Jeru's Journey: The Life & Music of Gerry Mulligan

Copyright © 2015 by Sanford Josephson

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, without written permission, except by a newspaper or magazine reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review.

Published in 2015 by Hal Leonard Books

An Imprint of Hal Leonard Corporation

7777 West Bluemound Road

Milwaukee, WI 53213

Trade Book Division Editorial Offices

33 Plymouth St., Montclair, NJ 07042

Permissions can be found here, which constitutes an extension of this copyright page. Every reasonable effort has been made to contact copyright holders and secure permission. Omissions can be remedied in future editions.

Printed in the United States of America

Book design by Michael Kellner

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Josephson, Sanford.

Jeru’s journey: the life and music of Gerry Mulligan / Sanford Josephson.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4803-6024-2 (pbk.)

1. Mulligan, Gerry. 2. Jazz musicians--United States--Biography. 3. Saxophonists--United States--Biography. 4. Composers--United States--Biography. I. Title.

ML419.M79J67 2015

788.7’165092--dc23

[B]

2015019654

www.halleonardbooks.com

This book is dedicated to my grandson, Riley. He loves his music.

Contents

Introduction

1. ‘A Great Guy, a Born Genius’

2. ‘A Band Totally Unlike Others I Had Written For’

3. ‘Out of the Basement and . . . into a Rehearsal Hall’

4. ‘He Would Play Fantastically’

5. ‘That Rare Kind of Jazz That Appeals to Everyone’

6. ‘It Was Much Like Playing with Bach Might Have Been’

7. ‘We Were All in Love with Judy’

8. ‘We Couldn’t Believe How Good the Band Was’

9. ‘The Saxophonist Who Came to Dinner’

10. ‘Oh, You Want Me to Be the Magic Flute Player?’

11. ‘One of the Most Important Arrangers in the History of the Music’

12. ‘I Forgot He Was Famous for a Reason’

13. ‘Schubert! Beethoven! Mulligan!’

14. ‘He Heard Every Part in His Head’

15. ‘Kings of the Baritone Sax’

16. ‘A Baritone Saxophone Sounding Like a Cello’

17. ‘Acceptance of Jazz as a Serious Music’

18. ‘Everybody’s a Film Critic’

19. ‘One of the Most Brilliant Performances Ever’

20. ‘Nobody Played Like Him’

21. ‘Love for Melody in Everything He Did’

Afterword

Sources

Discography

Photos

Introduction

Sanford Josephson

"Gerry Mulligan is one of the truly unique figures in

American music, not just speaking of jazz, but of

music in a broader, general way."

—Jon Newsom, retired chief of the Music Division,

Library of Congress

That quote by Jon Newsom, from the video documentary Listen: Gerry Mulligan, perfectly describes the basis and motivation for this book, which chronicles Mulligan’s enormous contributions to jazz and American music as a composer, arranger, bandleader, and baritone saxophonist. Thanks to Franca Mulligan, Gerry’s widow and partner for more than twenty-two years, I received access to his recorded autobiography, Jeru: In the Words of Gerry Mulligan (by Gerry Mulligan with Ken Poston). I have also quoted heavily from Listen: Gerry Mulligan.

That material has been supplemented by more than forty interviews with those who knew Mulligan and played with him, as well as with others who were influenced by him. I have also drawn on many articles, reviews, and excerpts from books, helped greatly by the resources of the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University–Newark, the Jazzinstitut Darmstadt in Darmstadt, Germany, and the Music Division of the Library of Congress. This book could not have been completed, however, without the indispensible assistance and guidance of my most trusted editor—my wife, Linda.

My passion for jazz began developing in the mid-1960s when I spent two years in Japan, working in the public information office of the American Red Cross’s Far Eastern Area headquarters. I remember buying Gerry Mulligan ’63: The Concert Jazz Band in the Army PX and wearing it out on my turntable. But it was not until I moved to New York in 1968 and was able to see Mulligan in person that I was able to enjoy the fruits of his musical genius. I saw him several times in a variety of settings—concerts at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, and many times at clubs, primarily at Hopper’s in Greenwich Village and StoryTowne on East 58th Street.

