Paul Desmond

1. Line For Lyons - GM composer

1. Ed Bickert
2. Jerry Fuller
3. Don Thompson

 LINER NOTES

Paul Desmond's career had many ironies. While he was a pioneer in creating a highly recognizable approach to the sound of the alto saxophone, he seldom received credit for his role in creating that approach. Although he was one of the most frequently recorded alto saxophonists in modern jazz, only a small percentage of his recorded work was made under his own name. For over fifteen years, he was an essential part of one of the world's most popular jazz groups, but while his bandleader became a household name, he remained virtually anonymous. And even though Desmond was the composer of one of the best-known melodies in jazz, few listeners knew that he had written it, and many assumed that his bandleader had.

Desmond, of course, was a founding member of pianist Dave Brubeck's quartet. In the 1950s and 1960s, Brubeck was one of a handful of jazz musicians, among them Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Benny Goodman, who were known to the general public. He was even featured on the cover of Time magazine in 1954. Given Brubeck's high profile and Desmond's generally modest and self-deprecatory attitude toward his own playing, it's not surprising that just a small portion of the American public knew the saxophonist's name or was aware of his contributions to the Brubeck group. It was only after the breakup of the Brubeck group in 1967 that Desmond solidly established himself as a performing bandleader and did some of the best playing of his career including the live recordings heard on this CD.

Paul Emil Breitenfeld was born in San Francisco on November 24, 1924. He began playing clarinet in high school and did not take up the alto sax until 1943. At some point he changed his last name, probably for professional reasons. (In 1960, when pianist Marian McPartland interviewed him for Down Beat, he told her,"I picked the name Desmond out of the phone book.") While he was in the army, Desmond met and first played with Brubeck. Beginning soon after World War Il, the two crossed paths many times in the San Fransisco area and began working together on and off.

The first commercially recorded collaborations between Brubeck and Desmond were made in 1950 and1951 and were released on the small independent Fantasy label. A 1951 Down Beat review of the 1951session referred to Desmond's "now-Konitz, now-Parker-like playing." Jazz critics who had not heard Desmond play in person in the mid-1940s understandably concluded that his light tone quality, preference for the upper register of his horn, and avoidance of bebop melodic cliches were inspired by his fellow alto saxophonist Lee Konitz. This assumption has continued to this day. Desmond admired Konitz (and listed him as one of his favorites in The Encyclopedia of Jazz), but the two saxophonists evidently formed their styles independen!y of each other.

Although he was nearly three years younger than Desmond, Konitz was the first of the two to record commercially, His earliest ecordings were made in late 1947 with pianist Claude Thornhill's band, and his brief solos on Thornhill's versions of "Yardbird Suite" and "Anthropology" (made in September and December 1947, respectively) attracted some attention in 1948. Konitz's reputation and influence greatly increased through the highly regarded recordings he made with pianist Lennie Tristano and trumpeter Miles Davis, beginning in 1949. The fact that many of those later performances were on the well-distributed Columbia and Capitol labels, and the fact that Konitz was based in New York City from 1948, also helped him to gain exposure. On all of those recordings, he displayed an airy tone quality, minimal vibrato, a preference for the alto's upper register, and an abstract approach to melodic lines in a combination that was unusual in jazz at that time.

Desmond, by contrast, primarily worked in California in the 1940s, and no recordings of him were released to the public until Brubeck's first Fantasy sessions. However, some of the early Brubeck -Desmond collaborations of the 1940s were noncommercialiy recorded for personal use, and a version of "I Hear a Rhapsody", made in either 1946 or 1948, depending on one's discographical source, was later commercially released by Fantasy. On this performance, Desmond's typical stylistic traits are already well established: a light timbre, medium-speed vibrato, prominent use of the saxophone's upper range, and a lyrical approach to melody. What early Desmond and Konitz primarily had in common, then, were similar tone qualities and a preference for high-register playing. However, the two saxophonists had quite likely evolved these similar qualities concurrently on opposite coasts.

Given his independence from Konitz, how did Desmond arrive at his characteristic approach to the alto saxophone? He often cited alto saxophonist Pete Brown as an early influence. Brown's influence on Desmond was probably more in the realm of inspiration than in actual style, because Brown's raspy tone quality, clipped phrasing, and assertive approach are a far cry from Desmond's intimate timbre, smooth phrasing, and reserved tendencies. Speaking of his earliest influences in a 1976 interview for COG Radio, Desmond cited Brown and mentioned in passing two other alto saxophonists, Johnny Hodges and Dick Stabile. But he concluded, "Willie Smith was my major influence at this point." Like Desmond, Smith had a clear, singing tone and routinely played in the upper register of his horn, even beyond its nominally highest note (a practice that Desmond employed extensively in the 1950s).

But what about Desmond's lyricism? Neither Konitz nor Brown nor Smith was a highly lyrical melodist. Certainly tenor saxophonist Lester Young offered a clear example of melodic elegance to a generation of young payers, and Desmond was probably no exception in this regard. In a 1991 interview with Paul Caulfield (published on his Web site, Pure Desmond), Dave Brubeck said that although he never heard Desmond talk about Young, he believed the influence was there. So we can include Young as a likely melodic model, while acknowledging that lyricism was Desmond's unique gift and probably would have been so with or without prior influences.

Of course, Desmond's musical development did not end with his admiration and emulation of Swing Era artists. In late 1945 and early 1946, he had the opportunity to hear state-of-the-art New York modem jazz first hand when he encountered Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie at Billy Berg's nightclub in Los Angeles. Desmond was understandably impressed by Parker's great technical facility, as he told Parker when he interviewed him on the radio in 1954: "Another thing that's been a major factor in your playing is this fantastic technique that nobody's quite equaled." In a 1953 Down Beat interview with Nat Hentoff, Parker showed that the admiration was mutual when he said, with reference to Brubeck, "I'm very impressed by his altoist, Paul Desmond."

Desmond also admired the narrative aspect of Parker's art, as he said in the radio interview: "You do always have a story to tell. it's one of the most impressive things about everything I've ever heard of yours." In performance, Parker told stories in part by sending musical messages to his friends and acquaintances in the audience by quoting the melodies of various songs. Desmond was also a master of the creative musical quotation, raising the possibility that he was inspired by Parker in this regard. Although his improvisations never strongly resembled Parker's, Desmond was nevertheless a modernist who chose to work with accompanists who were harmonically and melodically influenced by modern jazz.

The 1950s was a time of increasing popular recognition for Desmond. Upon Parker's death in 1955, he took over the top alto saxophonist spot in the annual Down Beat readers' poll, a position he would hold for the rest of the decade. However, jazz fans knew him primarily through his membership in the Brubeck quartet, largely because he seldom recorded on his own. During the decade, Brubeck recorded dozens of LPs (most of them featuring Desmond), while the saxophonist recorded only three LPs as the sole leader; in 1954, 1956, and.1959. Desmond never included a piano on these recordings choosing either to use an electric guitar or to play without a chordal instrument at all.

In 1959 Brubeck, Desmond, and the quartet recorded what would become one of the most popular of all jazz compositions, "Take Five". Although, Desmond is officially credited with being the composer, the real story may be a bit more complex. According to Brubeck, drummer Joe Morello and Desmond used to warm up before concerts using a catchy 5/4 rhythm figure that Morello had come up with. Brubeck had been urging Desmond to write piece in 5/4 for an upcoming album, Time Out built around the concept of unusual time signatures. Desmond reportedly composed two contrasting melodies (and, one assumes, the accompanying chord progressions) that fit Morello's drum pattern, but the composition didn't take shape, until Brubeck suggested that Desmond put the sections together into an AABA form. Desmond received the composer credit although Brubeck points out that the beat was Morello's.

Desmond's 1959 session East of the Sun marked the beginning of his fruitful partnership with electric guitarist Jim Hall. This association gave Desmond not only a superstar collaborator but also the pianoless instrumentation he preferred. In the early 1960s, Desmond recorded a series of highly regarded LPs for RCA Victor with Hall (and usually drummer Connie Kay of the Modern Jazz Quartet; several bassists were used). More than fifty tracks by the group have subsequently been released on CD.

Desmond's association with RCA ended in 1965, and he soon entered into a transitional period. In late 1967, the Dave Brubeck Quartet broke up, ending Desmond's years of frequent tours of the US and the world. In 1968, Desmond began recording on his own for A&M Records. Some of his LPs of the late 1960s and early 1970s featured his smooth alto sax over glossy backgrounds with pop-music overtones, and these sessions did little to challenge him. A few, however, were looser and more stimulating to him.

