Themes
Songs
Chronology
|
Collection Themes Songs Chronology | |
AGE OF STEAM | ||||||
|
 | |||||
|  | |||||
LINER NOTES |
|
As a baritone saxophonist, composer, pianist, band leader and recording artist, Gerry Mulligan has been an ever-growing and important creative force in modern American music. Aside from working in Dave Brubeck's group, making one album with Beaver and Krause and a live album with Charles Mingus, Mulligan has not recorded on his own for more than seven years.
It's not that his creativity is on the wane. Quite simply, he has been bored with the trendiness of music and the inevitable hassles of business. But when this opportunity came along it just seemed like the right time and the right combination of people.
When I first heard this recording, I was taken by its beauty. It is very contemporary without being a shallow, commercial updating of the old Mulligan. The music seemed to me to be an extension or further evolution of Gerry's great Concert Band of the fifties. He told me "In a way it is. The main difference is the size of this rhythm section. I never worked with such a large section before. They are an ensemble unto themselves. The trick is to make everything relate to make all of the elements into one whole. In fact I was listening to some of my old Concert Band recordings the other day and was quite surprised at the lack of rhythm and push. This new album really is an extension of the old orchestra."
"But I see this album primarily as a vehicle for some of my new material. During the production there were quite a few concepts floating around. But it does add up to an extension of the old band."
Although Gerry's childhood memories and the sounds of the old Midwest territory bands played a major role in the writing and playing of this new music, you will find no meaningless journeys into nostalgia. As Dave Brubeck says, "With Gerry, you feel as if you're listening to the past, present and future of jazz all at one time and it's with such taste and respect that you're not quite aware of the changes in idiom. Mulligan gets the old New Orleans two-beat going with a harmonic awareness of advanced jazz and you know that tradition is not being broken but rather that it is being pushed forward."
The album kicks off with "Slow Country Beaver" a laid-back funky loping country tune. The old Mulligan - Bob Brookmeyer sound is recaptured in a new context. Tom Scott adds a beautiful raunchy tenor sax solo to the proceedings.
"K-4 Pacific" was inspired by and named after a Pennsylvania R.R. locomotive that used to run by Gerry's house in Ohio. "I was fascinated by trains as a kid. The sound of that locomotive made a large impression on me. So I wrote this jazz chart with that sound and feeling in mind." Tom Scott solos on soprano sax this time and Roger Kellaway steps out for his own spot also.
The hymn-like "Grand Tour" has a long arrhythmic floating feeling. Alto saxophonist Bud Shank and Mulligan maintain the ethereal mood in their solos and interaction. The three-part "Over The Hill And Out Of The Woods" features the most extensive writing on the date. Gerry is heard on piano as well as baritone sax. "If I perform this work I want to develop it much more with soloists but I like the emotion of this recorded version. It was really a thrill to hear Harry "Sweets" Edison solo on my music. He maintains his amazing trumpet style and fits into the piece very well."
"Dancin' All Day Sunday" combines a shuffling rock beat with leaping melodic lines that resemble the irreverent tongue-in-cheek style of Thelonious Monk.
"A Weed Grows In Disneyland" is a showcase for the hard-driving guitar of Howard Roberts. And he keeps the tune moving fast with some fine help from Kellaway on electric piano.
The gentle airy "Golden Notebooks" draws its title from the Doris Lessing novel in which an emotionally hung-up American writer (male) takes a prized golden notebook from the heroine, a really terrific English girl - also a writer. It is symbolic of all that he has taken from her already. Gerry wrote this piece to acknowledge all of the tangible and intangible things that men in our society steal from women.
"Maytag" draws on Gerry's childhood experiences in his mother's basement with that soulful Maytag washer that just chugged away with its own special rhythm. Mulligan Brookmeyer Scott and Kellaway solo to the strange infectious rhythm of this tone poem.
It's been a long time between albums for Gerry Mulligan but it was worth the wait. Listen and enjoy.
-MICHAEL CUSCUNA
from DVD/CD
MICHAEL CUSCUNA'S LINER NOTES (MARCH 2004):
My original liner notes for this album have been a source of confusion for some time because titles in notes did not match the song stack. Gerry changed the title of two of the tunes before the album was released and those changes were never reflected in the liner notes or rhythm section credits. To set the record straight "Slow Country Beaver" became "One To Ten In Ohio" and "Dancin' All Day Sunday" became "Country Beaver". This reissue and recent Mosaic boxed set of Mulligan's neglected and brilliant Concert Jazz Band Recordings for Verve point up an irony. Gerry will forever be best known for his innovative pianoless quartets with Chet Baker, Bob Brookmeyer and Art Farmer and for his sextets with Brookmeyer and Zoot Sims. Yet he entered the professional ranks, writing and arranging for Gene Krupa before he was twenty and soon contributed charts to the bands of Elliot Lawrence, Claude Thornhill and Stan Kenton.
