Being Gerry Mulligan

Being Gerry Mulligan: My Life in Music is Gerry Mulligan in his own words. This autobiography tells the story of the iconic American jazz saxophonist, clarinettist, composer, and arranger.

Being Gerry Mulligan: My Life in Music is an intimate chronicle of Gerry Mulligan’s life and career, told in his own words. This personal narrative reveals great insight into the musician’s complex personality. He speaks freely about the important milestones in both his personal and professional life, bringing a new understanding to the man behind the music. Gerry Mulligan was one of the most important figures in the history of jazz. He was extremely influential as both a composer/arranger and as an instrumentalist. His career spanned an amazing six decades, beginning in the 1940s and continuing up to his death in 1996. Within that time, he worked with almost every major jazz figure, including Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday, Thelonious Monk, and Dizzy Gillespie, as well as his own illustrious groups that featured the likes of Chet Baker, Bob Brookmeyer, Art Farmer, and Chico Hamilton. As a composer, his music was distinct and original. His melodies were masterpieces, logically structured and filled with wit and humor. As an arranger, his linear approach and clever use of counterpoint helped define a new standard for modern jazz orchestration. As an instrumentalist, he is the most significant baritone saxophonist in the history of jazz. Gerry Mulligan single-handedly established the baritone saxophone as a solo voice. As one of the great jazz innovators, his writing and playing influenced entire stylistic movements, including cool jazz and bossa nova. This is his story, the way he wanted it told.

Mulligan began with Gene Krupa, and since then has played with Miles Davis in the "Birth of the Cool" sessions, and formed his own groups, including a much-acclaimed piano quartet. This book provides a commentary on Mulligan's recorded output

JERU'S JOURNEY: THE LIFE & MUSIC OF GERRY MULLIGAN

More than 25 muscians who first came to prominence during the 1950s are the subject of this collection of interviews. The author's purpose has been to help preserve the oral history of a great American artform, and this book reveals that jazz musicians who can 'tell a story' with their horn when improvising can be just as articulate in conversation.

The Gerry Mulligan Quartet, founded in Los Angeles in 1952, was widely acclaimed as the first small ensemble in jazz that did not include a chordal instrument such as a piano or guitar. Using original scores and detailed transcriptions of Mulligan's early work, The Gerry Mulligan 1950s Quartets offers an intimate look at Mulligan's musical development from his teenage years to adulthood, analyzing the ways in which his compositions and arrangements evolved through collaborations with Elliot Lawrence, Gene Krupa, and Claude Thornhill, culminating with Miles Davis's Birth of the Cool nonet. Featuring original interviews with Mulligan's associates, author Alyn Shipton presents a fresh take on Mulligan's harmonic creativity, in the process tracing the ups and downs of Mulligan's personal life, heroin addiction, imprisonment, and eventual sobriety.

This first major biography of the most romanticized icon in jazz thrillingly recounts his wild ride. From his emergence in the 1950s--when an uncannily beautiful young man from Oklahoma appeard on the West Coast to become, seemingly overnight, the prince of "cool" jazz--until his violent, drug-related death in Amsterdam in 1988, Chet Baker lived a life that has become an American myth. Here, drawing on hundreds of interviews and previously untapped sources, James Gavin gives a hair-raising account of the trumpeter's dark journey.

(Book). In a career that spanned more than 50 years, Gerry Mulligan was revered and recognized as a groundbreaking composer, arranger, bandleader, and baritone saxophonist. His legacy comes to life in this biography, which chronicles his immense contributions to American music, far beyond the world of jazz. Mulligan's own observations are drawn from his oral autobiography, recorded in 1995. These are intermingled with comments and recollections from those who knew him, played with him, or were influenced by him, as well as from the author, who interviewed him in 1981. Jeru's Journey The Life & Music of Gerry Mulligan vividly recounts all the major milestones and complications in Mulligan's extraordinary life and career, ranging from his early days of arranging for big bands in the 1940s to his chance 1974 meeting with Countess Franca Rota, who would have a major impact on the last two decades of his life. In between were his battles with drugs; his significant contributions to the historic 1949 Birth of the Cool recording; the introduction of an enormously popular piano-less quartet in the early 1950s; the creation of his innovative concert jazz band in the early '60s; his collaboration personal and professional with actress Judy Holliday; his breakthrough into classical music; and his love of and respect for the American Songbook.