Gerry Mulligan as One of the Most Famous American Jazz Saxophonist - Coursework Example

? Gerry Mulligan Introduction One of the most famous American jazz saxophonist was born in April 1927 with the name Gerald Joseph Mulligan, who later became popular as Gerry Mulligan among his fans and the people he worked with. Mulligan has been accredited of being one of the first saxophonists in the history of jazz music. His music had a unique touch and he played his instrument with quite a light tone. Hence, he was the one who gave rise to the cool jazz era. Throughout his career, Mulligan has worked with important musicians like Claude Thornhill and Miles Davis. His pianoless quartet performance with a famous trumpeter named Chet Baker in the 1950s has been appreciated of being one of his brilliant works ever. Other than being an impressive saxophonist, he was a brilliant pianist as well. Early life According to Mulligan, there were two things that helped him pursue such a successful career; a vision and a massive amount of guts. Both these things had a major contribution in impressing Warrington, a bandleader, and convinced him to believe that Mulligan had the potential to excel well in the field of music. He therefore, not only bought him arrangements but also gave him both critical yet productive criticism regarding his career. Following that, Mulligan organized for two bands that were led by important people like Tommy Tucker and Elliot Lawrence. Since Mulligan had three brothers and hence, a large family for his mother to look after, his mother chose to employ Lily Rose as their nanny. Lily Rose was African – American and very fond of playing the piano. She was the one who instigated Mulligan’s love for music when he used to spend time with her watching her play. Also, while staying at Rose’s place, he got the chance to meet a lot many black musicians who used to stay at her place when in town since the motels would not accommodate them in those days. In his early life, his family moved around a lot all over the country with stops made in the following order; southern New Jersey and Chicago, followed by Illinois, Kalamazoo and lastly, Michigan. It was sometime in 1940s that he first played in a concert. This concert was held at Philadelphia’s Music Academy, where he was accompanied by Sarah Vaughan, Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, all of whom turned out to brilliant musicians later on. Among these, Mulligan became closes to Parker since he not only encouraged him well on his first performance but also helped him recover a lost tenor which he was afraid that he had lost and also invited him to attend jam sessions with him. Mulligan officially started playing for orchestras at the age of nineteen. These were for people called Gene Krupa and Claude Thornhill. It was at this point also that he started correlating his music skills with important musicians from the past such as John Lewis and George Russell and made himself capable of touching new boundaries. Rise to fame When Mulligan first came to New York, he was clearly astonished of the originality the city offered. But he soon realized that even the best musicians had to strive to make a living in that city. So it was in 1951 that he moved to the west in the pursuit of better chances, playing his music all along the way as he traveled through the country. In the same year, he created his first ever piano less quartet that later and still has had a massive amount of impact for many jazz musicians that have followed him which includes bands like Art Farmers and Zoot Sims. He also formed a band of four which was successful in gaining much popularity in terms of Jazz music all along the west coast. Duke Ellington was Mulligan’s favorite composer and that is exactly why he often paired up with him for tours. They both shared a chemistry so strong that every time they went on stage, they performed wonders. Ellington was the same person who composed one of Mulligan’s most famous works called the ‘Prima Bara Dubla’ (Klinkowitz 65).A predicament that Mulligan faced during his musical career involved his rhythm section. Upon much pondering, he eventually decided to work upon his previous experiments and perform with his band of foursome with him leading with his piano less quartet. Baker's harmonious style fit well with Mulligan's, commanding them to create unpremeditated contrapuntal textures free from the stiff borders of a piano-enforced choral structure. While novel at the time in sound and style, this ethos of contrapuntal group improvisation hearkened back to the influential days of