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“In her biography, Straight Ahead - The Story Of Stan Kenton, Carol Easton refers to a personality clash between Kenton and Mulligan; 'Gerry was pretty fiery in those days, having it out with most people...' Which Stan summed up as follows: 'He (Mulligan) is quite an individualist and I guess I am also, and as much respect as we have for each other, if I had let the orchestra play Mulligan's music exactly the way he wanted it played, it wouldn't have had a Kenton sound to it at all. Gerry declared I never would perform his music any way that he wanted it performed. But, you know, even his (later) big band sounded like a small group, they played like a small group - whereas I think that a big band should sound like a big band, and it should have much strength as well as the soft things.'”
- Quoted in Raymond Horricks, Gerry Mulligan’s Ark [2003]
“No band, no rehearsal hall, no concert stage was ever large enough to contain the combined egos of Stan Kenton and Gerry Mulligan.”
- Carol Easton, Straight Ahead: The Story of Stan Kenton [1973]
“GERRY MULLIGAN By the end of the '40s the thing that was the most disturbing to me was that I could see that the bands, the dance bands, the name bands, were not going to survive. That's what was really upsetting to me. That had more to do with my anxiety about life than anything else. Except that without ever thinking about—1 want to do this or what I want to be in life, man, I never thought about another thing—seriously, other than being a bandleader and writing music for bands. Dance music. So the big band got cut off from its own source, which is dance music. But it's funny because the band kept evolving and getting bigger. Starting in the 20s they would have like four or five horns, and then the stock band got to be two trumpets and a trombone and three saxes. Three or four really. Then in the '30s it got to be four brass and four saxes, three or four rhythm. And then five brass. Then they got smart, and it got to be four trumpets, three bones, and five saxophones. It just kept going. And do you know, part of the thing that really depressed me and I always hated being called West Coast Jazz because to me the influences out of the West Coast in jazz were personified by Stan Kenton's band.
And Stan's band to me was some kind of way symbolic of the end of the bands as I loved them. It had gotten too big and too pompous. You know, it took itself so seriously. Like just something terribly Wagnerian about it all. Well, I once said, thinking I was being humorous, that Stan is the "Wagner of Jazz" and then realized afterwards—because he had done a thing with the transcriptions of the Wagner pieces, and tried to conduct them—that he really saw himself that way and didn't see any humor in it at all. But I hated what that band stood for because it was like the final evolution of wrongly taken points. The way the band kept growing. And the absolute maximum for any kind of use was the five saxes and the three or four bones and the four trumpets. The main reason . . . there's one you can do with four trumpets you can't do any other way, and that's four-part harmony, which only four trumpets together sound . . . OK. The only function for the fifth trumpet is an alternate player. But Stan's band kept getting bigger and bigger—to five trombones. Now five trombones is the most asinine.
That's why I didn't like Johnny [Richards'] band [either]. For just that reason. The only one of those bands that I liked at all was Boyd Raeburn's, and that's because Handy and Mandel wrote some interesting things for it. But the rest of the bands were just too preposterous. But Stan's band was just so unmusical to me.”
- Ira Gitler, Swing to Bop: An Oral History of the Transition in Jazz in the 1940s [1985]
The decade of the 1950s didn’t dawn in a particularly auspicious manner for Gerry Mulligan.
He was scuffling [Musician speak for surviving with difficulty; barely making a living].
After associations with the big bands of Gene Krupa, Tommy Tucker, Elliot Lawrence and Claude Thornhill in the 1940s, that decade closed with the demise of Gerry’s cherished big bands.
The association with what was to become known as the Birth of the Cool recordings in the late 1940s, while artistically satisfying, was financially unrewarding for Jeru [Miles’ term for Mulligan].
With little promise of more work, Gerry decided to head west with his friend Gale Madden and seek his fortune in California, a state which, following the close of World War II, was open to all sorts of development and seemed to promise unlimited opportunity.
Although the big bands were vanishing, one that was still standing and growing in popularity was Stan Kenton’s Orchestra.
Based in Los Angeles, CA where it originated in 1941, it seemed a logical first stop for Gerry, as his forte at the time was still primarily composing and writing for big bands.
Having been the principal arranger for his orchestra for many years, with the arrival of Pete Rugolo in the late 1940s, who became and alter ego for Stan similar to the relationship between Billy Strayhorn and Duke Ellington, Kenton became open to working with new arrangers while he concentrated on the commercial aspects of operating his orchestra.
But Stan’s big, brash, bombastic orchestra would prove ultimately to be very unwelcoming to Gerry’s approach to orchestration.
Given the Jazz luminaries both Stan and Gerry would go on to become later in their careers, there is scant information about their working relationship in the Jazz literature. [And I’ve yet to locate a photograph of the two of them during the time they worked together.]