Around this time, Desmond largely stopped playing to public. According to Fred M. Hall in his Brubeck biography, It's About Time (University of Arkansas Press), Desmond instead "led an indolent existence with lots of beautiful women (mostly models), lots of booze, and much hanging-out with writer friends at Elaine's, a bar on New York's Upper East Side." Desmond had opportunities to perform in public, but he generally turned them down. He didn't have to play to make a living; he was financially secure from his Brubeck years and no doubt received substantial royalties from recordings and performances of "Take Five".

In the early 1970s, Desmond received an enticing offer to lead a group at Toronto's Bourbon Street nightclub. He wanted to bring Jim Hall with him, but Hall wasn't available and instead recommended a Canadian guitarist, Ed Bickert. The rest of the Toronto rhythm section included bassist Don Thompson and, for most of the group's engagement, drummer Jerry Fuller. The invitation roused Desmond out of his artistic doldrums and led directly to his last series of great recordings, including the music on this CD.

The Bickert-Thompson-Fuller rhythm section was an extremely sympathetic one. These were players of a younger generation who were aware of the accompanimental innovations of pianist Bill Evans's 1959-61 trio, the 1963-68 Miles Davis Quintet, and individuals such as Hall. Each player was a sensitive listener and was ready to interact with Desmond harmonically, rhythmically, or melodically.

This rhythm section also provided artistic comfort for Desmond. He was inclined to play songs in familiar keys and especially liked the key of E-flat concert (C on his alto saxophone). The group obliged him: Five of the eight pieces on this CD ("Wendy", "Things Ain't What They Used to Be", "Nancy", "Take Five", and "My Funny Valentine") are based in E-flat.

Desmond felt so comfortable with this group in Toronto that several songs evolved right on the bandstand. One arrangement that took shape in performance is heard on "Take Five". Although the beginning and ending ensemble statements are similar to the original Brubeck-Desmond version, the solo sections are quite different. As before, Desmond solos, first, but instead of improvising in E-flat minor as he did on the original recording, he is given a different harmonic underpinning by Bickert and Thompson and improvises using an exotic scale that reminded the group of the Middle East in a 1991 interview with Caulfield, Thompson recalled this arrangement: "I was playing my solo and . . . Paul comes over and he says, 'I can smell the camels from here.'" From then on, Desmond and the group humorously referred to the song not as "Take Five" but as "The Camel".

Desmond's melody "Wendy" was created in the nightclub. It began as the saxophonist's improvisations on the chord progression of "For All We Know", a popular song that Desmond and Brubeck had recorded in 1953. In the 1991 interview, Thompson outlined Desmond's creative process: "Every night he'd call 'For All We Know', and every night he'd start playing this other thing and after about a week he actually had a new tune."

One of the final ironies of Paul Desmond's life was that after musicians such as Ed Bickerk, Don Thompson, and Jerry Fuller had lured him back to an active performing career (he even toured again with the Dave Brubeck Quartet), he was diagnosed with lung cancer. His last concert was with the Two Generations of Brubeck group in February 1997. Paul Desmond died on May 30,1977.

Carl Woideck

November 1999

THE PAUL DESMOND QUARTET the Original Liner Notes

.I've been quoted - actually, enough times that I'm beginning to be sorry I ever brought the whole thing up - as wanting to get the alto to sound like a dry martini. I mention this now only because there are moments on these records which could justifiably be said to sound more like three dry martinis.

All part of the giddy euphoria of playing in a club again after years of concerts. Or because of the musicians I was working with - Ed Bickert on guitar, Don Thompson on bass- Jerry Fuller on drums.

Jerry is a charter-member of a unique and endangered species - a drummer who appears happiest while devoting his sensitive, intelligent playing to whatever is happening at the moment.

Don of course is a walking miracle. Here are some things about him: He plays bass, somewhat reluctantly, if required. He plays piano in the manner of Keith Jarrett. He writes like an angel, (As a matter of fact, he looks a bit like a second cousin of Christ, and plays bass as if his family were a bit closer.) If you're into space music and feel like sitting on a B minor chord for forty-five minutes, he either swoops around the bottom register of the bass or flutters about like a giant butterfly trapped in a Stradivarius, whichever is most appropriate. And if you're an old curmudgeon like me and feel like playing some old standards, he plays all the right changes. (In this case, also recording the proceedings with his other hand.) In all of the above situations, his solos are dependably unbelievable.

Ed Bickert is unique. Chords, for instance. I play a sort of horn-player's amateur piano: Ten fingers, eighty-eight keys. When I work with Ed, I find myself turning around several times a night to count the strings on his guitar. Even with my eyes closed I'm reasonably sure, it's less than eighty-eight! (Perhaps I should count his fingers more often.) My question, then, is how does he get to play chorus after chorus of chord sequences which could not possibly sound better on a keyboard? Or, in some cases, written for orchestra? This all becomes more impressive when I play a tape of Ed's for a guitar player and suddenly realize, between the hypnotized gaze of fascination and the flicker of disbelief, that what I had cherished as a musical phrase is also totally impossible to play on guitar. (Unlike some musicians capable of this, Ed doesn't save it to beat you about the head and shoulders during his solo; the impossible chord occurs more often quietly in the background.)

(I realize, suddenly, that I'm violating one of my basic principles: It's dumb fof loner notes to rave about the music, in view of the fact that you've presumably already bought the album . . . like those packages you bring home and the first thing you see when you open them is "CONGRATULATIONS YOU HAVE JUST ACQUIRED THE BEST CASSETTE RECORDER AVAILABLE" etc.)

Why, I continue to ramble on in this fashion about the records is because I feel if I were you (and, incidently, I am), I'd be curious about the people who played on them.

Jerry Fuller and me you probably know enough about for now. Don Thompson sounds clearly impossible as described earlier, but he is. Nothing seems to change that.

Ed Bickert, then, remains the mysterious figure in the group, and I'm not sure I know much more about him than you do. A picture of him would look a lot like the Marlboro Man. (He smokes more than I do, which is impossible, and is much healthier, which is his guitar, both clearly indestructible. The cigarette, incidentally, is always a Maverick - a Canadian brand which, if it didn't exist, Ed might have invented.) When he talks, which is not all that often (not that he's anti-social - he just doesn't waste words),he sounds surprisingly like Gary Cooper. He has four children (ages fourteen, twelve, ten, and seven roughly, but don't trust me - who knows what birthdays have roared through that hectic house even as I write this?), and shares the attendant chores with his frighteningly capable, disarmingly charming wife.

He grew up in a small town in British Columbia (do you begin to get the feeling that this album is actually a short novel with records artfully concealed among the pages?).

All I know about Ed's home is that it's on the western side of Canada (since both Don Thompson and Jerry; Fuller, among many others, came from Vancouver, they must be doing something terribly right out there), which brings us to a very personal and slightly eerie coincidence.

During the same period (early 1950s) that Jimmy Lyons, a San Francisco disc jockey at the time, later the founder of the Monterey Festival, was helping Dave Brubeck and me get out of town, Jimmy's show was bouncing nightly from many ghostly Canadian mountaintops. Fortunately, the show got through to Ed Bickert each night as he was figuring out what to do with the guitar.

It took us long enough, Lord knows, but I'm glad we finally got together.

- Paul Desmond

Paul Desmond Live at Bourbon Street

In 1973 when the Half Note, New York's legendary (now legendary and defunct) jazz club moved from the warehouse wilderness of Lower Manhattan to midtown, Paul Desmond played an engagement there. He explained that he had agreed to the gig because the club was just around the corner from his apartment and he would be able to fall out of bed and onto the bandstand, more or less. The ideal club date. And it came about only after months of importuning by the Half Note's Canterino family and assorted friends and fans who wanted to hear Paul make live music.

Desmond's reluctance to again get involved in the wearing business of playing publicly was in reaction to the logistics of his career with the Dave Brubeck Quartet, a seventeen-year round airplanes, hotels, clubs, concerts, receptions, unpredictable meals, and, to put it mildly, irregular hours. Every day must have seemed like another leg of an endless journey.

After easing back into the active jazz life and into his first role as leader with the Half Note debut, Paul took a really adventurous step. He traveled all the way to Toronto for a date at Bourbon Street. That led to a fast musical friendship with Ed Bickert, which you hear continued on the recordings at hand. In the adjoining exhibit, Desmond has a few things to say about Bickert, Don Thompson, and Jerry Fuller.

And I have a few things to say about Desmond.

