© - Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.
Sometimes the music on a recording is so engrossing and engaging that I just want you to listen to it rather than have you read about it.
I mean, at some basic level, the music always speaks for itself.
In a larger artistic sense, there is something artificial about trying to describe music in words.
Gerry Mulligan died in 1996 and baritone saxophonist Ronnie Cuber put together The Three Baritone Saxophone Band Plays The Music of Gerry Mulligan as a sort of tribute to him.
Enlisting the assistance of fellow bari sax players Nick Brignola and Gary Smulyan, the band toured briefly and recorded the Dreyfus Jazz CD in 1997.
Ronnie wrote all of the arrangements and selected Andy McKee on bass and Joe Farnsworth on drums to create the rhythmic pulse in a piano-less atmosphere that Mulligan often preferred.
Gerry Mulligan left a huge footprint on the baritone saxophone and I doubt that any player of that instrument in the modern Jazz era has escaped his influence.
Of course, the magnitude of his contributions to Jazz as a composer, arranger and bandleader have few parallels in the history of the music.
I continue to be amazed by the fact that Gerry Mulligan has yet to be the subject of a major biography.
In order to rectify this omission I have published an anthology of articles, interviews and commentaries which you can find on Amazon.com as both a paperback and an eBook - A Gerry Mulligan Reader: Writings on a Jazz Original by Steven A. Cerra.
