Open Country: Gerry Mulligan’s 1950s Quartets When it first appeared in 1952, Gerry Mulligan’s quartet of baritone saxophone, trumpet, double bass, and drums represented something new in postwar jazz: an ensemble without a chording instrument. Jazz groups just naturally were supposed to have a piano or guitar to set out harmonic progressions, but this group had none. In addition, the quartet’s signature sound marked a departure from bebop’s quick tempos, forward dynamics, and knotty lines. Its textures were spare, its mood restrained, and its melodies transparent. It was, in a word that would come to characterize it all too easily and simplistically, “cool.” The group also was an artistic and popular success. But as music historian and jazz bassist Alyn Shipton notes in the preface to The Gerry Mulligan 1950s Quartets (Oxford University Press), his history of Mulligan’s pianoless quartets and their offshoots, they have never been given the focused attention their popularity and significance for the development of postwar jazz would seem to warrant. Shipton’s book sets out to rectify this situation, which it splendidly does by drawing on the author’s interviews with surviving band members and others – unfortunately not including Mulligan, who died before Shipton could talk to him – providing detailed musical analysis, and generously quoting contemporary accounts of the group’s music and activities.
The First Pianoless Quartet
Mulligan’s first experiments with a quartet eschewing a piano or other chording instrument were made in 1951, at the suggestion of Gail Madden, to whom he may or may not have been married. In addition to Mulligan, this experimental group comprised either Don Ferrara or Don Joseph on trumpet and a rhythm section of Peter Ind on double bass and Al Levitt on drums. The quartet played some dates at Club 43 in Queens, but was commercially unsuccessful. If this was an inauspicious start, it certainly wasn’t indicative of what was to come. The establishment of the pianoless quartet as a regular ensemble came about in the summer of 1952, after Mulligan’s relocation from New York to California. Mulligan was booked to play at the Haig in Los Angeles following an engagement by vibraphonist Red Norvo’s trio, for which the club’s piano had been put in storage. Rather than accept the offer of a small upright piano, Mulligan decided to dispense with the instrument altogether. The original plan had been for Mulligan to host a series of Monday night jam sessions, but now this was changed to feature a regular quartet of Mulligan, trumpeter Chet Baker, drummer Chico Hamilton, and bassist Bob Whitlock: the first pianoless quartet. It was a quartet that would stay together for nearly a year, with Mulligan and Baker as the two constants accompanied by a changing cast of bassists and drummers. The group was quick to begin recording. Their initial recordings were made by recording engineer Phil Turetsky in August, in Turetsky’s Hollywood Hills house. The session resulted not only in the release of “Bernie’s Tune” and “Lullaby of the Leaves” as a single, but in the establishment of a new record label. The August recordings, together with a set of tunes recorded in October, would be issued as a 10” LP – the first album released on the Pacific Jazz label, which local producer Richard Bock founded on the strength of the quartet’s performances. In between the August and October recordings for Pacific Jazz in Los Angeles, the group recorded for the Fantasy record label in San Francisco. Mulligan had been invited to the city to play at the Black Hawk by Dave Brubeck, whose group played there regularly. Brubeck also served as a talent scout for Fantasy, and arranged for the quartet to record at the club; four tracks were released as Fantasy LP 3-6. Mulligan’s new group now had exposure not only through their live performances at the Haig, but through sets of recordings on two different labels. And these recordings quickly obtained wide distribution both nationally and, through a series of shrewd licensing arrangements, internationally as well. The group was a success in California, but its reputation began to spread beyond the West Coast thanks to enthusiastic reviews of its recordings and other coverage in the wide-circulation press. In October 1952 their performance at San Francisco’s Black Hawk was reviewed in a Down Beat magazine piece by Ralph J. Gleason, whom Shipton quotes as describing the quartet’s sound as “fantastic, fugue-ish, funky, swinging and contrapuntal.” Interest in their music wasn’t limited to the jazz press; in February 1952 Time magazine did a feature story on what it called the quartet’s “Counterpoint Jazz.” Something of a stereotype was beginning to form of the group’s music as cerebral, polyphonic, and yes, “cool.” But as Shipton’s analyses of the group’s work demonstrate, much of the excitement they generated was the legitimate result of Mulligan and Baker’s intuitive interplay, enhanced by the contributions of the group’s more inventive bassists like Carson Smith, which implied relatively slowly moving harmonic change that presented listeners with a structural clarity they could easily follow. In his interview with Shipton, bassist Bill Crow, who played in later, post-Baker versions of the quartets, explained in detail exactly how the group worked out its harmonic interplay:
Early in the life of the quartet, when we were just bare bones, Gerry said something about, “You’re playing my notes!” And I said, “What makes them your notes?” And then he explained that he expected me to hang around the roots and thirds and fifths of the chord, so that he could play patterns that were based on higher partials of the chord. And also the “rich” notes, the major seventh, the minor seventh and ninth ... And I realized when he played a third and I played a root, because he was an octave above me that made a tenth, which if you play it on the piano shows that it implies the fifth and maybe the seventh, even though nobody’s playing them, because the notes just resonate that way.