First of all, he gets better all the time, but he doesn't practice. "I tried practicing for a few weeks," he once told me, "and ended up playing too fast." So it's a mystery how the world's slowest alto player (his description) stays in shape. Clean living, perhaps. Desmond, as it has become practically a cliche to point out, is one of the most lyrical jazz artists. He is also one of the most literate, musically and verbally. His ability to quote, to ingeniously integrate into his solos phrases from other sources, is celebrated. Sometimes the quotes are as obvious as the bit from "Little Man, You've Had a Busy Day" on "Things Ain't What They Used to Be" or the self-quote of his blues "Audrey" during "Wave" on this album. Often they are complex, and obscure except to the most attentive listener. Once, when he was playing "Pennies From Heaven" with Brubeck, I heard Desmond lift with absolute accuracy the first two bars of Lee Konitz's arsonist solo from the rare alternate master recording of "Oh, Lady, Be Good!" with the Gerry Mulligan Quartet, reprise the phrase, meld it onto the first phrase of Tadd Dameron's "Hot House", play a dimunition of the "Hot House" lick, then slip back into the mainstream of the solo. This sort of thing went on all the time in Desmond's solos in those days, but even for him this was something of a mini tour de force, and Brubeck, who had been sitting out while the rhythm section strolled behind Paul, stopped his head-bobbing and allowed his mouth to fall open.

That concert, by the way, is on tape, and if somebody doesn't get the rights to it and release it on records, somebody is crazy.

In Seattle in 1956 at the intermission of a concert, I told Desmond I had enjoyed his quote from Chet Baker's recording of "Happy Little Sunbeam". On the first tune of the second half, he found a way to work the remainder of Chet's complicated solo into a place where it could not logically have been expected to fit. "Thought you might like to hear the rest of it," he said later, nonchalantly. I think that was the same occasion on which Paul produced a single-lens reflex camera and took pictures of the cameramen who crowded the edge of the stand taking pictures of him.

Casual, even deprecatory, as he may be about it, Desmond's musicianship makes other musicians sit up and take notice. I saw him cause Duke Ellington to do that, literally. It was at the seventieth birthday celebration for Ellington at the White House in 1969. The high point of Nixon's administration, as it turned out. After dinner, the all-star band playing Ellington's music in the East Room was performing "Things Ain't What They Used to Be", and Desmond's solo included a few bars that were not merely reminiscent of Johnny Hodges. They were Johnny Hodges, to the life . . .tone, volume, phrasing, slurs; a distillation of Hodges, Ellington, who had been slumped and dreamily half-listening, popped upright, raised an eyebrow, leaned forward, and began digging Paul intently, a quizzical smile on his face. Desmond was enormously pleased when I described Ellington's reaction.

Paul's musical phrase-making is matched by his agility with words in conversation and in his writings, which are sinfully few. I know of no one with a quicker wit. Calling Desmond from San Antonio on the eve of his appearance at the Newport Jazz Festival, I told him I was afraid I wouldn't be able to get up for Newport.

"Yeah, that always worries me too," he said.

Upon seeing a girlfriend in the company of an obviously wealthy elderly gentlemen, Desmond shook his head sadly and said, "So this is how the world ends, not with a whim but a banker."

Hanging out one night at his favorite Greenwich Village listening spot, Bradley's, Desmond was besieged by an aggressive reporter, "a Barbara Howar type," he recalls. Having answered or avoided a barrage of cliche-laden questions, Paul had had enough.

"You're beginning to sound like a cross between David Frost and David Susskind," he told her, "and that is a cross I cannot bear."

One of the nicest things about Bradley's is Jimmy Rowles, the pianist. Desmond describes Rowles as the ultimate authority on chord changes to standard and some not-so-standard songs. After his night's work, when Fowles was packing away his volumes of harmonic reference works, known in the trade as fake books, Bradley Cunningham remarked to him that if Peter Duchin had those books his prayers would be answered.

"Unfortunately," Desmond interjected, "all of Peter Duchin's prayers have already been answered."

Desmond's facility with language has been on occasional public display in his liner notes, which are classics of the genre. It was in the notes for one of his legendary RCA Victor albums of the early Sixties that he found it necessary to identify himself as "this saxophone player from the Dave Brubeck Quartet, with which I've been associated since shortly after the Crimean War. You can tell which one is me because when I'm not playing, which is surprisingly often, I'm leaning against the piano." And in a later set of notes there was further wry self.-deprecation when he signed in as "Paul Desmond, rapidly aging sax-player with the Brubeck Quartet; sometimes called the John P. Marquand of the alto." In his little essay, for the first album under his, a ten-inch Fantasy LP, vintage 1954, Desmond recalled that he and tenor saxophonist-composer Dave Van Kriedt had spent some time together in the army band where I first met him and in which we spent many long hours together cleaning latrines - me because of a sort of monumental inefficiency, Van Kriedt mostly because he kept telling the first sergeant how bad the band "sounded."

For years, Desmond has been working, or thinking about, a book whose title is to be a question inevitably presented by stewardesses when he was traveling with Brubeck, "How Many of You Are There in the Quartet?" The only evidence that this eagerly awaited volume may actually someday appear is a chapter that ran a couple of years ago in Punch. It is virtually unknown this side of the Atlantic except to those to whom I show the tattered Xerox copy I carry around in my wallet. The piece concerns the quartet's misadventures at the Orange County, New Jersey, fair, and it is hilarious.

Over a couple of decades, I have listened to, dined with, drunk with, and, God knows, laughed with Desmond in a variety of situations. Some were your conventional social encounters, although with Desmond no encounter is likely to be that conventional. Others, like the White House bash for Duke, were a bit unusual. I recall sitting on the balcony of Bobby Hackett's hotel room in New Orleans with Paul, Count Base, Eddie "Lockjaw Bradley, toasting the sun as it rose over Bourbon Street. There were a couple of crazy hours in the bar off the lobby of the Portland Hilton when we pumped quarters into a Scopitone and repeatedly watched the Kestler Sisters sing and dance their way through a fantastic production number that must have cost more to produce than most full-length movies. We were both convinced that this glorified jukebox with pictures was going to be the hottest thing since television, and talked about buying stock in the company. Television, as it turned out, was considerably hotter, Scopitone disappeared, and we went on to blow our money on more enjoyable, if not more remunerative, adventures.

Desmond's curiosity is endless, his conversations stimulating, his ability to see through to the center of an issue - or a person - as amazing as his tolerance. There is no more entertaining or civilized companion.

Recently, Desmond has been hitting the road with Brubeck in the reconstituted quartet. It's a reunion tour, complete with Eugene Wright and Joe Morello. Paul is determined not to let it become the pressure cooker of yore. He's accepting selected club dates. Most often he selects Toronto's Bourbon Street. His playing, as you can plainly hear on the enclosed records, is as inventive as ever, perhaps a touch more reflective, the humor even more subtle. I don't know whether it bothered Desmond in the days when critics were wont to put him down for any number of spurious reasons - because he was part of a spectacularly successful band, because he was white, because he didn't attempt to sound like Charlie Parker, I doubt that it did. He knew what he could do, and he did it, one of the great individualists among jazz soloists.

One of the great individualists among human beings.

Doug Ramsey

1. Blues In Time - "Cool Talkin' Verve"
2. Body And Soul
3. Standstill
4. Line For Lyons
5. Wintersong X2
6. Battle Hymn Of The Republican
7. Fall Out
8. Tea For Two - only on "Quartet"
9. Lover - only on "Quartet"

• Dave Bailey
• Joe Benjamin
• Paul Desmond
• Gerry Mulligan

 LINER NOTES

MULLIGAN AND GETZ AND DESMOND

About Gerry Mulligan: here are a few statistics in as few words aspossible, for these facts have been exhaustively outlined on countless record liners and in numerous publications. he was born in New York City in 1927. Somewhat of a prodigy, he began playing piano and various reed instruments at an early age, and writing music in his teens. By the time he was twenty, his compositions and arrangements were being played by the big bands of Gene Krupa, Elliot lawrence, and Claude Thornhill, and by the small bands of Miles Davis and his own. By the time he was fifty he had won virtually every magazine poll, both critical and popular for his instrument and often for arranging and big band as well, recorded enough material as a leader to make a pile of records half as high as himself, altered everyone's thinking about the role of the baritone saxophone in jazz, and proved to be the most enduring of all the great instrumentalistswho emerged in the late 40's and early 50's. Today he gives every indication of continuing this not inconsiderable record of musical accomplishments.

