable element in Konitz's music. When these sessions were made, by the way, the "dry ice' nature of Lee's tone was still strange in concept to some listeners and he was accused of being insufficiently intense, too cerebral. Listen now, however, and it's evident that Lee, always committed to spontaneity, played then too with great (though controlled) intensity.

Of the other horns that figure in these proceedings, Zoot Sims, then as now, is the instant swinger who never flags. Lester Young first shaped Zoot but the latter has steadily, almost inexorably, developed his own style and sound. Zoot is not only one of the most reliable players in jazz, but he is also able to fit into a wide range of contexts without diluting his own robust individuality and without obtruding on the spirit of the gathering. In a way, he's like the spirit of pure jazz. What I had forgotten about Zoot, until reminded on a number of these tracks, is the lithe, incisive quality of his alto saxophone playing.

Al Cohn, for many years a regular co-director with Zoot of an itinerant swing machine, tends to be less vibrant a swinger than Zoot — although at times he too can shake a room from note one — but he is Just as consistent as well as being an invaluable spur to a swinging ensemble.

The presence of Allen Eager in a number of these performances is a reminder of the considerable potential of this alto and tenor saxophonist who was an ubiquitous figure in New York City's modern jazz scene in the mid-and-late 1940's. Like Zoot Sims and Al Cohn, Eager had been a disciple, in part, of Lester Young; but he had gone farther than Al and Zoot toward transmuting his style into that of Charlie Parker-directed modern jazz. Listen to his solos closely; Eager's was an intriguing voice.

As a baritone saxophonist, Gerry Mulligan emerged in the late '40's and early '50's as the most important soloist on that instrument since Harry Carney. Gerry's playing, like his writing, focuses on fluid form. The structural dynamics, as is clear in his solos in this set, are lucidly, blithely designed in flight and in retrospect, make for an object lesson in improvisatory logic and wit. Gerry does not engage in baroque ornamentation or flashy rhetoric. Furthermore, he can make the baritone saxophone sound more nimble, more limber, more quicksilver, than anyone I've ever heard on the instrument.

I can't fully characterize Mulligan's music without also underlining the spirit he brings to a performance — of any kind. He loves to play, and it's an infectious enthusiasm. It was around the time of these recordings, as a matter of fact, that Gerry was adding significantly to his reputation as an insatiable Jammer. I remember a couple of after-hours parties at the Newport Jazz Festival in the mid-1950's when Gerry, after having worked his way into several quite diverse sets toward the end of the concert itself, then proceeded for the rest of the night to jam with anyone — of whatever style and period — who wanted to play. And because his composer-arranger's mind is always working when he improvises, he would actually create differently apt ensemble scores in mid-flight for each different jamming situation.

It is Gerry's unabashed passion for the act of Jazz that makes his participation in a session as near a guarantee as is possible that it won't collapse into clichés. It doesn't always work that way, but when he himself is in charge, the session usually does cohere, for he has little patience for coasting—his own or anyone else's. In fact, he is a genuine natural leader, and one of my great musical regrets is that Gerry was not able to continue as a big band director for he, along with Dizzy Gillespie, would have been two of the most sempiternally exciting big band leaders in modern jazz history.

As a small combo leader, as here, Gerry was always arresting to watch as you listened to his group. With body language, with meaningful, if not imperious, glances, he kept everything in functional motion, with particular attention to dynamics. Listen, for instance, to the tracks With Konitz, Baker, and rhythm section, for marvelously variegated illustrations of Mulligan's finely nuanced ensemble leadership.

Chet Baker, who was still new — in a national sense—on the jazz scene when the first of these sessions were made, entered the consciousness of most of us as a unique phenomenon. I'm not saying everyone liked what he was doing. At first, I thought his tone too tentative and introverted, and his conception narrow. What happened, however, was that he stayed in the mind — after the music stopped, What he was saying was that personal, and cumulatively, the Baker sound and style became almost hauntingly necessary, once you'd been fully exposed to it. It's not enough to describe his playing as lyrical. The lyricism is a fusion of sometimes seemingly contradictory qualities — a vulnerability that nonetheless was often more closed than open, a considerable sounding of hurt and yet also of anticipation, a sensuality that was all the more challenging because of its lack of clear definition. There have been many more vital jazz trumpeters, but Chet Baker is surely his own man on that horn, and this is no small accomplishment.