But it was in the think tank known as Gil Evans' 52nd Street apartment in 1948 that his writing style began to take an innovative direction. Out of the sessions and discussions that took place there came the Miles Davis Nonet later known as the Birth of the Cool band with Gil, Gerry and John Lewis as its chief musical architects. Mulligan picked up the threads of that work in 1953 with his tentette recordings for Capitol. But the quartet with Baker was exploding at the time and the tentette fell by the wayside.
In 1957 he cut four tunes for Columbia with a traditional full-size big band but he told Burt Korall in 1961 that "the sound was too heavy and dull. The flexibility I had been so happy with in the small band was missing". Out of that dissatisfaction came solutions that helped create his remarkable Concert Jazz Band, founded in 1960 with Bob Brookmeyer's help. The band was smaller and pianoless except when Mulligan or Brookmeyer took the bench. Despite critical raves and a magnificent book of arrangements, the ensemble needed Norman Granz's subsidy to survive and lasted only a few years.
When interviewing Gerry for the original of this album I asked him if this was an extnsion of the Concert Jazz Band. His remarks were dead on (see original notes). The brass and reed instrumentation and writing style were similar, but where the rhythm section previously consisted of bass and drums with a mission to keep things loose and swinging, the rhythm section for the Age of Steam is full blown and an integral part of the compositions.
Revisiting this album 32 years after I wrote the notes, I'm struck by two things: Gerry's rich, gentle writing on pieces like "Grand Tour" and "Golden Notebooks" and the forceful rhythmic patterns played in a contemporary style on "One to Ten In Ohio" and "Maytag". Like so much of Gerry's music throughout his fifty years as an artist, it sounds like it could have been recorded yesterday.
The "quite a few new concepts" that Gerry refers to in the original notes included using instruments that were new to or rare in his lexicon like electric piano, guitar and congas, writing out rhythm tracks that establish and lock into a groove and the explosive drumming of Joe Porcaro on "A Weed in Disneyland" and "Maytag".
It appears that Gerry and producer Steve Goldman were using overdubbing as well. If he is playing electric piano on "Golden Notebooks" and piano on "Country Beaver" as the original credits state, then he had to overdub his baritone sax after the fact. In both cases, the piano is leading the rhythm track and too integral to have been overdubbed later, whereas the baritone sax plays with and floats over the track.
"Golden Notebooks", incidentally, is the only track without any other horns, but it is just as orchestral in nature. The electric piano, vibes, guitar and bass blend and build beautifully.
Immediately prior to starting this album, Mulligan, Bud Shank and Howard Roberts recorded five pieces live at The Grace Cathedral in San Francisco with organist Paul Beaver and synthesizer player Bernard Krause for their album Gandharva. One of the pieces was a Mulligan melody entitled "By Your Grace" which Shank believes inspired "Grand Tour". It would have been nice to hear Shank and Mulligan together more often as this moving performance reminds us. Essentially, they trade the melody and obbligato roles with each other over a bed of Roger Kellaway's electric piano and Emil Richards' delicate percussion. After Shank solos, Brookmeyer and bassist Chuck Domanico enter. As the drama builds, the rest of the horns enter for the final statement of the melody. Gorgeous.
Another highlight is "K-4 Pacific", a great composition and a wonderfully voiced arrangement with excellent solos by Mulligan, Tom Scott on soprano and Roger Kellaway (whose incredible comping under Scott harkens back to the energy and interplay of his 1967 quartet with Scott, Domanico and John Guerin). This is the only composition from the album to have made it into Gerry's regular performing book. He recorded it again in 1974 on Carnegie Hall Concert and in 1987 with the Houston Symphony Orchestra on Symphonic Dreams.
The Age Of Steam was a fresh new chapter for Gerry Mulligan, the composer and arranger. And things would change again on his next big band album in 1980, the Grammy award-winning Walk On The Water, on which he expanded the brass to nine pieces and opted far a more traditional jazz rhythm section.
In the early eighties, Gerry assembled a new edition of the Concert Jazz Band, which toured Europe. He modified the arrangements of "K-4 Pacific", "Over the Hill and Out of the Woods", "Maytag" and "A Weed In Disneyland" for the tour and added five horns to the sextet arrangement of "Golden Notebooks" heard here.
Gerry Mulligan's discography is filled with a wide range of one-of-a-kind combinations and collaborations. Although viewed generally as part of his big band canon, The Age Of Steam is truly unique work that stands alone in Gerry's output.
Excerpt from Letter from Gerry Mulligan to Herb Alpert, February 16, 1993 Dear Herb I remember very well the day you told me your idea that "it starts with one". I admired the conception and also the fact that that you were willing to follow through on it. And I'm always appreciative that you gave me the opportunity and the luxury to do it the way we did it, and let it evolve. I appreciate Steve Goldman's help in putting it together. I always need someone to help me get things off the ground and I've never found anyone as good as Steve to work with. So, my friend, a belated heart-felt thank you. 
|
| Collection Themes Songs Chronology | |
