Gerry Mulligan

Gerald Joseph Mulligan (born with Queens Village New York on April 6th 1927, died with Darien, Connecticut the United States on January 20th 1996) is a Saxophoniste baritone.

Biography

Its childhood occurs to Philadelphia, where he study the Piano, the Clarinette and the Alto saxophone. Still adolescent, it is devoted to the musical writing and sells its first arrangements at a local radio station. Quickly noticed, he works with Elliot Lawrence (1945) and Gene Krupa (1946). It is in the orchestra of Claude Thornhill that it meets Gil Evans. With him, it takes part in the little nun of Miles Davis and in the recording of its famous album, Birth off the cool (1949-1950); for the occasion, Gerry Mulligan twenty-two years composes Jeru and Venus De Milo , and arranges Godchild. After this blow of glare, the young musician is called by Stan Getz, Kai Winding and George Wallington. In 1952, it carries out some orchestrations for Stan Kenton (Young Blood). It founds the same year with Chet Baker (trumpet) a quartet where will follow one another Bob Whitlock, Carson Smith and Joe Mondragon with low, Chico Hamilton and Larry Bunker with the battery. It is about one formation to the unquestionable originality because, being based on the undeniable contrapuntic aptitudes of Gerry Mulligan, it does without the services of the piano. With the head of a whole of the same type - Bob Brookmeyer, Red Mitchell and Frank Insulated -, it occurs in 1954 with the festival of Paris. In 1955, with the addition of Zoot Sims and Jon Eardley, the musician tests himself with the sextette. But it returns well quickly to its first loves with new a quartet where the trumpet will be held by Chet Baker then by Art Farmer (1958). In order to play its own arrangements, it founds an orchestra of thirteen musicians, the Concert Jazz Band (1960). Success being hardly with go, it turns once again to the quartet with the complicity of Bob Brookmeyer. It is for him one period of intense discographic activity with jazzmen as various as Lee Konitz, Thelonious Monk, Paul Desmond, Johnny Hodges, Ben Webster or Tommy Flanagan. For the rounds and the recordings, he is the permanent guest of the Dave Brubeck Trio (after the departure of Paul Desmond), with which he occurs in particular in Paris. In 1971, it creates new a sextette, Age off Steam , to which it offers new compositions and colors. Gerry Mulligan, which adopts then the Soprano saxophone, called upon the guitar like with the Vibraphone and uses for the first time electric amplification. It is with this unit that it occurs in Paris in 1977. He plays with Charlie Mingus in Philharmonic Hall of New York, finds Chet Baker in Carnegie Hall of the same city, joins the Argentinian bandoneonist Astor Piazzolla and directs a big band to Europe (1982). One still celebrates the soloist with the Kool Jazz Festival of New York (1983). Its last partners have as names Teddy Wilson, Duke Ellington, Stephan Grappelli and Scott Hamilton. It is carried by cancer on January 20th, 1996. It had, as musician but also as actor, taken part in several films, among which I Want to Live , of Robert Wise (1958) and Jazz one has Summer' S Day , of Bert Stern (1958), more known in France under the title of Jazz in Newport .

Its style

Gerry Mulligan incarnates more one very particular style which he does not affirm like an impossible to circumvent personality. With various happinesses, it could côtoyer the opposite esthetics without its own play being disturbed by it, inflected, transformed. Musician of the intimacy and discretion, Gerry Mulligan evolves/moves in a world delimited by Serge Chaloff and Stan Getz. Claire and flexible in spite of the expansion of the melody lines of a counterpoint seldom used in jazz with this constancy, her music leaps with an irresistible rhythmic grace, alanguit in subtle nostalgias and finds her pleasure in a kind of naivety sound. A stamp chechmate hardly effleuré by the Vibrato, of the smooth and voluble sentences, a decency of feeling: Gerry Mulligan invites us to the art of the confidence.

Quotation

the first, Harry Carney had, in the orchestra of Duke Ellington, given at the same time her independence and its noble letters to the cumbersome saxophone baritone. But it is in Gerry Mulligan that this instrument owes truly its statute of soloist with whole share, and its celebrity. The saxophonist - but also pianist, type-setter, arranger and leader - are however not those which impress a generation by the glare of technical prowesses or the audacity of the improvisations. In a language which does not belong that with him the very fine sensitivity and the sincerity of a musician are expressed who gave to the extreme history jazz a key of freshness.

External bonds

http://memory.loc.gov/cocoon/ihas/html/mulligan/mulligan-bighome.html

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