In 1981, I interviewed him at his home in Darien, Connecticut, for a newspaper article that became the basis for a chapter in my previous book, Jazz Notes: Interviews Across the Generations.

The following pages trace Mulligan’s life and career from his early days of arranging for big bands to the end of his life, when he was revered and recognized as a major composer, arranger, bandleader, and baritone saxophonist whose influence spread beyond the world of jazz.

Mulligan once said that he aimed for 42nd Street and ended up on 52nd Street. That is an indirect way of pointing out that practically everything he wrote, arranged, and played had a sense of melody at its core.

All quotations from Gerry Mulligan, unless otherwise noted, are from Jeru: In the Words of Gerry Mulligan, by Gerry Mulligan with Ken Poston.

1

‘A Great Guy, a Born Genius’

Johnny Warrington was the leader of a thirty-piece orchestra that played on Philadelphia radio station WCAU in the early 1940s. He also wrote many of the stock arrangements that music publishers sold during that period. But he never achieved fame or even widespread recognition among the general public and would be just a footnote in the history of the big-band era if not for a chance encounter with a sixteen-year-old named Gerry Mulligan. Mulligan, a student at West Philadelphia Catholic High School, approached Warrington and said, I’d like to write for your band.’

Mulligan remembered Warrington’s reaction. He laughed and said, ‘Why not?’ Then he assigned some tune for me to do, so I took it and wrote an arrangement. He went over it with me, went through the chart with me, made suggestions, and asked me to rewrite it and bring it back. A couple of weeks later, he bought it and assigned another piece. That was the beginning of my professional career as an arranger. He was more of an arranging teacher than I’d ever had before or have had since. I’ve always thought what it would have been like to be Johnny Warrington and have this kid show up and say, ‘I’d like to write for your band.’

Warrington had no way of knowing that Mulligan would go on to become a brilliant arranger, composer, performer, and bandleader, but he did recognize that there was something special about the boy. Elliot Lawrence, a bandleader Mulligan would eventually arrange for at WCAU a couple of years later, recalled receiving a phone call from Warrington: He told me, ‘This young guy’s got talent.’

Philadelphia was the last stop in a childhood that had taken Mulligan from his birthplace in Queens Village, New York, to Marion, Ohio, to Chicago, to Kalamazoo, Michigan, to Detroit and then Reading, Pennsylvania. His father, George Mulligan, an engineer, had taken a job in New York with a maritime company, moving the family from Chester, Pennsylvania, where Gerry’s three older brothers had been born. One of my mother’s favorite stories, Mulligan said, was about the day I was born—April 6, 1927. Since I was the fourth child, she felt she knew pretty well what was going on. Apparently, it was an easy pregnancy, and she said to my father one morning when he was getting ready to go to work, ‘I think today’s the day.’ She called the doctor, and the doctor came over and examined her and said, ‘I don’t think so’ and took off. Shortly after the doctor left, the baby started coming out, and Louise Mulligan had to call a neighborhood midwife for assistance. I was born in the kitchen, Mulligan said, and apparently I lifted my head and looked around. She loved that. I amended that story by adding to it. I always said that I took a look around and decided to get back in. I’ve been trying to get back in all my life.

When Mulligan was less than a year old, the family moved to Marion, about forty miles north of Columbus, so that his father could accept an executive position with the Marion Power Shovel Company. Mulligan’s early memories of life in Marion were of an African-American woman named Lily Rowan, whom his mother had hired as a helper. She was kind of a nanny to me. I became her ‘baby.’ She was very protective of me. When I got older, I remembered some of these things. My father could be a pretty stern fellow, not given much to a sense of humor, and he had some very authoritarian kinds of rules. I guess I was not eating something I should have been eating, and he said, ‘By God, you’re supposed to be eating everything on your plate.’ I don’t know if he smacked me or what, but Lily came flying in from the kitchen and said, ‘Don’t you hit my bonzo.’ It’s funny. My relationship with Lily seemed perfectly normal to me, but it must have seemed to my brothers like I was really spoiled, to have a protector and a woman who was so warmhearted and outgoing. She literally adopted me.

