Revival of a Little-Known Gerry Mulligan Album

from the Amazon.com Web page for the album being discussed

At the beginning of this month, New Land released a reissue of one of the less familiar albums of baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan. The title of the album is Night Lights. The tracks were recorded at the Nola Penthouse Studios in New York City over the course of two sessions taking place on September 12 and October 3, 1962. The result was a six-track album lasting a little more than half an hour, and it was released by Philips in 1963.

Composed by Mulligan, the title track is the first one on the album. He is also responsible for composing two other tracks, “Festival Minor” and “Tell Me When.” In addition he prepared an arrangement of one of the 24 solo piano preludes (accounting for all the major and minor keys), which were composed by Frédéric Chopin as his Opus 28. Mulligan’s selection was the fourth of these, a Largo composed in the key of E minor. Two other composers are represented on the album. The second track is Luiz Bonfá’s “Manhã de Carnaval” (morning of the Carnival), which provided the principal theme for Marcel Camus’ film Black Orpheus. This is followed by David Mann’s tune for the song “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning.” The album concludes with a second “Night Lights” track, recorded in 1965.

Taken as a whole, this album provides a thoroughly engaging account of the cool jazz genre. Whether or not Mulligan recorded these tracks to wean listeners away from the distorted semantics of “cool,” which had been popularized by both Stephen Sondheim’s lyrics and Leonard Bernstein’s music (including a fugue, no less) for West Side Story, can be vigorously debated; but all that vigor would be the antithesis of “cool!” Much more important is that, to establish a more genuine sense of “cool,” Mulligan recruited three masters of subdued understatement: Art Farmer on flugelhorn (and possibly trumpet), Bob Brookmeyer on valve trombone, and Jim Hall on guitar. Rhythm is provided by Bill Crow on bass and Dave Bailey on drums.

The 1965 version of “Night Lights” involves entirely different resources. Mulligan leads a quintet while playing clarinet. The other quintet members are Pete Jolly on piano, Jond Gray on guitar, Jimmy Bond on bass, and Hal Blaine on drums. There is also what amounts to an evanescent background provided by a ten-piece string ensemble led by concertmaster Harry Bluestone. It goes without saying that the “semantics” of 1965 differ significantly from those of 1962. However, that “bonus track” simply reinforces the breadth of approaches one can take to playing cool jazz.