LT-1101

Gerry Mulligan - Freeway

Released - 1981

Recording and Session Information

Phil Turetsky's House, Los Angeles, CA, June 10, 1952
Gerry Mulligan, baritone sax, piano; Red Mitchell, bass; Chico Hamilton, drums.

Get Happy

Phil Turetsky's House, Los Angeles, CA, July 9, 1952
Chet Baker, trumpet; Gerry Mulligan, baritone sax; Jimmy Rowles, piano; Joe Mondragon, bass.

She Didn't Say Yes

Phil Turetsky's House, Los Angeles, CA, August 16, 1952

PJ-206-3 Bernie's Tune
PJ-209-1 Lullaby Of The Leaves

Gold Star Studios, Los Angeles, CA, October 15 & 16, 1952
Chet Baker, trumpet; Gerry Mulligan, baritone sax; Bob Whitlock, bass; Chico Hamilton, drums.

PJ-223 Aren't You Glad You're You
PJ-219-8 Frenesi
PJ-218-1 Nights At The Turntable
PJ-220 Freeway
PJ-221 Soft Shoe
PJ-222 Walkin' Shoes

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Get Happy	H. Arlen-T. Koehler	June 10 1952
She Didn't Say Yes	J. Kern-O. Harbach	July 9 1952
Bernie's Tune	Miller-Stoller-Lieber	August 16 1952
Lullaby Of The Leaves	B. Pelkere-J. Young	August 16 1952
Nights At The Turntable	G. Mulligan	October15/16 1952
Side Two
Frenesi	A. Dominuguez	October15/16 1952
Aren't You Glad You're You	J. Van Heusen-J. Burke	October15/16 1952
Walkin' Shoes	G. Mulligan	October15/16 1952
Soft Shoe	G. Mulligan	October15/16 1952
Freeway	C. Baker	October15/16 1952

Liner Notes

GERRY MULLIGAN

This is the first of several albums that will present in chronological order all of the Pacific Jazz recordings, as well as a number of previously unreleased performances, by the original Gerry Mulligan Quartet. It was this group that among other accomplishments signaled the arrival of West Coast jazz as a movement of wide popular appeal, made Mulligan into something of a media celebrity, launched the career of Chet Baker, the quartet's original trumpet player, and was responsible for establishing the fledgling Pacific Jazz Records operation.

These factors aside, the group's place in jazz history is based on other considerations, chief of which was its restoration to the jazz vocabulary of a type of buoyant heterophonic interplay that largely had been absent from the music for well more than a decade, involving a use of front-line instruments that was much more typical of early jazz practice but which, as expressed by Mulligan and Baker, not only was totally in keeping with the melodic-harmonic character of post-bop but accessible to large numbers of listeners as well. This stemmed from the group's, for the time, unorthodox instrumentation of two horns, bass and drums. The absence of a chord-feeding instrument such as piano or guitar led to Mulligan's developing a number of ensemble practices that were somewhat at variance with those of conventional small group jazz of the day. The intelligence and imagination with which he addressed himself to this challenge resulted not only in the distinctive, immensely satisfying sound of his own quartet but introduced to jazz a number of techniques that have expanded its expressive potentials, being used to this day.

What he did, basically, was to exploit to the fullest all the resources of two- (and occasionally three-) voice linear writing, using Baker's trumpet and his baritone saxophone, and often the bass as well, in every combination he could think of—harmonized, in unison, contrapuntally and antiphonally, often within the space of a single performance — creating a mobile play of lithe movement and rich color that was all the more remarkable for having been developed spontaneously, in the very act of playing itself. Just how well he succeeded can be heard in every one of the selections in this collection.

The earliest Mulligan quartet recordings reflected its original use of piano, however, for it took some time for the group's final instrumentation and approach to take shape. Following a period of weekend performing at Howard Rumsey's Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach, the saxophonist had secured the regular Monday night job at The Haig, a small club located on Wilshire Blvd. in Los Angeles. There he performed with a rotating group of musicians that included trumpeter Ernie Royal, pianists Jimmy Rowles and Fred Otis, bassists Joe Comfort, Red Mitchell and Joe Mondragon, and drummers Alvin Stoller and Chico Hamilton.

"The quartet's recording history had its beginnings on the afternoon of June 10th, 1952, in (recording engineer) Philip Turetsky's tiny Laurel Canyon bungalow in the Hollywood Hills," noted Pacific Jazz's Richard Bock, who was something of a midwife to the group's birth. "Gerry asked Jimmy Rowles, Red Mitchell and Chico Hamilton to meet up at Turetsky's house where I had access to his Ampex tape recorder and one RCA 44-B microphone. For some reason Rowles failed to arrive so we recorded anyway — without the piano. The opening selection on this album, Get Happy, by Arlen and Koehler, was the result of that meeting. (Note: The listener will hear piano during this performance, however During Mitchell's bass solo, which follows the baritonist's statement of and elaboration of the theme, Mulligan switches briefly to the keyboard before re-entering on saxophone for a round of exchanges with Hamilton.)