jazz. Notwithstanding their very dissimilar backgrounds, Mulligan a classically-trained New Yorker and Baker from Oklahoma and a much more natural player, they had an nearly cerebral bond and Mulligan later remarked that, "I had never experienced anything like that before and not really since." Their dates at the Haig developed to be sell-outs and the soundtracks they made in the fall of 1952 became key sellers that led to noteworthy acclaim for Mulligan and Baker. This incidental alliance came to an unexpected end with Mulligan's arrest on narcotics accusations in mid-1953 that led to six months at Sheriff's Honor Farm. Both Mulligan and Baker had, like their colleagues, become heroin addicts. Nonetheless, while Mulligan was in jail, Baker altered his lyrical trumpet style, mild tenor voice and matinee-idol looks into liberated fame. Thus when upon his discharge Mulligan tried to rehire Baker, the trumpeter dropped the offer for business reasons. They did temporarily reunify at the 1955 Newport Jazz Festival and would sometimes get together for concerts and recordings up through a 1974 performance at Carnegie Hall. But in later years their association became stressed as Mulligan, with substantial effort, would achieve to kick his habit, while Baker's dependence would bedevil him competently and personally almost continuously until his death in 1988. Four tunes of Mulligan were a part of Mulligan’s album Holiday with Mulligan. It was taped back in 1961 with the lyricist being Judy Holliday. They both had an association from the fifties to the sixties and the proper album was released later in 1980. Although, by the late sixties, Mulligan had become a star in the world of Jazz. Peak Dave Drubeck was Mulligan’s partner for much of the years between 68 and 72 and performed in tours such as Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra’s recording. Some of those recordings included The light in Wilderness. Drubeck said that when he listened to the music composed by Mulligan, it was as if he was listening to music of all tenses, the past, present and the future with all taste and complete respect. The Age of Steam was an album that was composed because of Mulligan’s attraction with trains, particularly the composition “K-4 Pacific.” The Age of Steam, taped for A & M Records in 1971/1972, was an addition of Gerry’s old Concert Jazz Band that were clear indications of his fascination towards the mechanical engines. In 1974, he encountered his future wife for the first time in Milan when he was recording a Summit album with Astor Piazzolla. Her name was Countess Franca Rota Borghini Baldovinetti who was handling the profession of her family related to the wine industry. She also worked as a freelance journalist for Italian television in New York by collecting photographs. Then in December of the same year, he cooperated with Judy Holliday on the musical Happy Birthday. It was composed for the play written by Anita Loos, with music by both of these musicians. Happy Birthday premiered at the University of Alabama in December 1974. In the fall of 1975, with his quartet, he performed with the New Haven Symphony Orchestra, lead by Eric Kunzel, at in Connecticut. Gery also performed in Jazz Gala with Peter Herbolzheimer’s twenty-two piece orchestra which was on a tour in Germany with several significant guest stars. He was a part of the tour with the Quartet until September, when he taped Idol Gossip with a sextet, and toured with them in Europe with a few performances of Art Farmer. In 1977 the Canadian Broadcasting company made a collaboration with a well known Canadian composer Harry Freedman to compose an orchestral music as a assign of respect of Gerry’s fiftieth birthday. The CBC Symphony Orchestra, with Gerry as guest soloist, and later with other symphony orchestras did the saxophone concerto, entitled celebration. The French Film La Menace’s music was also composed by Gerry the same year which was intended to be an album in the United States and France. In 1978, Mulligan rehabilitated the Concert Jazz Band for a concert at the ”Newport Jazz Festival” in New York, which went on to visit in the United States. In June of the same year, Jimmy Carter began the festival, “Jazz at the White House,” created by George Wein, with a remarkable list of jazz greats, including Gerry. Play with Fire, a play inscribed by Dale Wasserman, with music by Gerry Mulligan, was presented at the Eugene O’Neill Theater in 1978. During the 1980s, the Concert Jazz Band toured the United States, Europe, and Japan. In 1981, a tour in the U.S. comprised a bundle with the Gerry Mulligan Concert