Music to have fun by: Gerry Mulligan & his baritone sax

I've been trying to remember a time when Gerry Mulligan--somewhere, somehow--wasn't on my mind, and I can't think of many. Mulligan died on January 20 at the age of sixty-eight.

In 1953 I was eleven, had just discovered the saxophone and the glory of jazz, and had decided that playing that music was what God had made me for. (Well, turns out I was mistaken, or maybe God had been sending mixed signals--a notoriously bad habit of his.) Anyhow, there was this artsy Sunday morning TV show on CBS, "Omnibus" (its theme was from Stravinsky's Firebird), and this one Sunday one of its features was a live performance by the Gerry Mulligan Quartet: the original Quartet, drums, bass, Chet Baker on trumpet, Mulligan on baritone sax with--revolutionary for the time--no piano. I didn't catch then the title of the tune they played; but I've heard it so often in so many versions, over the years--and can still remember that first hearing so clearly--that I can tell you it was Gerry's own sinuous, swinging composition, "Line for Lyons." Bass drum (the great--I'd learn later--Chico Hamilton) laid down that nice, easy and open groove that's the heart of the heart of the music, while the trumpet and the baritone stated the leisurely theme and then improvised on it, first trumpet with baritone counterpoint, then baritone and trumpet counterpoint, and then both returning to the main theme and coming to an absolutely satisfying, quiet rest. To me, entranced, it was the sound of happiness, of a limpid intelligence--of an unassailable gaiety.

And that gaiety, for me, has remained Mulligan's great gift: the gift he had and the gift his music gave.

Okay, there were shadows, desert places: is there a truly human life without them? When I first saw Mulligan, he had only recently kicked his heroin habit, and the brilliant, matinee-idol Baker was descending into his habit, which would make his next thirty years a woozy junkie's hell. And, okay, in a Draconian cosmic reckoning, Mulligan, for all his wonderful facility as a player, wasn't one of the music's great innovators--not an Armstrong, a Parker, a Coltrane, or a Cecil Taylor. Even the jazz press at times dismissed his music as too comfortable, too pleasant a decoction of postwar modernism--as "bopsieland."

And how Draconian that is. So, you're not Picasso or Jackson Pollock, sei gesund; it's no big disgrace, already, to be Miro or Chagall.

The fact is that for fifty years Mulligan wrote, arranged, and played the music he obviously loved the way most folks can only love a husband or wife, and did it with a Toto-I-don't-think-we're-in-Kansas-anymore, wide-eyed passion that, itself, is almost the message of his art. And he did it with anybody who would join in: with the boppers, with rockabilly players, with Mel Torme, and even with--God save the mark--Barry Manilow. Legends are rife of Mulligan, at one jazz festival or another, prowling the rehearsal tents to find somebody, anybody, who would just like to go someplace and jam. "Boyish," in the best sense, is the word: and in the best sense he died a sixty-eight-year-old boy.

It's a hoary musician joke. What's the difference between a baritone saxophone and a chain saw? You can tune a chain saw. The baritone sax is a big, unwieldy horn, and playing it is as much an athletic event as an artistic one; you've got to force a lot of air through that sucker even to get a blaat. Which is why, in the history of jazz, there've been so few great bari soloists: Harry Carney, who spent his whole career with the Ellington orchestra, and who got pitiably few solo opportunities; Serge Chaloff, aflame with genius but a junkie suicide in his early prime; and Mulligan.

Why Mulligan chose bari as his voice is a fascinating question, to which I think I know the answer. Bari is a cumbersome axe for solo playing, but absolutely essential to big band arranging. You need the damned thing in the reed section, to give a bottom, a foundation, to what the tenors and altos are doing. And Mulligan, whether he was playing with one of his pianoless quartets or with Dave Brubeck or with his wonderful (and unsuccessful) Concert Jazz Band--or with any of the astonishing array of people with whom he recorded--thought of himself primarily as a big band player. Let me elaborate on the magnificent plangency of that.

In Ira Gitler's indispensable collection of interviews, From Swing to Bop, Mulligan talks about his early years. It's worth quoting at length:

By the end of the '40s the thing that was the most disturbing to me was that I could see that the bands, the dance bands, the name bands, were not going to survive. That's what was really upsetting to me....Man, I never thought about another thing--seriously, other than being a bandleader and writing music for bands. Dance music. So the big band got cut off from its own source, which is dance music.

Dance music: he says that three times in about as many sentences. And only if you understand what the big bands meant will you get what's behind his words. From the mid-thirties to the early fifties in America, jazz, in the form of big band music, was the American anthem. Never before or since has this, the only true national art form, enjoyed such an immediate, universal, and visceral connection with that loose and baggy monster, the public. Jazz was for dancing. However harmonically complex and stunningly inventive, it was also something that the kids, the community, the society, could move to, dancing their own improvisation back at the improvisations of the guys on the bandstand--a real festival, next to which even the best rock concerts seem sadly planned pieces of business.