An important factor in the Baker and later quartets’ ability to create these implicit harmonies was Mulligan’s previous work as a writer and arranger for the big bands of Elliott Lawrence, Claude Thornhill, and others, which Shipton covers in a preliminary chapter. This prior experience came into play not only in his writing for the groups but in the supporting lines he played when others were soloing; it was his arranger’s sensibility that allowed him to improvise the kinds of countermelodies that could create the illusion of more fully spelled out chords. The quartets’ lack of a chording instrument didn’t loosen the harmonies so much as let the saxophone, brass instrument, and bass work together to present them from a perspectives set at an oblique angle. Listening to their early recordings even now, we can clearly hear the chemistry between Mulligan and Baker. An easy lyricism seems to be at work as they nimbly take cues from each other and weave a tight-knit sonic fabric of melodies and countermelodies. But underneath the group’s musical and commercial success were problems with drugs, which ultimately ended this first quartet. At the end of 1952 bassist Bob Whitlock was fired from the group after Baker, caught smoking marijuana with Whitlock, was arrested and charged with possession. Mulligan blamed Whitlock for the incident and replaced him with Smith, who stayed with the group for its remaining few months. More serious was Mulligan’s own arrest for heroin possession in April 1953, which effectively put paid to the first quartet. Shipton documents the frantic series of recording sessions that was arranged for the quartet immediately following Mulligan’s arrest, after which Mulligan was tried and sentenced to the Wayside Honor Rancho low-security prison, where he was incarcerated until his release on Christmas Eve of 1953.
From Four to Six and Back Again
By the time Mulligan got out of prison, Baker had begun leading his own quartet, and wasn’t interested in forgoing the financial rewards in order to re-form the quartet with Mulligan. Consequently, Mulligan got in touch with valve trombonist Bob Brookmeyer in New York and in short order had a new quartet, which was active during the first half of 1954. After the quartet, which included bassist Red Mitchell and drummer Frank Isola, played the Salon du Jazz in Paris the first week in June, Brookmeyer quit the group. Speaking with Shipton, Brookmeyer recalled the difficulty of replacing Baker when audiences wanted to hear the sound of the original quartet faithfully reproduced. He also recalled personal tensions within the group, particularly as the result of Mulligan’s volatile temper. Mulligan replaced Brookmeyer first with trumpeter Tony Fruscella, who played the quartet’s set at the first Newport Jazz Festival in July, and later with trumpeter Jon Eardley, who played with the group until the end of the year. The late 1954 iteration of the quartet also saw the return of Chico Hamilton on drums; the combination of Hamilton’s swing with Mitchell’s active bass playing made for what may have been the most exciting of the various quartets’ rhythm sections. Nineteen fifty-five saw Mulligan with a case of writer’s block and consequently spending most of his time playing as a guest with other groups, including at times Baker’s own. Just prior to this he had formed a sextet that was in essence an expanded version of the quartet, but shortly after disbanded it. Now, in late 1955, he revived it. In addition to Mulligan on baritone saxophone and occasional piano, and Eardley on trumpet, it included Brookmeyer on valve trombone as well as Zoot Sims on tenor saxophone, and Red Mitchell, then Peck Morrison and later Bill Crow on bass, and Larry Bunker followed by Dave Bailey on drums. As Shipton shows, the sextet represented an organic extension of the pianoless quartet concept, and yet was something new at the same time. The harmonies that had been implicit in the quartet now were elaborated and made explicit thanks to the availability of the two additional horns, which also provided Mulligan with a wider range of timbres to arrange. And in marked contrast to the original Baker quartet, the group’s sound had a harder, more dynamic edge, forcefully giving it an identity that wasn’t overshadowed by memories of the earlier group. Indeed, to borrow a turn of phrase from Brookmeyer, the sextet did much to exorcise Baker’s ghost, which until then had been a stubbornly haunting presence. By the end of 1956, the sextet was dissolved, leaving a quartet of Mulligan, Brookmeyer, Crow, and Bailey. To be sure, Mulligan had played with this quartet in July and August of 1956 while the sextet was on hiatus, and now it became his regular ensemble. With one change of personnel – Joe Benjamin replaced Crow on bass at the beginning of 1957 – the group stayed together until August 1957. Between August 1957 and spring 1958, Mulligan worked on a number of projects, including a recording session with Thelonious Monk, a pianoless quartet with Paul Desmond, and a reunion with Chet Baker in a pianoless quartet that included bassist Henry Grimes as well as Bailey. This last project was especially poignant in that it showed how far apart Mulligan and Baker had become in the several years since their original quartet broke up. Baker’s playing had fallen off, leaving Mulligan alienated by what he thought was Baker’s lack of discipline as a musician, and as an ex-addict himself, Mulligan did not appreciate Baker’s heroin use. The quartet recorded both by itself and with vocalist Annie Ross; Shipton, in unusually strong language, characterized the music on their instrumental album as “insipid.” In April 1958 Mulligan formed a new quartet with trumpeter Art Farmer, Grimes – replaced by Crow when the former left to play with Sonny Rollins – and Bailey. This was, essentially, the last of the 1950s pianoless quartets. Arguably, it also was the hottest. With Farmer in the group, a pronounced blues influence made itself felt for the first time. Farmer’s background in hard bop also gave the group’s soloing an urgency that contrasted sharply with what Shipton describes as the “cool relaxation” of the Baker quartet. The solos now were both longer and more adventurous; the relatively mainstream harmonic language of the earlier groups was expanding into increasingly angular territory. Compared to the Baker quartet – which inevitably would always serve as the point of reference for the subsequent quartets – the sound of the late ‘50s group was robust and assertive. And it was the soloing, rather than Mulligan’s writing and arranging, that now formed the ensemble’s center of gravity. Mulligan’s success as a musician and fame as a personality had on the one hand divided his energies, and on the other, had become something of a distraction; as a consequence, he was writing less, and the group therefore had less fresh material to work with. Shipton quotes Crow’s wry comment to the effect that Mulligan seemed to write best when he was poor and musically hungry, and that by the time of the Farmer quartet, he was neither.