Despite this appearance of success, Gerry Mulligan remains a mass of contradictions and, often, a man alone with his music. A prolific recording artist in terms of total output over the years, his last serious recordings made in the U.S. were in December 1976 (Idol Gossip) and February 1971 (The Age of Steam). Although he is a major American composer, of late he gets most requests for compositions and motion picture scores from Europe, and he maintains his thirteen-piece orchestra not so much for its modest commerciality but because it provides an immediate (and often the only) outlet for his compositions and arrangements, old and new. Because Mulligan possesses a name with celebrity value and an enormous artistic reputation, one would assume there would be constant bookings, but he works infrequently because of the general inadequacy of the concert scene. His tastes and livelihood revolve around the culture of New York City but he shuns it, preferring to be away from it or outside the United States completely. The times and the business of music in America have worked in his disfavor, given his talents, his success should have been tenfold and his recognition even more far-reaching. All of this has made for a very complicated individual.

Part of Gerry's personality can be simply explained. Mulligan's formative years as a musician occureed during a complex period, a time when musical forms were changing rapidly and when the proponents of various types of music were hostile to each other - yet, Gerry found himself easily assimilated into the most disparate camps. His geneation was one that produced many talented instrumentatlists; in fact, the emphasis seems to have been on the ability o individual soloists. While Gerry was certainly a soloist of uncommon abilities, his most noteworthy contributions were in terms of writing for groups, and his earliest efforts, such as some of the arrangements for the early MIles Davis "Birth of the Cool" group, reshaped American musical thinking. Gerry, then as now, wrote for groups, large and small. The composition, the overall structure of a musical statement, was far more important than any individual soloist. This kind of writing was not the way to get ahead in the 50's; concert tours featured soloists, jam sessions, and the like. While much has been made of Gerry's ability to fit into almost any sort of musical group, he remains at his very best as an integral part of a group he has written for and structured himself.

While Mulligan has endured, many of his contemporaries who burned brightly are nowgone. If one looks carefully at the major figures who emerged during the early 40's to the early 50's, one realizes that the number who were still fulfilling their creative potential by 1960 was very small. By 1980 there are only a few who are vitally creative. True, many continue playing, but only a handful seem to be living up to the potential they evidenced early in their careers. In fact, most of the ebst are either dead or buried in commercial studios, or they simply make occasional records, tour with small groups , try to be a part of the festival scene, live in Europe, or appear as soloists when the situation arises. This does not comment adversely on the talents of these musicians, but it does (continued on insert)

- BUT THERE WAS NO INSERT - SORRY!!

GM and the Paul Desmond Quartet

In the 1950s, some of the most popular jazz performers, including Dave Brubeck, Andre Previn, and Sherry Rogers, were based in the Los Angeles and San Francisco areas hence their music was dubbed West Coast jazz. Generally their work, though pleasant, was more restrained and conservative than the music being played by beboppers and post- (or hard) hoppers in the East and Midwest: Art Blakey, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, and Sonny Rollins, amongst others. By the mid-Sixties, however, it had become apparent to most musicians (and fans) that the playing of the post-boppers was, by and large, more innovative and intense than that of the West Coasters. Interest in West Coast jazz waned from then on until it practically vanished.

This was and is unfortunate, because among the ranks of the West Coasters were some very fine musicians; dismissing them all is a gross distortion of jazz history. Certainly Gerry Mulligan, even before moving to California, had made significant contributions to the body of recorded jazz with his baritone sax playing and writing for the extremely influential 1949-50 Miles Davis nonet sessions that produced the classic LP Birth of the Cool.

When Mulligan established himself in the L.A. area he formed a very popular pianoless quartet with trumpeter Chet Baker, bass, and drums. He employs the same format here, with alto saxophonist Paul Desmond substituting for Baker.

Desmond, star soloist of the Brubeck quartet for many years, is a difficult musician to evaluate. His was a fragile but considerable talent that might have been more fully realized outside the context of Brubeck's group. His main influences were Lee Konitz, Lester Young and possibly Stan Getz. He had a small, pretty, vibratoless tone; an excellent upper register: and at his best an inventive, lyrical, improvisatory instinct. When not in good form, however, his playing could be cloying and insipid. Mulligan seems to inspire Desmond here; in any event some of Paul's best recorded work is on this disk.

Gerry is inspired as well. He too has been influenced by Lester Young, though he is more extroverted player than Desmond. His work can be predictable rhythmically and his choice of notes is by modern jazz standards conservative; but melodically he's ceaselessly inventive and he resolves his ideas very well, playing the kind of lines you can memorize and sing. In fact, in listening to this album again, I was surprised and delighted to find how much of it I had memorized.

The genesis for this date occurred in 1954, when Mulligan sat in with Brubeck's quartet at a Carnegie Hall concert. He and Desmond enjoyed the experience so much they decided it would be a great idea to make their own record. Finally, in August 1957, everything came together. They went into the studio with very little preparation - but just about everything they tried worked. According to Mulligan: "I'm very proud of several things we did on the date. Like sometimes we're blowing passages in thirds, and they come off. It's a little alarming."

Some of the selections here employ the chord changes of pop standards: Stand Still is based on "My Heart Stood Still", Wintersong on "These Foolish Things", Battle Hymn of the Republican on "Tea for Two", and Fall Out on "Let's Fall in Love".

Mulligan's playing is so buoyant and infectious - you just know he's having a good time, that everything's working for him. On the slower tunes, Body and Soul and Wintersong, he plays with a full-bodied warmth that's hard to resist. Desmond swings harder and plays with more continuity than he usually did with Brubeck. When he uses motivic variation he does it creatively rather than by descending to coyness. The improvised counterpoint here works out very well. Each man listens to the other and reacts, seemingly effortlessly, with appropriate responses.

Kudos also go to Dave Bailey and Joe Benjamin. Their quiet but steady and resilient time-keeping gives Mulligan and Desmond just the kind of accompaniment they need, as the high quality of the saxophonists' work demonstrates.

These musicians were made for each other.

- Harvey Pekar - July 1993

The idea for this multi-linear playground has been bottled like an amiably desperate jinni, in Paul Desmond's mind since 154 when Gerry Mulligan sat in with the Dave Brubeck quartet at Carnegie Hall, and a Tea For Two resulted that convinced both Desmond and Mulligan that their ways of speaking music had what Gerry terms "a natural affinity."

Nothing and no one happened by to release the jinni until the summer of 1957 and the American Jazz Festival at newport. During a quiet time at those assizes, Desmond again suggested the idea of a record date to Mulligan. There still seemed to be too many obstacles for liberation day to be in sight. There was, for one thorn, the matter of which record label would preserve the union. Desmond was affianced, so to speak, to one company and Mulligan preferred others. There were other problems too, and the conversation apparently headed towards inaction.

Norman Granz , who has a collection of bottles from which he has released jinn of this kind (one of them named Ella Fitzgerald) had been a listening bystander at the Desmond-Mulligan colloquy; and a few hours later, offered to do the date himself. He would make a trade with Desmond's company to indemnify them for the loan of Paul (it is increasingly hard in present-day jazz recording to obtain the loan of a player; it is sometimes easire to borrow Kim Novak); And in general, Granz promised to untangle any other difficulties, present and possible.

In August of 1957, the bottle was opened. Mulligan had flown to California with his quartet to playa concert at the Hollywood Bowl. He had also recorded a jam session album for Granz with Stan Getz, Harry Edison, Louis Bellson, and the Oscar Peterson Trio; and at 2 A.M., after this record date, Mulligan and Desmond met for their first session. "About all we came in with that was planned," notes Desmond, "was a list of typewritten tunes. There were some obvious unison things written, one-chorus lines on two short tunes Gerry wrote, but everything else, including the counterpoint was off-the-cuff."

Desmond and Mulligan are both dour self-critics, and are especially severe on their recorded work. Both, however, are quite pleased with this session. Desmond's explanation of his enjoyment in working with Mulligan is succinctly clear, "He just does all the right things."

"I'm very proud of several things we did on this date," adds Mulligan, "like sometimes we're blowing passages in thirds, and they come off. It's a little alarming. And there are also places where Paul comes through very strongly, much more aggressively than he usually plays with Dave. He gets to swing pretty hard at times here in some contrast to the more flowing and lyrical work he does with Dave.

As for some of the songs, there is an intimation of a figurative coronary occlusion in Standstill; Wintersong is a litany for more mnemonic foolishness; Battle Hymn of the Republican ("Guess who titled that?" asks Mulligan rhetorically, pointing to his fellow Stevensonian) has at least enough Lapsang Souchong left for Alice and the Mad Hatter; and Fall Out is a hortatory celebration of natural genesis rather than an essay on possible genocide.

The steady, admirably unobtrusive rhythm section are members of Mr. Mulligan's pianoless street band - drummer Dave Bailey and bassist Joe Benjamin.