Jazz Band, Woody Herman’s Orchestra, and Pete Fountain’s Band. The album Little Big Horn found Mulligan in an unusual musical atmosphere, buttressed by performer, composer, and arranger Dave Grusin.”There’s a fraternity among arrangers,” said Mulligan, defining his friendship with Grusin. “We all suffer similar pangs of anxiety over our work, what Quincy Jones calls the ‘rolling around under the piano syndrome’.” The six Mulligan configurations on the album contain pieces for the big band, small group, and vocals (Klinkowitz 65). However the pieces are written for diverse musical bands, they all share Mulligan’s distinguishing melodic method to arrangement and saxophone improvisation. The album got released in Italy with a much larger and warmer reception than expected and about six million people viewing his performance at the Manzoni Theater in Milan. Other than his jazz activities, Mulligan has also been accredited for constructing an impressive kind of symphonic music. The melodies he composed with his friend Harry Freedman were released in 1984 titled the Sax Chronicles. In the same year, he appeared as a soloist with his pianist partner Dave Grusin in Los Angeles and performed on the account of the fifth anniversary of the New American Orchestra. Entente is known to be Mulligan’s first ever solo composition, which also got completed in the same year. While writing it, he also did some drawings that reflected both his high and low moods during the working time. This work of his along with all the rest of his brilliant ones became part of his performing routine on his tours ( Watrous 1996). Later career Mulligan maintained a very active career of recording and performing throughout his life. In 1988, he was invited to be the first – ever Resident Composer at a Jazz festival in Glasgow and later, commissioned to write The Flying Scotsman. In 1991, Mulligan and Miles Davis decided to work together and revisit the music from the album Birth of the Cool of 1949 since Davis has performed some of the album’s titles with much enthusiasm at a festival. However, Davis soon lost his life at the hands of a stroke and Mulligan had to continue his project with substitutes like Art Farmer and Wallace Roney. His final recording was titled Dragonfly which was a quartet album that got recorded in early summer of 1995. He gave his final performance at Norway’s Annual Floating Jazz Festival in later half of 1995. He was also awarded the Viotti Prize in the same year in Italy. It was a matter of great prestige since he was the first jazz musician ever to receive that award. Death Mulligan left the world and all his beloved fans behind at the age of 68 in the later half of January 1996. Although he has been reported to be suffering from liver cancer, his death is basically accredited to complications following a knee surgery. Upon his death, the Library of Congress was honored to receive his library and many of his personal belongings which included his dear saxophone as well. To date, the collection titled with his name is available for public access in libraries all over the country. His ever famous saxophone has also remained on a permanent exhibit in the library of Performing Arts Research Centre since 2009. Legacy Through 1996, praises to Gerry Mulligan were performed, comprising concerts at Long Beach, California, with Bob Brookmeyer, Johnny Mandel, and Bill Holman, and at the Konzerthaus in Vienna, Austria, with Art Farmer, Lee Konitz, and Bob Brookmeyer. The biographical film Listen: Gerry Mulligan was premiered as a pilot at the Walter Reade Theater, Lincoln Center on October 24, 1996 and presented by Wynton Marsalis. The film was backed by the Library of Congress via a grant from the Ira and Leonore Gershwin Fund and was produced by Gerry Mulligan Productions. Works Cited  "Performing Arts Digital Collections:". Loc.gov. March 29, 2011.  "The Gerry Mulligan Collection". Memory.loc.gov. Jazz: Jerry Jazz Musician. "Jazz/Jerry Jazz Musician/Chet Baker biographer Jeroen de Valk interview". Jerryjazzmusician.com. Klinkowitz, Jerome. Listen-Gerry Mulligan: An Aural Narrative in Jazz. NY: Schirmer Books, 1991. Print. Profiles, Jazz (November 12, 2009). "Jazz Profiles: Robert Gordon – Jazz West Coast: The Los Angeles Jazz Scene of the 1950's – Chapter 4". Jazzprofiles.blogspot.com. Watrous, Peter. "Gerry Mulligan, a Baritone Saxophonist and 'Cool School' Jazz Pioneer, Dies at 68", The New York Times, January 21, 1996.  Watrous, Peter. "Gerry Mulligan, a Baritone Saxophonist and 'Cool School' Jazz Pioneer, Dies at 68", The New York Times, January 21, 1996. Print. Read More