Baker, as has been widely publicized, paid some horrendous dues — many of them of his own making in the years after these recordings, and I wondered if he could ever make any kind of substantive mark again in jazz, He was frail enough, to start with; and the battering, physical and psychic, he absorbed all these years, led me, and a good many others, to underestimate the man's dogged determination. For, as of the writing of these notes, Baker has been appearing in clubs and on recording sessions with increasing assurance and with no diminution of that strange, somewhat eerie singularity of sound and conception that you can hear on these sides when he first ascended to what was to be transient fame. Musicians who have worked with him tell me that Baker's time may have come again; and in view of the experiences he's had since the last ascent, he may now have a longer and more satisfying second career.

With regard to the rhythm sections, on the ten 1953 tracks, Larry Bunker is on drums and the bassists are Joe Mondragon or Carson Smith. There is no piano. The absence of a piano was at first rather disconcerting to some listeners when the Mulligan-Baker Quartet initially appeared. But Gerry, although himself a sometime piano player, wanted, as a hornman, relief from having the chordal directions continuously stated by a pianist or guitarist. Why not have the harmonic design implicit in the lines of the horns?

The result, for the horn players, was more freedom for the imagination. (The pianist was not continually sounding road signs over their shoulders.) At the same time, of course, the horn players had to sharpen their ears, and keep them sharp. They had only each other, and the bass, to depend on for those harmonic signposts. And that led to very subtle harmonic interplay between Mulligan and Baker — and on these sides, Mulligan, Baker and Konitz. So subtle and absorbing that, if you think about it as you listen to these recordings, a pianist would have been an intrusion.

An additional benefit of Mulligan's pianoless combos was that they stimulated listeners to hear more sensitively, more sophisticatedly. The pianist, after all, had served as chordal road mapper for the listener as well as the players. With the pianist gone, it was instructive, and at times rather exhilarating, to realize how far you, the listener, could stretch your own ears as you were drawn into the Mulligan microcosm, And once they were stretched, they stayed that way. It has not often been remarked, but I think the Mulligan Quartet provided invaluable ear training to a lot of listeners who went on to be able to enjoy other groups — including those with pianos — much more knowledgeably than they had previously.

On the seven 1957 sessions (with the four saxophones), there is a guitar, but the guitarist is Freddie Green, the man who has, for so long, been in charge of what he calls "the rhythm waves" for the Count Basie band. Freddie, while chordally precise, is primarily a master of moving time. So on these tracks too, the Mulligan penchant for suggested rather than explicit harmonic directions prevailed.

Note here, by the way, that except for Crazy Day, which was scored by Mulligan, all the other arrangements were by Bill Holman. The latter was an apt choice because his predilection too was for lean, open, but crisply ordered charts which maximized swinging without being so loose as to be sloppy.

I have not annotated each track because I didn't think it necessary. The music, both in score and in solo, is so clear that each listener can provide his own verbal responses, It seemed to me more worth your reading time to place these sessions, and their principal figures, in a historical and stylistic context.

At the time the sessions were recorded, however, I doubt if any of the participants were thinking twenty and more years ahead and wondering what the music would sound like then. Few jazz musicians do look ahead in that way, The essence of Jazz is still immediacy, spontaneity, now. Even Duke Ellington, by far the most creative of all composers in American history, refused to speculate about the place of his music in the future. He was too eager to continue the next work, to hear it played, and then go on to the work after that.

Essential to the jazz spirit at this emphasis on immediacy is, nonetheless it's always beguiling for the listener to wonder what will last and then, decades having gone by, to re-listen to past enthusiasms and see if they have indeed lasted.

The music here has. More so, I confess, than I thought it would then. I knew Mulligan's worth, but I somewhat underestimated Konitz at the time, and I did not know how refreshing all of this would sound now. It swings and it breathes and it can still surprise. This is now part of classic jazz It has more than survived.

NAT HENTOFF