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“Well, I suppose it must have been after the Krupa band that I started to play the baritone. I don't really know why I did it. I hung out sometimes with a baritone player named Johnny Dee who played with Frankie Carle's band. He was very interested in horns for their own sake. I don't know if he was teaching or buying and selling horns, but for some reason I made the decision. I don't know if it was anything that Johnny said, or if he had an influence on me or what it was. I can't recall. But it seemed like a pretty arbitrary thing to do. I took the old horns that I had—my alto, tenor, and my clarinet—and sold them, and decided I was just going to play baritone. Why I did it, I never really understood, because I hadn't really been playing it. I wasn't playing baritone with Ike Carpenter, I wasn't playing baritone with Krupa's band ever, so it was just one of those kinds of left-field decisions that I've never been able to rationalize in any way, but that's what I did. I was always kind of sorry that I did because I wound up never finding an alto I liked as much as the one that I sold. Later on I went and bought one, and I never played it much because I never liked it. Same thing with the tenor. So it was all of those things that kept me playing baritone. I wasn't even tempted to play the other horns. And that was the beginning of it. I started going to jam sessions playing nothing but baritone. When I worked with a band it was on baritone.
I had always been fascinated with the role the baritone played in the band. It wasn't just the bottom note, instrument or ensemble. But a lot of the bands, a lot of the arrangers that I liked used the baritone in a way that was very melodic. And, of course, Ellington's band, the way it appears is that Duke wrote the top line of the ensemble, the melody line for the trumpet, and he wrote a bottom line that was the baritone. There was a lot of contrary motion in these two lines, and then you could figure what the rest of the section is doing based on these two main lines. So that means the baritone line was essential to the ensemble, and I liked that very much. ….
Most of the bands when they added a fifth saxophone, a baritone sax, they stuck it on the bottom like a tuba, which can be boring to play. But if you've got something interesting in the ensemble, it's a great register. It's like playing the cello in an orchestra, which is a beautiful register in relationship to the whole ensemble.
In fact, I've often thought, when people ask me, "Why did you choose baritone instead of alto?" I said, "Well, if I had been a string player in my youth, I probably would have chosen cello over violin for the same reason." There's just something about the register that you are attracted to, that you choose to play in. The cello and the baritone are both very much human voice registers.”
- Gerry Mulligan in Being Gerry Mulligan: My Life in Music with Ken Poston [2023]
“Gil, instead of offering any advice at all, was mad at me. That was no help. I really needed some direction. Somebody had to tell me because I didn't know how to deal with people. It was hard to get along because I've always, with my quick temper . . . things would erupt out of my mouth that were not what I wanted to say but then the damage would be done and I didn't know how to undo it. That led to a lot of personal trouble for me in dealing with people.”
- Gerry Mulligan in Being Gerry Mulligan: My Life in Music with Ken Poston [2023]
As Gerry moved from his early associations with the Gene Krupa, Tommy Tucker and Elliot Lawrence big bands, his next musical environment found his music shaped and molded by a tenure with the Claude Thornhill Orchestra and one of its principal arrangers, Gil Evans.
Also reflected in the following piece is Jeru’s astute awareness - Mulligan was a keen observer of people, places and things. He didn’t miss much about what was going on around him.
Unfortunately, though, his observational acumen notwithstanding, this was still a period when the early Mulligan lacked the social skills he needed to interact successfully with people in general and other musicians in particular.
CLAUDE AND GIL from Gerry Mulligan in Being Gerry Mulligan: My Life in Music with Ken Poston [2023]
“There is a kind of irony about the Thornhill band, or a coincidence at least. I had loved the band as a kid still in high school, and I started getting Thornhill records because the sound of the band was beautiful. I always thought that Claude approached writing for a dance band as if it were an orchestra, and even though there were no strings, he always used, in the early band especially, two clarinets. A lot of the time people thought there were French horns in the band, but there weren't. In the early band it was just five brass and the four saxes plus two clarinets, and he managed to get those orchestral sounds that way. It was the clarinets that did it, not the French horn. Later on he did have French horns because that enhanced the thing and gave it more depth, but even so, as an orchestration device, you can get those kinds of orchestral, faraway sounds that they did so well. There was always imagination in the arrangements. They always came up with some kind of unique approach to tunes. There were some things they played that were just so imaginative and beautiful to me, and he had a great vocal group that they used in interesting ways.
At one period during the early war years, or even before the war, maybe starting in 1939 or so, Glenn Miller had a daily half-hour broadcast. It was a very popular show even though it was on at 6:00 a.m. or what seemed like an ungodly time, but it was, I suppose, before the news or after. It became like an important slot for a music program. It was very popular.