Marion was an industrial city of about thirty thousand people. A twelve-piece band still played in the pit in the city’s Palace Theater after the movies, and live music was available in other places, as well. Mulligan’s first recollection of going to the Palace was of the big band in the pit. In the days of the silent movies, he explained, the movies were accompanied by a score and parts for a symphony orchestra. That was the difference between the big movie houses and the B and C theaters. It was kind of a sidelight of the period, but those insights were important to me, to be able to compare what the atmosphere for the music was like in that period.

Mulligan spent a lot of time at Lily’s house, which had a player piano. I used to love that, he said, playing Fats Waller rolls and all sorts of things. I would lean against the piano bench, nose at keyboard height, pumping away. Spending as much time as I did in the black part of town, I just thought that was the normal way things were. I learned things about the community there that were totally different from the rest of town. For instance, when the various black bands would come through, there were no hotels for them. So, the community would put them up. Often there would be musicians staying at Lily’s house.

With the emergence of radio, the big bands started to gain in popularity in the 1930s, and bandleaders such as Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, and Duke Ellington became the equivalents of today’s superstars. They were my heroes. Mulligan said. They were not just musicians; they were like movie stars. So they started putting bands into the theaters because they were drawing people, even though it was primarily dance music. And later the bands brought singers. Sinatra and Dick Haymes came out of the bands.

All of this was developing as the Mulligan family moved out of Marion in 1937, when Gerry was ten. After a brief stay in New Jersey while his father was working on a special project in Puerto Rico, the family moved to Chicago for his father’s latest job. That had the advantage of being a very active city where music was concerned, Mulligan said. My brother Phil and I would be off to the theaters all the time to hear the bands. Four or five theaters in Chicago played name bands. I had heard Louis Armstrong on the radio and saw him in the movies. But unless he came to a theater, I couldn’t see him, because I was too young to go to the clubs.

After a year in Chicago, the family moved to Kalamazoo, Michigan, where Mulligan was inspired by a neighbor to take up the trumpet. We lived in a kind of suburban area, Mulligan recalled, and the kid across the street, Jimmy Shoemaker, played a good trumpet, flashy stuff like ‘Carnival of Venice’ and ‘Flight of the Bumblebee.’ That really gave me the desire to play a horn. Mulligan was enrolled in a Catholic school in downtown Kalamazoo, and during recess, the Michigan Central and New York Central luxury trains would go by, and I’d see people sitting with the white tablecloths and silverware and say, ‘Oh, man, what am I doing here?’ That was my idea of heaven.

The following year, inspired by a new music program at his school, Mulligan switched from trumpet to clarinet and became part of a makeshift band that consisted of his clarinet, one trumpet, one violin, a piano, and drums. I had the desire to write something for us. That was my first arrangement. I was fascinated with the tune Lover with its chromatic progression. So I sat down and tried to write out an arrangement of Lover—lots of whole notes and quarter notes, trying to get all the moving parts and all that stuff. I ultimately never heard it, because the school was taught by nuns and, like a fool, I put on top of all the sheets the title, Lover—and the nuns took one look at the title, and that was the end of that.

Next stop was Detroit. My father, Mulligan recalled, had a dream that all of his sons would become engineers. My two older brothers were in high school, and my father would put them into college if they would go to engineering school. If they didn’t want to go into engineering school, they would have to shift for themselves. They knuckled under. My father never discussed education with me. Maybe it was because he knew what I wanted. I wanted to go to music school. I had taken piano lessons in the second grade in Marion. At the first recital, I forgot the piece halfway through. I was taken off the stage, and the nun told my mother, ‘Save your money. He’ll never learn how to play this stuff the way it’s written.’

On December 7, 1941, Mulligan was in a Detroit theater listening to the Erskine Hawkins band play After Hour Blues. I came out of the theater, he said, and the country was at war. That kind of changed everything. From Detroit, my father went to an engineering job in Reading, Pennsylvania. The owners of the copper companies viewed my father as a villain because of the new techniques he brought in, and he was eventually out of a job. So, he went to work for the government during the war years.

