The hot music topic in Los Angeles last week was the cool jazz of a gaunt, hungry-looking young (25) fellow named Gerry Mulligan, who plays the baritone saxophone. For the past three months, Mulligan's quartet has been performing in a nightclub known as the Haig, a spot that has featured such stalwarts as Red Norvo and Erroll Garner—and he was drawing the biggest crowds in the club's history. Says the Haig's happy manager: "People just like his kind of sound."
Mulligan's kind of sound is just about unique in the jazz field: his quartet uses neither piano nor guitar, does its work with trumpet, bass, drums and, of course, Mulligan's hoarse-voiced baritone sax. In comparison with the frantic extremes of bop, his jazz is rich and even orderly, is marked by an almost Bach-like counterpoint. As in Bach, each Mulligan man is busily looking for a pause, a hole in the music which he can fill with an answering phrase. Sometimes the polyphony is reminiscent of tailgate blues, sometimes it comes tumbling with bell-over-mouthpiece impromptu.
Eyes Shut. Gerald Joseph Mulligan looks more extreme than he sounds. His hair is cut for a Jerry Lewis effect, crew-cropped on top, bangs in front. He has a sleepy face, and on the bandstand he keeps his watery-green eyes closed even when listening to Trumpeter Chet Baker, opens them only occasionally to glower at customers who are boorish enough to talk against the music.
Mulligan is extremely serious about his music. As early as he can remember, he was inventing tunes of his own on the piano—"I hate to play other people's." In seventh grade he got a clarinet and made his first arrangement. By his senior year at Philadelphia's West Catholic High School, he was a full-fledged arranger, and his studies had fallen off lamentably. "I walked into physics class and listened to the teacher. Man, I didn't get a word of it. Right then and there, I quit."
But his arranging got him high marks, and he worked for such bandleaders as Tommy Tucker and Claude Thornhill, looking for ideas in his favorite composers —Stravinsky, Ravel, Prokofiev and Bach. When he turned to playing, he could blow ragtime, Dixieland, the blues and bop, but he refused to be categorized: "It would be senseless to start playing and sound like anybody else."
But Sleep Can Wait. Last June he walked into the Haig stony-broke. Somebody lent him a horn, and he began sitting in on jam sessions. Within a month he was leading the sessions and drawing customers. Pacific Jazz Records recorded an LP of the quartet playing a few jazz standards and some of Gerry's own compositions, e.g., Soft Shoe, Nights at the Turntable. The Haig put Gerry in headline position at $200 a week.
After a long evening at the horn, Jazzman Mulligan finds he is too keyed up by 2 a.m. to sleep, so he stays up until 6 writing new tunes and arrangements. Next Mulligan objective: an enlarged band and a nationwide tour. "I've got to keep moving. I've got to grow."