Then, after a while, they stretched the show and did another segment that had Claude Thornhill's band on it. So for a while it was Glenn Miller, I think for a half-hour, and then Thornhill's band for a half-hour. I loved the band. Then when Miller and his band were drafted into the service, Claude was given the Glenn Miller time slot, so he was really set up to become the most popular band in the country. And it was popular. People loved it.
So things were really looking up for a while and then, after not too long a time, Claude got drafted and it wasn't a high-profile draft. He chose to go into the navy and Miller got into the air force; I guess it was still called the air corps then. Miller was made a major and was high profile. And you know, they made a big fuss about it, and it was something that everybody felt something about.
Claude, on the other hand, ended up being like a chief petty officer or something because the navy wasn't about to make any musicians into officers. They figured that the upstart air force could do that, but the navy was not about to breach tradition. So none of the musicians were made officers. Claude became the piano player in Artie Shaw's band, and Shaw was a chief petty officer. I don't know what rank they gave to Claude, but number one, it was low profile, and number two, it was really tough because they sent those guys out to the South Pacific and they had some hair-raising stories to tell.
Artie left after a while. I don't know how long he was out there. Claude took it over, and from all of the accounts that I've heard about it, Claude was really remarkable out there. He'd play a piano if they had one or he'd play accordion if they didn't. He proceeded to try to make good music for the guys, island hopping for God's sake, flying island to island and going around playing for the guys. I mean, it was really physically tough and I don't know how many years they did that; really something.
So finally, when the war was over and Claude came back, I heard that they were reorganizing, and I was back in New York staying at the Edison Hotel. I had a room that was on the back of the building, which meant it faced the back of all these other buildings. So it was like a great big, not just a little air shaft, but a big air well between the buildings.
The first morning I was there I hear music, and I open up my window and I say, "My God, that sounds just like Claude Thornhill’s band. It must be somebody playing records or something somewhere," and I listen. They play the thing through and a while passes, and they start playing the thing again and they stop. I say, "My God, they're rehearsing," and it turns out my room was just about over where the rehearsal hall was.
I had this friend who was like one of my crazy Texas friends who just loved music. He was a guitar player, but he just loved to be on the scene and he was fun-loving. His name actually was David Wheat but his nickname was Buckwheat, and it fit him down to the ground. He was really a character. He showed up in my room and he had some good Texas pot or something, so we'd sit there and smoke and listen to Thornhill's band as long as they rehearsed. For the whole week, every morning and into the afternoon, the band would be rehearsing.
So I heard them when they were putting it together again. I was like the kid in the candy store. I never did go down to the rehearsals at that point because I always hated to interrupt some place if I didn't know somebody.
At some point I had gone back to Philadelphia and I was living there. One day I got a postcard from Gil Evans that said, "What the hell are you doing in Philadelphia? Come to New York where everything is happening. . . . Gil."
I had met Gil Evans, most likely when I was with Krupa's band. I remember going to some place in New York and I met Gil, who was there backstage, and we became friends.
I said, "Well, I guess you're right." I took off for New York and found myself a place to live and proceeded to hang out at Gil's place most of the time. Finally, Gil talked to Claude and Claude invited me to write for the band, and it was just kind of a natural evolution.
My first arrangement was "Poor Little Rich Girl," which Claude liked a lot. So they used to use that as the opener from then on, kind of the warm-up piece. Gil and Claude always felt that Gil's writing and my writing, and also Bill Borden’s writing, all kind of fit together. Even though there were different stylistic things, they were kind of complementary to each other.
So that worked out nicely, and I wrote for the band for quite a while. I was very much in awe of Claude, you know. Claude was such a shy man and I was always basically kind of shy and reticent, so our conversations together were always a lot of hemming and hawing, and neither of us could talk to each other.
I never intended to play with the band, but they were going out on a tour and Gil and Claude wanted me to go with the band at that point. What had happened was we spent a lot of time having sessions in New York. Whenever the band was in town, the rhythm section, who were all kind of disciples of Gil, would always get together and blow with Danny Polo, the clarinetist, and maybe one or two other guys.
I was playing with them a lot in that way, so it seemed a natural evolution to go out and play with the band for a while. I was out with them for a few months, I guess. It wasn't a terribly long time and it wasn't the greatest period for the band either, because that was the time when things were starting to fall apart in the whole music business. I think they had a hell of a time keeping the band working and getting a price for the band. It started to happen in 1948. That must have been kind of a crucial year. The bands started to disband one after another because the guys just didn't have the money to sustain themselves. Duke, for years, sustained himself on his composer's royalties and ASCAP royalties and sank the money into the band and kept his band going. But not everybody had the means to do it. I remember Count Basie in the early 1950s went out with about a seven-piece band after he disbanded. Woody even, for a while, had a small band so it really died very quickly; going from having hundreds and hundreds of bands all over the country, it just sort of disappeared.