- Nat Hentoff

COOL TALKIN' VERVE

Cool knows this about the world: The world doesn't know you. Doesn't know you exist - unless it wants your money, your efforts, your vote, or your life. Doesn't know. Probably can't know, who you really are. And, it probably goes without saying, the world doesn't care that it doesn't know these things. To all of which, and more, Cool says: That's cool.

Maybe there was Cool, the attitude, before there was cool jazz, but not by much. Ernest Hemingway (born 1898) was the first great cool writer; the first great cool jazz musician was cornetist Bix Beiderbecke (born 1903). Beiderbecke's first, vastly influential recordings ("Davenport Blues" in particular) were made in 1925, the same year Hemingway's first, vastly influential collection of short stories In Our Time was published. A dead heat.

Cool jazz makes terrific background music, but it can do more than just match or amplify a mood. An ode to the world's indifference, cool jazz tells you what the deal is and suggests - coolly - some things you might do to shift the odds in your favor.

Keep It to Yourself

Cool jazz is not just le jazz hot with the dial turned down. The two great hot pioneers -Louis Armstrong and Sidney Bechet - were genuinely public viruosos whose large , extravagant gestures were meant to thrill, astonish, even overwhelm. You could say they played as though the whole world was listening.

Cool jazz does things differently, its audience, first and foremost, is the musician himself. "He plays", said English writer Charles Fox in his Sixties critique of Biederbecke, "as if he [were] taking the listener into his confidence, reading a page or two out of his diary." Not quite private, because someone else is listening, but almost.

Why almost private? Because how do I know who else is out these? the musician asks. Besides, before I can think about speaking to them, there are some things I have to get straight between myself and the music. After all, what's the point of lying to your diary.

Lee Konitz's version of Out This World is a perfect example. The tune he plays here was written by Harold Arlen (composer of another escapist masterpiece "Over The Rainbow"), and it's about as subtle as a pop song can be and still be one. But even though Konitz obviously feels at home with its gliding, moody lines, the melody "Out of This World" remains a public statement, one that this musician has to make private.

So, even while he's still stating the theme, Konitz's musical tone of voice starts to change. It's as though he has to draw song into his saxophone to test and investigate it before he can allow it to emerge again - graceful, hesitant and, it seems, not quite sure of where it's going until it actually gets there. And when it does get there, damned if it doesn't stop. If Cool has a warm side, this is it: The listener has been taken, honestly, into an honest player's confidence.

Welcome to Lonely Street

I once knew a young woman whose fondest wish was to be secretly filmed as she went about her daily routine, then to be allowed to rerun endlessly the resulting footage: "The Story of You", starring . . . who else? This is the grandiose side of Cool's dream. More or less alone in the world - with the connections broken, invisible, or failing to work - it just might be that it does all radiate outward from you, as you walk the rain-slaked streets of a deserted city in the stage set of your mind.

Can it be an accident that half of these performances (Fever, "St. Louis Blues", "Au Bar du Petit Bac", "Theme From The Pink Panther", and "Spoonful") sound like scores for a movie called, "Lonely Street"? Of course, Theme From The Pink Panther actually was created for the movie of the same name and then went on to what seems likely to be eternal life in TV cartoons. And "Au Bar du Petit Bac" is part of a film score, too - improvised by Miles Davis and friends one night in Paris in 1957, while director Louis Mallo showed them key scenes from his thriller Ascenseur Pour L'echafaud (original US title: Frantic).

And who wouldn't like to see, perhaps play a part in, the fabulous movie that Spoonful conjures up? Gil Evans, it has been said, inverted instrumental colors previously unknown to humankind. But can that alone account for the mood-shaping power of the results, as Evans keeps recasting that minimal, three-note figure for a shifting choir 'of brass and winds, filling the atmosphere with elegant intimations of loss and despair. Gerry Mulligan dubbed Evans "Svengali" - the name of a fictional hypnotist-seducer (and an anagram for Gil Evans). Listening to "Spoonful", you can hear why.

Just Friends

It would be exaggerating, but only just a bit, to say that every jazz musician is more like every other jazz musician than he is like anyone else. The demands of the game are that intense, that exclusive to those who have "been there, done that". It was said by pianist Cecil Taylor that John Coltrane captured the "hysteria of the times" - and that remark is amply backed up by Trane's hurtling-down-the-track, hellhound-on-his-trail solo on The Sleeper. So what fondness could Coltrane have for the lyrical freshets of Stan Getz, who is heard at his best on 6-Nix-Quix-Flix? Well, when Coltrane said, "We would all play like Stan Getz, if we could," he wasn't just being polite. Mastery knows mastery and is always hungry for more. If the facts of isolation made cool jazz a necessity, that still leaves room for awe, respect, and friendship - and the free exchange of ideas.

It's easy to tell how much Joe Newman's fine trumpet solo on St. Louis Blues is built on the playing of Miles Davis, although Newman brings plenty of his own brassy passion to the task. At first, AI Cohn and Zoot Sims sound almost like brothers on Improvisation for Unaccompanied Saxophones, but after a while you can't help but hear the sweet, subtle differences between them: Sims, who leads off the solo exchanges, sounds airier, more bubbly, is lighter on his feet; Cohn sounds bolder, more soulful, is a deeply rooted moaner. And Paul Desmond's happy, gurgling solo on Blues in Time is proof of what Desmond was always pleased to admit that Getz, Sims, and Konitz were his key inspirations, his musical friends.

Cool and Sentimental

Cool tries to hold loss at bay, but finally it's one of those "rust never sleeps" things. Just listen to Davis and French tenor saxophonist Barney Wilen on Au Bar du Petit Bac. There's an eerie wholenss to this striding dialogue of fallen men -you can almost hear Davis wince at Wilen's wry quote from Jerome Kern's "Dearly Beloved", the song that used to be played at almost every wedding. But this steady blue tread through the falling leaves can't put them back on the trees again. And Cool knows that, too.

Available again, this meeting of giants merits many hearings.

1. All the Things You Are
2. Stardust
3. Two of a Mind (Not on PD & GM)
4. Blight of the Fumble Bee
5. The Way You Look Tonight
6. Out of Nowhere
7. Easy Living - "Bluebird"
8. All the Things You Are - "Bluebird"
9. The Way You Look Tonight - "Bluebird"
10. Untitled Blues Waltz - "Bluebird"
11. Untitled Blues Waltz - "Bluebird"

 LINER NOTES

by George Avakian

Two of the finest talents to emerge in the post-war jazz generation are brought together here for a happy, informal, yet earnest session of music-making. Individually, Paul Desmond and Gerry Mulligan can each look back at a decade of winning jazz polls. Paul as the alto saxophonist of the Dave Brubeck Quartet, and Gerry as a baritone saxophonist who has led his own groups for many years, ranging from a quartet to a full-sized band.

In this era when television ratings, trade publication charts, and popularity polls have become impossible to ignore if one earns a livelihood in the light arts, it is rare to find such camaraderie between two star performers as this collaborative album exudes. Paul Desmond and Gerry Mulligan are not only old friends who came up at about the same time on the big-time jazz scene, but their strong feelings about the role of ensemble playing in jazz makes them ideal partners for a get-together such as this. There is never the slightest hint of a "cutting" session; always they work together toward the same ensemble conception, even though each is also one of the greatest soloists in jazz today.

In a way, this album is a recollection of the best elements of two of the most popular and musically successful groups of the middle 1950s--the period when modern jazz first blossomed into large-scale public acceptance. The Dave Brubeck Quartet and the original Gerry Mulligan Quartet were the leading exponents at that time of contrapuntal jazz. The polyphonic duets of Desmond and Brubeck in the one group and of Mulligan and Baker in the other broke new ground and did it with high quality as well as spectacular flair. In this album, the saxophonists of the respective combinations have taken a similar approach and, with a clean sureness and an inspirational spark born of close compatibility and the ease of long experience, they bring the technique of improvisation in counterpoint to a new height.

But, at the same time, both Desmond and Mulligan are solo improvisers with great melodic gifts. The result is a series of sweeping performances in which something exciting is happening every instant, whether it be a solo of keen inventiveness or a duet passage in which each line stands up by itself within a whole that sounds like the work of a craftsman composer.

Informality in jazz often means over-casualness, carelessness, or downright sloppiness. These recordings are unusually neat and clean even though they are highly informal. There had been considerable advance discussion of repertoire, and each of the saxophonists brought along sketches for some of the tunes (although, except for some beginnings and endings, mostly Gerry's, they weren't used). But there the formality ceased. Final decisions on what tunes would be played and how they were to be treated were made in the studio. And here, as in the discussion that preceded the sessions, there was a Gaston-and-Alphonse deference between Paul and Gerry, typical of their uncompetitive relationship. "What tempo do you like?" "Oh, I don't know. What do you like?" Or, "You take the first chorus." "No, I started the last one. You go first this time."