Fortunately, the local school Mulligan attended in Reading had a good band and a good bandmaster who played interesting music. Mulligan won first solo chair for clarinet and was able to study with the owner of a local music store, Sam Correnti, who persuaded him to try arranging. He introduced me to all kinds of things, like jazz solos off of records. And the high school bandmaster used to take me with him on some of his professional dates as a first clarinetist. He used to like it when I would improvise on the solo parts. One of Mulligan’s high school bandmates was Dick Hafer, who later played tenor saxophone in bands led by Charlie Barnet, Woody Herman, and Jimmy Dorsey. In an interview with Mark Myers of the blog JazzWax, Hafer recalled that Mulligan knew all the hip tunes that were on the radio and could arrange them by ear in a flash. He was a great guy, a born genius.

Asked by Michael Bourne, in the January 1989 issue of Down Beat, when he’d known he’d become a musician, Mulligan replied: It was conditioned in me from childhood to have a band, to write for bands, to play with bands. I have a feeling that no matter what era I lived in, a hundred years ago or a hundred years from now, I’d always be interested in orchestration. It’s one of those things that’s a mystery to anybody who doesn’t have an ear or talent for orchestration: why does some kid come along and know how it’s done? And when I was a kid, I knew how it was done, and I wanted to do it. I really wanted to go to music school and study composition, but I never got the chance.

Mulligan had started a quartet with other kids in the school in Reading and met a piano player who had played with Johnny Warrington in Philadelphia. So, when the family was getting ready to move to Philadelphia, he suggested I go to see Johnny Warrington.

2

‘A Band Totally Unlike Others I Had Written For’

Mulligan’s first professional job was with bandleader Tommy Tucker, who hired him as an arranger and took him out on the road for three months. Tucker, who played piano, trumpet, and trombone, was a popular bandleader mostly associated with sweet music. His biggest hit was I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire, recorded in 1941.

The job with Tucker ended after the initial three months because Mulligan’s arrangements were too jazz-oriented for Tucker’s taste. Mulligan returned to Philadelphia and began working as an arranger for Elliot Lawrence, who had succeeded Johnny Warrington as leader of the WCAU band. Lawrence and Mulligan had become good friends in the early ’40s. Gerry did not get along with his own family, Lawrence told me. He hung around with me, and sometimes he would bunk down with my parents outside of Philadelphia. We were very close. He wanted to be a jazz tenor player, but he was sixteen or seventeen and the older musicians would make fun of him. Gerry started to write for my band even before I took over as musical director of WCAU. He and [trumpeter] Red Rodney were into the early days of bebop. They got me into listening to it, and that’s how Gerry started to write for the band. Gerry was given the jazz things—the ‘hot’ things—and I wrote the ballads. He wrote the first arrangements for ‘How High the Moon,’ ‘Just You, Just Me,’ and ‘Jeepers Creepers.’ Mulligan remembered that he and Lawrence spent a lot of time together, and this created some resentment with musicians in the band.

During World War II, late-night broadcasts from clubs were shut down, but people could hear bands on the radio. They heard our band, Lawrence said. We got those spots. It didn’t hurt that Lawrence’s father was the program director. That, said Lawrence, was the start of my long relationship with Gerry.

The relationship took a hit when drummer Gene Krupa came into the Earle theater in Philadelphia in 1946 and hired Mulligan and Rodney away from Lawrence. They gave me less than two weeks’ notice, Lawrence said, because Krupa was going to leave Philadelphia. They went with him, and that was the end of my first Gerry Mulligan era.

Lawrence was eventually signed to a recording contract by Columbia Records and continued to incorporate Mulligan arrangements into his repertoire. Gerry wrote from wherever he was on the road. I bought a lot of his arrangements—‘Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea,’ ‘Swingin’ Door,’ ‘Happy Hooligan.’ When I reorganized the band on the road, he came back and played baritone with the band. I don’t remember the year, but it was before he went to California in the early ’50s.

In February 1946, Mulligan moved to New York to join Krupa’s band, where he was given an opportunity to perform, playing alto and tenor saxophone. His first arrangement to be recorded was Disc Jockey Jump, which became a hit. Krupa described it to George T. Simon, for Simon’s book The Big Bands, as good both musically and commercially, adding that Mulligan was sort of a temperamental kid who always wanted to expound on a lot of his musical ideas. Mulligan recalled how