"A week later," Bock continued, "at the Monday night session at The Haig, Mulligan and Chet Baker met. Soon after that meeting Gerry decided to attempt to record with Jjrnrny Rowles. So, together with Chet and Joe Mondragon, we met at the Universal Recording Studio in Hollywood on the evening of July 9th, 1952. Out of this session came Kern and Harbach's She Didn't Say Yes, This is the only quartet recording without drums and with piano."

This performance IS also notable for the glimpses it affords one of what was then happening onstage at The Haig. The fabled rapport that existed between the saxophonist and trumpeter and which charged their music with such poignancy and excitement had yet to reveal itself, although the seeds are evident, Mulligan's arrangement makes interesting use of the quartet's instrumentation, particularly the harmonized cushion his baritone and Baker's trumpet furnished Rowles during the latter half of his solo. This leads directly to a warm and flowingly lyrical Mulligan chorus, followed by an exchange of fours between himself and Baker, and then out.

Bock takes up the tale: "In mid-July of 1952, The Haig booked the Red Norvo Trio for an engagement of indefinite length. The trio at that time consisted of Red Mitchell on bass and Tal Farlow on guitar. Inasmuch as the trio did not use a piano, and since Gerry had insisted that he would rather play the Monday night sessions without the piano, (Haig) owner John Bennett decided to put the piano in storage. It was this decision that brought Chet Baker, Chico Hamilton, and a young bass player from Long Beach by the name of Bob Whitlock to form the first Mulligan pianoless quartet.

"After five Monday nights, Gerry felt the quartet was ready to record. On the afternoon of August 16th, 1952, at the Turetsky bungalow again, we recorded the memorable Bernie's Tune and Lullaby of the Leaves. That record, released as a single in the Fall of 1952, put Pacific Jazz in business. The quartet rapidly became a West Coast sensation. Soon after the release of the single record, the quartet was booked into The Blackhawk in San Francisco. Bob Whitlock was unable to make the trip there, so Gerry replaced him with Carson Smith, a promising young bass player. The new quartet was caught in the act by Ralph J Gleason of the San Francisco Chronicle and West Coast editor of Down Beat who said at that time, 'The Gerry Mulligan Quartet is certainly the freshest and most interesting sound to come out of jazz in a long time.'"

While in San Francisco the group recorded four selections for that city's Fantasy Records (and four months later four more titles), which are well worth seeking out, as they duplicate only one of the quartet's Pacific Jazz recordings of the time and offer additional samples of its working repertoire. Returning to Los Angeles the group was booked into The Haig for an engagement of four weeks which, as Bock recalled, "stretched into over six months and during that time the Mulligan Quartet received national attention through a Time magazine story."

Shortly after settling in for this extended stint the group undertook additional recording for Pacific Jazz. At a single session held on October 15, 1952, Whitlock back on bass in place of Smith, the quartet recorded six remarkable performances, beginning with Mulligan's Nights At The Turntable (along with his Walkin' Shoes the masterpieces among these small miracles) and concluding with the Baker original Freeway. In this group of recordings the original sound of the quartet, as signaled in the earlier Lullaby of the Leaves and Bernie's Tune, was delineated more fully and resourcefully, with much greater assurance and blossoming creativity on Baker's part. The several months of concerted performing had not only drawn ever deepening resources of thoughtful, poignant melodism from the young trumpeter, revealing an original, heartfelt syle in the making, but also had brought to the fore an ability for improvised counterpoint and other types of interplay that meshed well with Mulligan's mastery in this area.

The characteristic sound of the quartet, developed from the simple premise of utilizing to the fullest the potentials of the two horns — as Andre Hodeir described it, "to highlight a very small number of melodic parts by suppressing all harmonic commentary" — was never any one thing but, rather, the sum of many individual handlings of the basic premise, each dictated by the special character of the song being so treated. This was the result of the application of a fluid, generalized working methodology to a fairly wide range of performance vehicles, blues, ballad standards and original lines based on these two basic forms. The distinctiveness that marked the quartet's music from the start was due solely to the great originality and vitality of Mulligan's imagination in shaping the group's arrangements; the stimulating, mutually complementary interplay of the two horn players — the spare, warm, elegaic melodism of Baker and the blowsy, extroverted, booting inventiveness of Mulligan — each individually pleasing but in tandem much greater than the sum of those separate parts; and powering the engine the steady, unobtrusive, deftly propulsive rhythm team of Bob Whitlock and Chico Hamilton. All those things were the Gerry Mulligan Quartet, Together, as this collection so satisfyingly reveals, they wrote the first chapter in the saga of one of the most consistently absorbing, creative, original-sounding and popular of all modern jazz ensembles.

To be continued
—Pete Welding