There was plenty of relaxed fun in the studio during the sessions. Both Paul and Gerry are quick wits and quicker still is Judy Holliday, who was a welcome visitor in the control room. While no one kept track of the quips that flew about during the sessions, one bit is preserved in the title of the fast blues that opens the second side of this album. While it was being played back, one of the engineers asked Paul what the title was. "I don't know," he said, "it's a tune by Gerry." Just then the tape reached the climax of the counterpoint passage in the chorus before the boys come back to the melody. "We might have to call it "Flight of the Bumble Bee," somebody said. "Or," said Judy thoughtfully, "Blight of the Fumble Bee."

It is rather pointless to recite in these notes a roll of the passages that pass in review as you listen to this extraordinary album. Suffice it to say that there are moments of rare beauty which will grow on you with repeated listening. The album is also a lot of fun; time and again, in the counterpoint passages, the boys will seem about to play an idea into an obvious corner, but they will let you hear just enough of what you might expect to let you know that they know that you know-and then they're off on a wholly fresh idea. You can also have a lot of fun with your friends letting them guess the tunes which are never actually played in these performances-I've caught quite a few people with Stardust and The Way You Look Tonight. But Paul and Gerry have a game for you, too-do you have any idea what tune Two of a Mind really is? But the real kick in this album is to follow the invertible counterpoint and the marvelously flowing solos of these two superb improvisers. The interplay between them reaches an unusual height in The Way You Look Tonight, when Paul, as an afterthought, added a third saxophone line (stereo owners can hear it in the center channel) for the last two choruses of the performance. The way Paul and Gerry work together never ceases to fascinate, even when one drops into a distinctly subordinate role, as when Gerry backs up the last five choruses of Paul's long solo in Bee. It is a safe assumption that only an arranger of Gerry's caliber could have done so much so unobtrusively and with so few notes.

The rhythm section in these performances varied from session to session because the recordings had to be made in sessions several weeks apart during the summer of 1962; as Paul and Gerry traveled in and out of town for their respective engagements, so did the other musicians, so that it was never possible to get the same men together at the same time. In fact, the dates always seemed to take place as one principal was unpacking a suitcase and the other one was about to catch a plane. Wendell Marshall and Connie Kay play bass and drums respectively in All the Things You Are; they are replaced by Joe Benjamin and Mel Lewis for Stardust, Two of a Mind and Out of Nowhere; John Beal and Connie Kay are heard in Blight of the Fumble Bee and The Way You Look Tonight.'

The Cocoanut Grove is part of the Ambassador Hotel. Freddy Martin used to lead the band there. The hotel grounds are vast; tall palm trees stand like sentries at its edge. Across the street, in 1952, was a bungalow bar called the Haig, where Gerry Mulligan played with his quartet and where Time magazine gave him the most important review of his young career:

... in Los Angeles ... a gaunt, hungry-looking young fellow named Gerry Mulligan plays the baritone saxophone His jazz is rich and even orderly ... sometimes the polyphony is reminiscent of tailgate blues, sometimes it comes tumbling with bell-over-mouthpiece impromptu.... He has a sleepy face and on the bandstand he keeps his watery green eyes closed even when listening to Trumpeter Chet Baker, opens them only occasionally to glower at customers who are boorish enough to talk against the music .... Next Mulligan objective: an enlarged band and a nationwide tour. "I've got to keep moving. I've got to grow."'

Mulligan was hired by the Haig's publicist, Richard Bock, a student attending college on the G. I. Bill.

"I conned the owner... into letting me put in a jam session on the off night," Bock said. "I met Mulligan and hired him as a soloist, then he became the leader of a regular thing. Chet Baker wandered over one night after his gig with Charlie Parker and sat in with Gerry. They hit it off. A few weeks later Red Norvo's trio, the one with Mingus and Tal Farlow, was booked for a month to play five nights a week. Red said "don't want the piano on the stand - we don't use piano'" The owner stored the piano in his apartment and we said "What are you going to do, Mulligan? - you don't have a piano.' And he said "Well, we can play without one.' He didn't want to lose the gig - at that point he was really scuffling. And so it turned out to be a pianoless quartet."

"After the third week it was magic," Bock continued. "It ... gave Chet a freedom that he never would have had ... he was able to play almost anything that he thought of and it didn't clash with the piano...he could really go on real flights of imagination .... With Gerry, Chet was forced to be inventive; he was forced to come up with contrapuntal lines - they had that marvelous ability to chase each other and to play what was almost Dixieland or two part inventions."

"And it went on for months, you know," Bock concluded. "It was the biggest thing that happened on the West Coast at that time. Time magazine covered it and it became a real experience."

"I was overlooked," Paul Desmond was fond of saying, "long before anyone knew who I was." By l953 Dave Brubeck and Paul Desmond were attracting the same kind of attention as mulligan and Baker. Brubeck had noticed earlier, while on the road, that stuck between the jazz clubs of the country were colleges. He began to contact some of them for concert bookings and developed an itinerary. The move was an important move for the group: it gave Brubeck the means to develop a generation of listeners and it gave Desmond a chance to meet girls.

Paul Emil Breitenfeld - Desmond came later, the name picked from a phone book - was born in San Francisco in 1924. His father was a theater organist and arranger who talked twelve-year-old Paul into returning the violin that he had brought home from music class at San Francisco Polytechnic High School in favor of a clarinet. Desmond played in the Polytechnic band and edited the school paper. He went into the army in 1943, switched from clarinet to alto, and spent the duration of WW II at the Presidio of San Francisco in the 253rd AGF Band. Dave Brubeck passed through town on his way overseas. "We went out to the band room for a quick session," Desmond said to Nat Hentoff, "[and] started to play the blues in B flat, and the first chord he played was a G major. Knowing absolutely nothing at the time about polytonality I thought he was stark raving mad." Not without reason, Desmond added - Brubeck was "wild haired, ferocious looking, with a pile-driver approach to the piano, and an expression of a surly Sioux. It took ... several more listenings before I began to understand what he was up to."

After the war Desmond ran into Brubeck and formed a quartet. "We were making about $50 a night," Desmond told Marian McPartland. "I was splitting it with the guys and paying for the gas, too. That's when I decided I really didn't want to be a leader." Brubeck took over the quartet. Brubeck was studying with Darius Milhaud; he formed an octet comprised of other Milhaud students and Desmond, who was majoring in literature at San Francisco State. In the first six months of 1950, Desmond's only jobs were "two concerts with the octet and a Mexican wedding." Desmond joined the Jack Fina band. Fina, a pianist, had once been with Freddy Martin's orchestra; highlights of his career with Martin had been an adaptation of Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto, called Tonight We Love, and a boogie-woogie rendition of The Flight of the Bumble Bee. Desmond reached New York City with the band, entertaining thoughts of settling there, but found that "all the guys I talked to wanted my job with Fina." Discouraged, Desmond returned to San Francisco. Brubeck's trio had achieved recognition beyond San Francisco and he decided to form a quartet. He hired Desmond and they never looked back. During 1953 the quartet recorded albums at two colleges, Oberlin and College of the Pacific. Record producer George Avakian signed them to a contract at Columbia Records. Their first release for Columbia was another set of campus recordings, Jazz Goes to College. The album was an immediate success. On November 8, 1954, Dave Brubeck appeared on the cover of Time.

A month before Time's cover story ("Desmond's eyes close, his long fingers glide over his alto's mother-of-pearl keys..."), Desmond recorded his first solo album. "It is my custom when listening to playbacks: Desmond wrote, "to cough loudly whenever I hear something coming that I played and don't like, and altho things have improved since the early days 'Whispering Desmond' they used to call me, up at Sound Recorders-most editing sessions leave me a bit hoarse."The album had Desmond's most inspired title, Baroque ... But Happy, and "a fond tribute to Gerry Mulligan:' called Jeruvian.

"You remember that one," I said.

"Sure," replied Mulligan smiling. "We used to hang out together at all the festivals, hangout a lot - which was not wonderful for my liver. In fact that's how we ended up recording together. Norman Granz was always around and he'd overhear us talking about doing something. Paul would say he'd really like to do a thing with my quartet, only have it be an alto instead of a trumpet, and I'd say 'Sure, that's a great idea.'And then we'd go to another festival and say the same thing. Well, after a few years of that Granz finally said 'Would you stop that? You're driving me crazy! If you're serious about this and I set up a date will you do it? 'We said 'Sure. 'So he did and we did."

