The Book Cooks The Gerry Mulligan 1950s Quartets From Chapter 3: The Second Quartet
Gerry was a hero as a writer. The scores were very interesting because they were so clear, and so economical – Bob Brookmeyer
In the final few days of 1953, Mulligan wasted no time in forming another quartet. To replace Chet Baker, Dave Brubeck suggested a former member of his Octet, the trumpeter Dick Collins, but he was unable to join. Consequently, thinking back to the informal sessions earlier in the year while Stan Getz was at the Tiffany, and remembering an abortive plan from that time to invite Bob Brookmeyer to join the band and make it a quintet, Mulligan called Brookmeyer in New York. He asked him to come West, and to bring a bassist and drummer. As a result, before the end of the year, the trombonist arrived in Los Angeles with drummer Frank Isola and bassist Bill Anthony. This lineup would become the Mulligan quartet for the first few months of 1954, although in due course, Anthony was replaced by Red Mitchell. (Red was based in Los Angeles at the time, and, as noted, had rehearsed and recorded with Mulligan at Phil Turetsky’s house shortly before Chet Baker joined the first version of the group.) At the start of January 1954, Mulligan assembled a Tentette again, though without Baker, and presented a “one night only” concert, featuring a set each by this group and his new quartet. It took place at the Embassy Theatre, on S. Western Avenue in downtown Los Angeles, a couple of blocks or so north of Wilshire Boulevard. Arlyne Mulligan recalled: “This was Gerry’s first public appearance since his release and he came onstage as the conquering hero – the crowd went wild, you’d have thought he was Elvis Presley. I’d never seen anything like it. They went berserk – just an explosion of love.” After playing close to the very area where he had established his band and his reputation as an instrumentalist, Mulligan now wanted to move the quartet onto the national stage, which meant taking it East. The first press reports of his intention appeared within days of his release from the honor farm (alongside reviews of his pre-incarceration records and his poll successes). A typical piece from the start of January ran: “Lee Konitz and Gerry Mulligan have teamed up on the Pacific Jazz label to record an album, entitled Konitz with Mulligan Quartet, Chet Baker and his quartet have invaded the Eastern States and will appear in Detroit on his way to the Coast ... Also Gerry Mulligan is playing a similar tour.” The band did not head East with quite the alacrity that this suggests. Instead, there were some weeks of preliminary gigs on the West Coast, before the group headed cross-country. By the end of January, the new quartet was in San Francisco, appearing at the Downbeat, on the junction of Market Street and California Street, close to the waterside Embarcadero district. The local press reported: “Gerry Mulligan does the current jazz beat at the Downbeat.” But even at this early stage, there were incipient problems in the band. Bob Brookmeyer remembered:
We started in January and that was also the start of Gerry’s “rich and famous” period. He’d never been rich and famous before, and he was married to a lady who was from a rich and famous family. We did OK rehearsing in California, because in LA we played a couple of concerts. And then we went to San Francisco for two weeks, and Gerry began to announce at length between tunes what we were going to play next, interspersed by jokes, which were not funny. Frank Isola the drummer and I complained. “Let’s knock off this stuff, it’s really embarrassing.” He said, “I’m doing this stuff because the quartet is not ready.” We said, “We’re not ready for this!”
Tensions in the band also ran high because, firstly, Mulligan was often angry with himself as he worked to recapture the easy instrumental fluency he had before his incarceration, and secondly, the group’s management had changed. In 1952, there had been no manager, simply informal growth into the potential that had been observed by Dick Bock when the quartet arrived at the Haig as a unit. During 1953, Gene Norman, who was starting to extend his interests beyond concert presentation and recordings, had taken a hand in promoting the band. But now things were different. Having gotten involved in looking after the group’s business before Mulligan’s imprisonment, as Carson Smith observed, Arlyne Mulligan now made matters more formal. She said, quite categorically: “He was getting offers like crazy but he said he wouldn’t take the quartet on the road unless I managed it, so I took over as Gerry’s manager and being Lew Brown’s daughter I helped negotiate better fees for the group.”
After staying in the Bay Area well into February, including a return to the Black Hawk, the band moved East via a flurry of one-nighters and short-term gigs. Arlyne Mulligan remembered everyone “living out of suitcases ... and the only time we were not working was when we were travelling to the next job.”After crisscrossing the nation, they spent some time in Philadelphia, following which an informal recording exists of the quartet at the Storyville in Boston at the start of April. From there they moved to a longer residency in New York, at the Basin Street club, on 51st Street at Broadway. Here they might well have been perceived as “rich and famous,” because they followed Louis Armstrong and the All Stars at the venue, and were billed opposite Gerry’s former boss, Gene Krupa, and his trio.The club occupied part of the Roseland Theater building, and was managed by Ralph Watkins, who had also been involved in running the Royal Roost and Bop City. In the same way as he had with those clubs, he attracted big names to play at the venue, and coming in to New York opposite Krupa, Mulligan had very certainly “arrived,” at a very different level from his ignominious departure from the city just over two years before, with Gail Madden.
Just as the first quartet’s rise to fame in early 1953 had been helped by positive press and a dash of controversy, the very day the band opened at Basin Street, the Baltimore Afro-American ran a story that was to fuel public curiosity once more. It has already been mentioned that some Jazz at the Philharmonic Concerts involved the piano dropping out from the rhythm section while certain soloists played, but now a musician, who would some years later be a prominent member of the Mulligan quartet himself, cast doubt on the originality of Mulligan’s “pianoless” concept.
“The idea of leaving the piano out of ensemble playing by small combos did not originate with Gerry Mulligan like most people think.” So says trumpeter Art Farmer “Why man, that cat just picked up on something that Thelonious Monk himself started in New York a few years ago. Thelonious would just ‘stroll,’” he went on. “He would ‘cool’ on the piano and leave the other guys to blow by themselves. In fact,” continued Farmer, “the ‘Monk’ would even leave the bandstand. Then the bass would come up real loud while the other instruments would go down soft. After a while the horns would swell back up loud, and the bass softened down and it would sound like a whole lot of instruments playing.”
While such controversy about the band’s pianoless style was again being stirred up, Mulligan’s earlier reputation as an arranger was being boosted by another former employer, when Claude Thornhill released a couple of 10-inch LPs on the Trend label. Reviews of the second of these described “his band playing a flock of arrangements by the ace Gerry Mulligan.” For quite different reasons from the new group’s time in San Francisco, Brookmeyer found the Basin Street residency tough. This was largely because, compared to playing in a city where the group already had a reputation and could explore some new material, the band reverted to playing much of the repertoire recorded by the original quartet. It was the music from those LPs that East Coast audiences expected to hear. He recalled:
There was no replacing Chet, and I was very aware of that. I would quit every night and after a few drinks say, “What this band needs is a trumpet player! I quit!” It got to the point where we were in New York and Gerry called me at 6 a.m. He said, “Are you okay?” I growled, “What’s wrong?” He said, “Well you didn’t quit tonight, so I was worried!” Gradually, the musical side of the band settled down. In May, the quartet headlined in a concert at the Philadelphia Academy of Music, as part of a package show alongside its Basin Street counterpart, Gene Krupa’s Trio, plus Sarah Vaughan and the George Shearing Quintet. It also garnered speculation that it might be about to move to a major label, when reports appeared saying: “Columbia Records, who recently signed pianist Dave Brubeck’s quartet, is now making generous overtures to Gerry Mulligan.”
© 2023 Alyn Shipton. From The Gerry Mulligan Quartets, published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
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