But perusing what little there is, one can’t help but come to the conclusion that they were an odd couple, but musically and in terms of their personalities. This excerpt from Carol Easton’s Straight Ahead: The Story of Stan Kenton [1973] is an apt description of their relationship.
“Swinging is one of those elusive and indefinable terms. Like soul, you know it when you hear it. Swinging implies looseness, freedom, spontaneity and instinctively flawless rhythm.
It has probably been associated with Count Basie as much as with any big bandleader. And Stan has always had a horror of his band's sounding like Basie's—or Duke's, or Woody's, or any other bandleader's. Once he established his own sound, it was straight ahead, letting the critics fall where they may. More than a principle was at stake; to Stan, it was a matter of identity.
But while swinging turns Stan off, jazz players turn him on. And therein lies Stan's (to use Bill Russo's word) dichotomy. He covets their lack of restraint, even while shying away from it. He hires them out of respect for their talents, and lets them wail their hearts out in their solo work. But the arrangements he favors do not swing. And to a jazz player, there is simply no substitute for swinging! So the musicians bitch, and exert varying degrees of pressure in all sorts of subtle, and sometimes not-so-subtle, ways. And Stan has made compromises.
His most notable compromise took place in 1952, when he began buying charts from Gerry Mulligan and Bill Holman— two uncommonly talented, uncompromisingly swinging writers.
No band, no rehearsal hall, no concert stage was ever large enough to contain the combined egos of Stan Kenton and Gerry Mulligan. Perhaps because of his drug habit, which he has since overcome, Mulligan was arrogant, rude, abrasive and rebellious. He frequently made it clear to anybody within earshot that he didn't give a shit about Stan Kenton's music, that he had more musical expertise in his little finger . . . and so on, ad nauseam. He insisted on over rehearsing the band, as though his charts were their sole concern. Stan loved the way he wrote — "Swing House" was one of the band's most popular numbers — but, "If I had let the orchestra play Mulligan's music exactly the way he wanted it played, it wouldn't have had a Kenton sound at all." For his part, Mulligan remembers that Kenton would "tell his drums to play so loud they sounded like they were part of a whole separate band!"”
Similar sentiments of discontent between Stan and Gerry can be found in this excerpt from Bill Dobbins’ Conversations with Bill Holman: Thoughts and Recollections of a Jazz Master [2017].
“B.H. Well, I joined the band in March [1952], and I didn't write much for the band until the end of that year. Aside from Invention, I had written a chart on Star Eyes that had a whole lot of lines in it. Stan played it a few times, but he said, "Holman, that sounds like a merry-go-round."
Both (Laugh.)
B. H. It had all these lines that didn't especially say anything. But they were there, and they worked. But then I should talk about Gerry [Mulligan]. Because he had written eight or ten charts for the band about the time that I joined. That was when he came out from New York to L. A.
B.D. Yeah.
B. H. Stan didn't like most of'em because they were too light, too happy.
B.D. (Laughs.)
B.H. He called them "Bo Peep music".
B.D. (Laughs.)
B.H. But a few of the dance charts he did play. And I got to study those things and find out what a real arranger does, you know, about form, about changes, how to use the sections, how to use mixed colors, and like that. A lot of people think that I got the linear thing from Gerry, but I didn't. I had it before that. But I did get a lot from him in terms of how you do it.”
After an introductory paragraph which contains a nice overview of Gerry’s time with Stan, the following excerpt from Steven Harris’ The Kenton Kronicles [2000] goes on to include Gerry’s reminiscences of his time on the Kenton Band and his relationship with Stan which was recorded during a Los Angeles Jazz Institute panel discussion in Redondo Beach, CA from October, 1994.
New to Kenton's writing staff was 24 year-old Gerry Mulligan (1927-96), who hailed from New York City. Aptly nicknamed "Jeru" by Miles Davis (becoming a composition as well for the Birth of the Cool band formed in 1948), Mulligan's scores for Kenton between February and June, 1952 included: Walkin' Shoes, All The Things You Are, Swing House, Limelight, Where Or When, Bweebida-Bobbida, Dancing In The Dark, Too Marvelous for Words and Begin The Beguine. His Young Blood was originally written in 1949 for the Second Herd of Woody Herman, who rarely if ever played it publicly. A superb chart on Night & Day for Kenton (in the author's opinion, the best of the bunch) never got past rehearsal.