The record was called Blues in Time.

" Pronounced aahn - teem, I suppose."

"Sure," said Mulligan, "we both like to fool around with words."

Desmond was epigrammatic and pun-loving, Mulligan is a master at anagrams, a composer/ re-arranger: viz., "I worked out something recently for Duke, except it doesn't work with 'Duke - I have to use 'Edward,' Duke's real name. What do you think 'E. Ellington' works out to be?"

"I don't know."

"GentleLion."

His masterpiece is his anagram for Gil Evans: Svengali.

Gerald Joseph Mulligan was born in April 1927, in Queens Village, Long Island. His father was a management engineer; Mulligan was the youngest of four brothers and the only one not to enter their father's profession. The family travelled extensively during Mulligan's childhood, living in Ohio, New Jersey, New York, Illinois, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. He showed an early aptitude for music, starting clarinet and turning out his first arrangement at age ten, organizing his first combo in high school, then expanding it into a big band and writing arrangements. When he was fourteen the family moved to Philadelphia: Mulligan switched from clarinet to tenor and put together another high school dance band. He sold his first professional arrangement to the WCAU Radio house band while still in high school; by the beginning of his senior year he had worked professionally with two local bands, had toured with Tommy Tucker's band as an arranger, had joined WCAU as staff arranger for the Elliot Lawrence Band, and had met and befriended Charlie Parker. Mulligan moved to New York in 1946 and was hired as an arranger by Gene Krupa, for whom he wrote Disk Jockey Jump. The following year he joined Claude Thornhill's band, involving himself in the development of ideas with Thornhill's chief arranger, Gil Evans, that would result in the birth of the classic Miles Davis Nonet, for which he arranged George Wallington's Godchild, and the Mulligan compositions Rocker, Jeru, Venus de Milo, and the much-later released Darn That Dream. By 1951, twenty-four-year-old Mulligan had produced memorable, and in several instances historic, compositions and arrangements. He had also abandoned the clarinet, tenor, and alto in favor of the baritone. Work was scarce that summer, money elusive.

About the time Paul Desmond left Jack Fina, Gerry Mulligan hitchhiked to L.A.

"Most of the albums Paul did apart from Dave were pianoless," I said, "but with a different conception than yours."

"Early on, I was amazed to find out that different horn players listen to different guys in the rhythm section," Mulligan said. "Some guys listen to drummers, some to piano players, but not too many listen to bass players. I always, always listened to the bass line. So when I played with a bass player who was shucking it, it really threw me a curve because I didn't hear anything. But, conversely, when I played with good players -guys with good time but also good melodic sense of the bass line - it would inspire me to better things."

Mulligan's liner notes for his first album for Dick Bock weren't exactly a Manifesto, but they contained concepts that would be discussed throughout the decade:

I consider the string bass to be the basis of the sound of the group; the foundation on which the soloist builds his line, the main thread around which the two horns weave their contrapuntal interplay. It is possible with two voices to imply the sound of or impart the feeling of any chord or series of chords. When a piano is used in a group it necessarily plays the dominant role; the horns and bass must tune to it as it cannot tune to them, making it the dominant tonality. The piano's accepted function of constantly stating the chords of the progression makes the solo horn a slave to the whims of the piano player. The soloist is forced to adapt his line to the changes and alterations made by the pianist in the chords of the progression. It is obvious that the bass does not possess as wide a range of volume and dynamic possibilities as the drums or horns. It is therefore necessary to keep the overall volume in proportion to that of the bass in order to achieve an integrated group sound.

The decade of the 1950s in Los Angeles would begin and end with quartets, Mulligan's and Ornette Coleman's, and the path from one to the other was straight and short.

Desmond listened to piano. He spent seventeen years with Dave Brubeck. "When Dave is playing at his best," he told Hentoff in that 1952 interview, "it's completely live, free improvisation in which you can find all the qualities of the music I love .... This sort of playing doesn't happen every night and hasn't happened yet on a record session. Maybe it never will, but it's worth waiting for. When I heard it happening the first time, all the other jazz I had heard and played then seemed pale and trivial by comparison." A few years later, responding to those who suggested the contrary, he said "I never would have made it without Dave. He's amazing harmonically, and he can be a fantastic accompanist. You can play the wrongest note possible in a chord and he can make it sound like the only right one." Away from Brubeck he usually worked with Jim Hall, or later Ed Bickert. He liked the guitar - the instrument once described as a piano you hold in your lap.

Mulligan and Desmond made only three records together: Blues in Time (Verve) in 1957; Together Again for the First Time, with Dave Brubeck (Atlantic) in 1972; and Two of a Mind, recorded in three sessions during thesummerof 1962, exactly ten years to the season from Mulligan's original quartet sessions. "The dates," wrote George Avakian, who co-produced the album with Bob Prince, "always seemed to take place as one principal was unpacking a suitcase and the other was about to catch a plane." Much was expected of the album-"a classic-to-be collaboration by two of the greatest saxophonist of modern jazz," read the original back cover - and musically the expectations were realized.

But summer of 1962 was the season of the Stan Getz/Charlie Byrd recordings of Desafinado and One Note Samba. The Bossa Nova Craze had arrived; record companies, distributors, and promoters thought of little else, and Two of a Mind drowned in the Wave from Brazil.

"We liked the record," Mulligan said. "We put in a lot of thought to the kind of tunes that would lend themselves to Paul and me playing together- things that would lend themselves to counterpoint playing. We came prepared for more than we thought we'd need. In a studio you never know what's going to work and what isn't."

Stardust evokes Brubeck and Desmond at Oberlin the decade before, when Brubeck and Desmond used as their opening the same descending three-note motif used by Paul and Gerry here ("...prom perennial Stardust is popular with Brubeck and Desmond," wrote Time, "because its stately harmonic progressions flow as smoothly as the Mississippi..."). Desmond overdubbed an additional saxophone line on the last two choruses of The Way You Look Tonight; it and All the Things You Are are classic Jerome Kern, and Two of a Mind comes close. The song was titled by George Avakian as he drove through Central Park. Avakian also likes to fool around with words, has a good memory, and probably an umbrella.

"Judy Holliday walked in during a playback of that part where Paul and I are working through the counterpoint," Mulligan said. "She gave us one of those looks, you know, and said 'That sounds like the "Blight of the Fumble Bee". "' He laughed. "So that's how that got titled."

"Anything more about Paul?" I asked.

"There always is something to say about him," said Mulligan, "but I miss him, almost more than anything. It's really hard not having someone to talk to. He used to say that. Desmond and I were kids together and it gets to be important to have somebody to talk to you don't have to explain anything to. My wife said it the other day - she said that what finally hit her about this life - for all musicians - it's lonely out there, man! It's lonely out there on the road! Your friends start dying off, you're left bereft. You loose your youthful friends ... bereft. He's your childhood friend - that's it! You're alone' "Mulligan paused for a moment."Anyway,"he said. "My wife's calling me. We're going to go eat lunch."

The Haig has been gone for years. The Ambassador Hotel with its vast lawn and tall palm trees that stand like sentries and its cocoanut Grove where Freddy Martin conducted while Jack Fina played Tonight We Love and the boogie-woogie rendition of The Flight of the Bumble Bee has been sold. The new owners recently laid off the staff and shut down the hotel. They plan to tear it down.

WILL THORNBURY

The Bluebird Release

A Note on the Contents: Two of a Mind

Despite the publication of copious session details while TWO OF A MIND was new, several matters require clarification. It may he surprising to learn that almost every piece on the original record was edited somehow-most assembled from multiple takes or reordered within a performance-and not always with clear indications allowing us to reconstruct the sources. (Even adjacent parts of the Rimsky-Korsakov quote in Blight of the Fumble Bee were originally played in different takes.) In any event, the music from the original issue is intact here, and mastered for the first time from original session tape. For this CD, program edits to the master takes are indicated: they show as consecutive index numbers within each tune.

The June 26 master take of The Way You Look Tonight, for instance, seems to have been assembled from takes numbering up to 18; Desmond's over-dubs were done either at the end of the same session or on another day. Indeed, the entire piece was revisited at a later session, provoking a misunderstanding of where the final version comes from. Some discographical reports have presumed that the remake was used, and therefore that Joe Benjamin and Mel Lewis appear on The Way You Look Tonight. Not so; though the tune was re-made, Avakian's preference for take -2 front the original 6/26 Beal-Kay date prevailed, and none of the 8/13 remakes has appeared until now.