Into the 1960s
The Farmer quartet broke up at the beginning of 1960, after it had participated in recording music for a film adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s novel The Subterraneans. Mulligan’s next move was to form the Concert Jazz Band, a small big band without a chordal instrument other than Mulligan’s occasionally playing piano. Like the earlier sextet, this band was an extension of the original pianoless quartet concept; in conversation with Shipton, Brookmeyer remembered Mulligan saying that it was an “outgrowth of the quartet.” The ensemble was active through July 1961. In February 1962, Mulligan formed a new pianoless quartet with Brookmeyer and Crow, and with Gus Johnson formerly of the Count Basie band on drums. It was Mulligan’s main group that year, and one that Shipton characterizes as the “summation of everything that he had achieved in his four-piece bands.” Certainly, the close musical relationship between Mulligan and Brookmeyer, which had been honed over many years and ensembles, was remarkable – “telepathic” is Shipton’s description – and an essential asset for a small group improvising a contrapuntally inflected jazz. The group’s agility and creativity were displayed in one notable engagement which had them improvise background music for a live television play – nearly an hour’s worth of spontaneous music based on a handful of themes that Mulligan had composed beforehand. This group was disbanded early in 1963; in essence, it was the last of Mulligan’s 1950s quartets. The end of the 1962 quartet came about a little over ten years after Mulligan had begun his experiment with pianoless quartets. It was an experiment that by any measure must be deemed a success. There had been some controversy over the originality of the concept – Monk’s habit of dropping out behind his soloists in particular was cited as the true origin of the idea that chording instruments could be dispensed with in a jazz ensemble – but even if Mulligan hadn’t been the first to come up with the idea, he was the one who, rather than using it as a temporary gambit to open up musical texture, made it the underlying element around which his ensembles were formed and inferred from it a structured polyphony that differed qualitatively from, say, the polyphonic collective improvisation of early jazz. It seems to me too that the Mulligan quartets prefigured and opened the path to, if not directly inspired, the avant-garde jazz groups that were forming in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Certainly the lack of a chording instrument pointed the way to the kind of greater harmonic freedom, bordering on and even passing over into atonality, that was actively being explored at the time, even if Mulligan’s groups did not go that far themselves. In addition, the pianoless quartet itself was becoming a paradigm of sorts. As early as 1955 Jimmy Giuffre’s Tangents in Jazz album featured a pianoless quartet of saxophone, trumpet, bass and drums, and his recordings of 1958 feature pianoless nonets that, thanks to Mulligan’s quartets and sextet, may have almost begun to seem conventional. Even further away from the mainstream, one can draw a line connecting Mulligan’s saxophone-trumpet-bass-and-drums quartets to Ornette Coleman’s pianoless quartet with Don Cherry, Charlie Haden, and Billy Higgins. Coleman was in Los Angeles in 1953 and was known to hitchhike to hear Mulligan play and to sit in with him; in a 2006 interview with the “Democracy Now” radio program, Charlie Haden tells the story of Coleman’s sitting in with the Mulligan group at the Haig and being asked to stop. That there would be a lack of fit between Mulligan’s more conventional harmonic ideas and Coleman’s freer approach is hardly surprising; in spite of that, there obviously was something that Coleman heard in Mulligan’s pianoless quartets that he found attractive. Mulligan’s pianoless quartets and related groups, then, represent one of the more significant developments in 1950s jazz. By showing how and why this was so, and doing it with a clarity and attention to detail that, fittingly, is analogous to the clarity and meticulousness of the Mulligan groups’ harmonies, Shipton does them justice with a book that will certainly be the unsurpassed authoritative work on the subject.
© 2023 Daniel Barbiero
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