Gerry Mulligan: “When I first got to New York in '45, you could walk down Broadway and there was one rehearsal studio after another. I could spend a whole day going from one band to the other. But that gradually petered out, and the bands had died off. So I picked up and left. I had a friend named Gale Madden and we hitchhiked to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where I had a friend who got me a job for a while. I played with a country & western band for a month or so. Then word came from someplace...next thing I know, one of them tells me, "I'm sorry, but you're not a member of the union." So we picked up and set out for California, where we were heading in the first place. One of the reasons we wound up hitchhiking was because I was owed for some arrangements I had written, and I couldn't collect. If I'd had the money, I would have paid my rent; I would have paid my union dues. The two people in particular were Buddy Rich and Stan Getz.. I had written a whole record date for Stan. Buddy... he eventually paid me; Getz never did.
Gale was a very important friend of Bob Graettinger [who was arranging for Kenton] … she was really responsible for getting Bob writing again, because he was not in very good shape himself. So Stan invited me to write something for the band...it was quite obvious at the rehearsal that Stan didn't like my chart very much, but the musicians liked it...he was stuck with me. I wrote a dozen, maybe fifteen charts for him. Stan used to kick off the tempo of my piece, then he'd kind of stand, leaning on the side of the stage [frowning]. It's funny...I always understood why he was like that, because it was such a different philosophy than what he was either used to, or liked. My things...not any of them had a sledgehammer in them. Stan really liked that, to start out with a sledgehammer and work your way up!
I realized in a way that I hit a low ebb with Stan, because in one arrangement, I had an indication on the drum part that said brushes on cymbals. We started playing this thing...and Stan, all 6'4" of him, jumped in, "No, no, no, no!" We all looked around. I said, "What's the matter?" He said, "We don't use brushes on cymbals in this band; that's faggot music!" I asked, "Stan, how can a musical instrument have any kind of sexual characteristic?"
Oddly enough, we always had kind of an antagonistic relation to each other, and always liked each other. I liked Stan very much; he was a great guy. He made a lot of really remarkable things happen. One, of course, is that he gave Bob Graettinger an outlet. Had Graettinger lived, I'm convinced that he would be considered one of the outstanding American composers of this century. He was really incredible in his techniques, his control of orchestration and his imagination. Some of the music that Pete Rugolo wrote for the band was just so beautiful, fantastic...and of course, he [Stan] put up with me, so I can't really complain too much.”
Steven Harris concludes this portion of his book on the Kenton-Mulligan relationship with the following anecdote.
“One Kenton band member, requesting anonymity, remembered: "Bob Graettinger and Gerry Mulligan, the two most opposite musical minds you could find, would come to rehearsal wearing unisex clothes. They'd sit together in the same posture and, as though on a given cue, cross their legs from left to right and several minutes later, cross their legs from right to left, and that was the only animate sign from them. They were both unusual people."”
Mulligan’s own words from these excerpts in Chapter 11 “Young Blood - Writing for Stan Kenton in Being Mulligan: My Life in Music, Gerry Mulligan with Ken Poston [2023]:
“They [Gale Madden and Bob Graettinger] were in touch with Stan Kenton, and I wound up getting the opportunity to write for the band, which, even though it wasn't my ideal band or style or anything, I was very glad to have the job to write for them and did my best to try to satisfy Stan as a leader. I wrote a lot of charts for him at that period. I remember the first thing I wrote for him was very contrapuntal. I was trying to do a thing that built an ensemble sound out of all unison contrapuntal lines, and it built up to a nice solid ensemble chorus.
Stan didn't really like it very well, so he said if I rewrote it, he would take it. So I did. I took it and put the tune "Walking Shoes" on the first part and used the out chorus from the piece that was there, and that was all right. But I was always kind of amused by the fact that I felt Stan had kind of gotten stuck with me. He'd had all these various bands that were experimental or the large orchestra with strings, which was the thing he was dealing with when I was first around the band. It was a whole orchestra, and we were always governed by some kind of motivating principle. So this time he was he going to have a band for the musicians. This was going to be a swing band.
The fact that the musicians liked my charts and they enjoyed playing them, he sort of felt obligated to buy them. But he made sure that I understood that the other guys were to do the concert stuff and what I was writing was like the dog work, which was the dance arrangements. It was all right with me because I liked the tunes. I did the best I could with them. I'm not sure how much he liked them. Then I threw in a few originals along the way and he had the idea for me to write a piece called "Young Blood," so I did.
It's funny with that one, though. Gail and I had a little apartment in Hollywood, close to Hollywood Boulevard. It had a big walk-in closet and I had this little sixty-six-key studio upright piano. I wheeled it into the closet and stayed there for three days while I wrote "Young Blood." Just stayed there, man! It was the only arrangement I ever wrote in anger.
And I realized something else, too, because this has happened to me on a number of occasions, where I do something, a piece of music, a composition or arrangement or something, that kind of boils in my head. A sort of incomplete state for a long time, and I'll turn around and rewrite it and come up with something that's altogether different, but based on the original idea.”
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