Also new(s) is the surfacing of Easy Living, about which Desmond and Mulligan felt sanguine enough to work up four complete versions. They later voted the tune out, presumably in light of the wealth of other choices for the album. (A 1964 performance of Easy Living became the centerpiece of Desmond's swansong collection fur RCA.) According to surviving paperwork, the take presented here was the one preferred for issue.

Not every piece of music from these dates is available for examination, but there is enough evidence to reveal a fallacy in Martin Williams's report front the Evergreen Review. Whether intentionally or accidentally, Williams telescoped two full sessions' music into one. That is, what he describes as having happened in one visit to Studio A actually encompasses the proceedings of June 26 and July 3. The tracklist in this volume reflects the actual recording dates (and corrects a misattribution of Star Dust's provenance in the original liner essay). All the Things You Are, from the latter, went to 13 takes; Star Dust uses most of take -7, as Williams narrates, with a tailpiece sewn in from insert -R.

Perhaps understanding the entire content of these sessions will one day he possible; at least another CD's worth of music is known to exist. (All bonus material-including tracks 7-11 here-comes from rough mix tapes that don't perfectly match the LP's final balance.) The handful of alternate performances added for this reissue remind us that most of Desmond's and Mulligan's rejected performances are still excellent, and even their aborted experiments (like both playing baritones on the session with Hall) can be delightful.

- BEN YOUNG (Winter 2003)

Paul Desmond was almost as good at putting himself down as he was at playing the alto saxophone, which is to say very good indeed. Asked about the unmistakable strain of melancholy in his playing, he attributed it to "the fact that I'm not playing better." Asked how he was consistently able to improvise long, impeccably structured melody lines, he deadpanned, "It's all a fraud."

Comments like these (and over the years there were a lot of comments like these) point to something fundamental about Paul Desmond. In a music dominated by self-confident extroverts, he was a master of understatement and self-effacement who seemed most comfortable in the background. Playing a supporting role-most notably to Dave Brubeck, the ferociously outgoing pianist and composer in whose quartet he spent almost two decades-came easily tohim; asserting himself did not. Center stage was simply not his natural habitat.

Lacking the temperament (and, by his account, the technique) for the kind of blowing that rattled the rafters, Desmond developed a soft and subtle style that emphasized melodic inventiveness over pyrotechnics. That in itself was not necessarily a barrier to fame. Plenty of other musicians who shared Desmond's understated and somewhat cerebral approach - the critics tended to pigeonhole them as members of the "cool" or "West Coast" school - managed to achieve high profiles while keeping the volume low. Miles Davis, although he belonged to no school but his own, played the trumpet every bit as quietly as Desmond played the saxophone and became a superstar. But Davis had charisma to burn and a natural feel for the spotlight. So did such leading lights of the West Coast movement as Gerry Mulligan, who was both a successful bandleader and a ranking matinee idol of the 1950s jazz scene while still in his 20s. Desmond was another story.

Not that stardom mattered much to him. He seemed satisfied with the combination of security and anonymity he got from working with Brubeck. And long before he finally put together a quartet of his own in 1974 (which, sadly, turned out to be just three years before he died), he got to enjoy the artistic satisfaction of being a leader, without the hassles, on a handful of albums he made under his own name.

Those albums hardly made a dent in the marketplace. Desmond was not that far from the truth when he spoke of "a hard core of three hundred and twenty-four people who will buy any album I put out." But his records gave the perennial sideman ample opportunity to demonstrate that he had a lot to say for himself, and they have held up well over the years. Tellingly, though, among the albums that hold up best are the ones on which the ever-modest Desmond gives plenty of room to other musicians. This one, for instance.

As its title suggests, TWO OF A MIND is actually less a Paul Desmond album than a collaborative effort by the unique two-headed jazz beast known as Paul Desmond and Gerry Mulligan. Recorded at three sessions in the summer of 1962 using three different bass-drum teams, it was released under Desmond's name for contractual reasons, but it was in essence a follow-up to a date with the same instrumentation that the two saxophonists had done five years earlier, under Mulligan's name, for Verve.

For a member of the supposedly laid-back cool school, Mulligan could be quite boisterous and demonstrative at times; anyone who made the booming baritone saxophone his instrument of choice would almost have to be. And although both Desmond and Mulligan were exceptionally thoughtful improvisers, driven more by the desire to construct a beautiful melody than by the need for unfettered self-expression, their collaboration was on the surface somewhat risky. They shared a love for the delicate and difficult art of improvising in counterpoint, and there was a danger that when they went head to head, as they do on every selection here, the naturally exuberant Mulligan might overpower the nominal leader of the date.

But Mulligan was too sensitive (and sensible) a musician to let that happen, and Desmond, modest as he may have been, was too proud to let himself be overshadowed. TWO OF A MIND succeeds not just because Desmond and Mulligan were kindred spirits, but because they knew how to work together.

They both have plenty of solo space, and they make the most of it. Note, for example, how Desmond's eloquent use of silence enhances the poignancy of his solo on All the Things You Are; how much fire and intensity Mulligan generates on Out of Nowhere without ever raising his voice; how each saxophonist's set of variations on Star Dust (Desmond's receive some discreet accompaniment from Mulligan) takes its cue from Hoagy Carmichael's timeless melody without being tethered to it. But what marks TWO OF A MIND as more than just another very good jazz record is the dexterity-and the infectious joy-with which, as producer George Avakian said, "they bring the technique of improvisation in counterpoint to a new height."

The critic Martin Williams, who was a guest at the first TWO OF A MIND session and wrote about it for The Evergreen Revieiw, was struck by the high spirits in the studio. "Yeah," he quoted a visitor exclaiming as the session was just getting under way, "tonight they're going to play!" Williams raved about the first number recorded that day, Easy Living, praising Mulligan's buoyancy, Desmond's fluency, and the saxophonists' "fine emotional and musical rapport." Easy Living did not end up on the original LP, but it is one of several previously unissued bonus tracks included here, so we can at last hear what Williams and that anonymous visitor were so enthusiastic about: The joy and energy in the studio were bracingly evident from the start.

The high spirits of that first session clearly carried over to the second and third. They are especially tangible in the contrapuntal passages near the end of every track, on which Mulligan and Desmond seem to be anticipating each other's thoughts, finishing each other's sentences, and having a blast in the process.

Desmond cheated a little on the master take of The Way You Look Tonight when he turned the two-saxophone interplay into three-saxophone interplay after the fact by overdubbing a second alto part. (The alternative version included here is overdub-free.) But even allowing for that bit of good-natured gimmickry, TWO OF A MIND is at heart a celebration of one-on-one improvisational intimacy and derring-do. That probably explains why the hitherto unheard Desmond- Mulligan quintet session of June 8, with Jim Hall on guitar, did not yield anything that made it onto the album. Hall is a superb musician, and Desmond, who hired him for most of his recordings as a leader, obviously valued his work. But on the blues waltz from that session included here, Hall's presence seems superfluous-the performance is lively, but the chemistry is a little off. When the two saxophonists resumed recording 18 days later, it was with the bare bones accompaniment of bass and drums only, and the chemistry was perfect.

Humor was an important element in thatchemistry. Among the things Desmond and Mulligan shared was a penchant for the apt and expertly placed musical quote-that is, for leavening an improvisation with a few measures of a familiar melody-and there is some expert quoting to be found here. Judy Holliday, the great comic actress who was Mulligan's significant other at the time, gets the credit for naming The Blight of the Fumble Bee, but it was Mulligan's insertion of an off-the-wall light-classical quote into a jaunty up-tempo blues that inspired the name. And speaking of actresses named Judy, Desmond seems for some reason to have had old Judy Garland movies on the brain in the summer of 1962-how else to explain his allusion to On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe in the heat of his byplay with Mulligan on All the Things You Are, followed immediately by a few bars of The Trolley Song? (For good measure, he repeated his Trolley Song quote on the album's title track, recorded six weeks later.)

Those quotes will no doubt amuse the movie-musical aficionado, or anyone else who recognizes them. For all I know, they had some additional hidden meaning to the two saxophonists. But the important thing is that they make perfect musical sense, and can be appreciated just as easily by someone who has never heard either song.

In other words, it would be a mistake to hear this moment, or anything else on TWO OF A MIND, simply as some kind of inside joke or intellectual exercise. There is a lot of cleverness on display here, but that's not why the music endures. It endures because it comes from the heart as well as the head, and because it is played by two masters of the saxophone who loved the challenge of making up melodies on the spot, who loved the excitement of improvising in tandem with a like-minded colleague. and who, the musical evidence strongly suggests, loved each other.

1. Line For Lyons
2. Polka Dots And Moonbeams
3. Prelude To A Kiss
4. Take Five
5. All The Things You Are