The focus was moved. I guess all of show business was in kind of a ferment; they didn't know quite what to do with themselves. It was also a transition from the important days of radio. Radio was still it, you know. What the family did in the 1930s, man, you had your favorite show, the Jack Benny show and the Fred Allen show and Burns & Allen and so on and everybody would sit and look at the radio set. But radio was great, and as a social focus I always felt radio was a healthy evolution and television was unhealthy, because radio did things that you still had to use your own imagination; you did your own visualizing. Television does it all for you, you know; you're just kind of a blob who sits and reacts to all of this. When you compare the stuff they do now to the science fiction things they did in the 1940s and 1950s, I mean, there's no comparison, and the 1930s even more so, though I must say the Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers things were quite satisfying when we were kids.
But musically it was a good period for me because the band traveled by cars most of the time at that period, and Danny liked to have his own car. Because I was young and strong, I always had the first gig of driving after the dance was over. Danny and I liked to take back roads instead of going on the main highways. We'd say, "This road looks good on the map." So we wandered around and sometimes wound up in the middle of somebody's farm in Indiana at six in the morning. We had some kind of eerie experiences that way.
Being with Danny was kind of a settling experience for me because Danny was very mature and gentle and kind of spiritual. There was a quality about the guys in "Thornhill's band who were close to Gil. They all had this kind of spiritual quality. There were lots of almost religious-sounding theories that these guys were always into. When they were in town, Gil and Billy Exner, the drummer, would talk all night. They were very much into mysticism. In fact, the relationship with Danny and Gil was mystical to begin with.
Gil had known Billy for years apparently, and Billy had been a seaman all his life. He didn't start playing drums until he was about forty, and some place he was in — South Africa or Asia or somewhere — he bought a picture of a man with an Asian face. It was just a beautiful picture: a very serene, wise-looking man with kind of a wispy gray beard. He brought that picture back and gave it to Gil. Well, sometime later, Danny Polo joined the band, and Danny Polo was the absolute spitting image of this picture that Billy had brought back. Man, he looked like a younger version, not that much younger either, because Danny had gray hair and his mustache had turned gray. He was probably in his fifties, but he was just identical to this picture. There were lots of little things like that about those guys that made for a kind of contact between them that was unusual.
The guys in the rhythm section, like Joe Shulman, the bass player, loved Billy — and they just had all these theories about how rhythm should be played and its function in the band. They were very influenced by the Basie rhythm section, where Freddie Green was really the control center of it. Barry Galbraith, guitarist with the Thornhill band, was very much in that mold. He played with the band in a similar way to Freddie, and later on when I got to know Freddie, I realized that there were other similarities in personality, which often happens — that people who are of similar physical structure and similar personality often have the same kind of approach to music. And there will be something recognizable in the ways that they play. There are these basic structural similarities. I was always fascinated with the ways that people's physical presence related to their playing.
A good example was Lester Young, whose music, especially when he was young and playing with the Basie band, had such grace and a flying, soaring quality to what he played. It just came out so effortlessly, and he would stand and look so graceful and hold his horn up, man, he was flying.
Bird, on the other hand, who was very down to earth, had a hard, straight-ahead kind of time. He could swing but it was in another kind of way altogether. Bird would walk on the stand and plant his feet like a tree, you know; he was like rooted to the ground and so he'd play this stuff that was fiery and with that same kind of earthy, basic beat going on. The ways that they held themselves physically related to the ways that they played.
I'll never forget one time I was standing outside Birdland and I turned around and saw Prez's hat kind of sailing up the stairs, you know, a porkpie hat with the big brim, and he'd sail it upstairs . . . effortlessly, man. He floated, you wouldn't see him taking steps, he'd kind of float out of the place and down the street and right behind him a couple of minutes later came Charlie. And Charlie comes stomping up the steps and the whole place rattled — such a total difference in personality.
Several of the musicians in the Thornhill band were drawn to Gil Evans. I think they gravitated toward him because Gil tended to be a philosopher. He adopted attitudes that I think were his associations with, probably, Zen Buddhism. That seemed to be the direction that he was evolving. But his attitudes were very considered and nonjudgmental, and there was always this kind of activity of thinking and theorizing and talking. It was an ongoing thing. So it was a very rewarding experience for everybody to be part of something, and you'd feel like something is happening. Gil was very much the focus of it. He brought that out in other people.
He was a leader in a way, but he refused the conventional roles of leadership, and he was very happy to let Claude be the one who had to deal with an audience and with agents and with the musicians. You know, it suited him just fine that he didn't have to do any of that and he could just concentrate on writing, which of course is a very selfish way to be and he realized that. It's a hell of a lot easier to let somebody else do all the worrying and all the kind of work you don't want to do.
But if you want a band and you want the things that go with having a band — the music — somebody's got to do it. Bands don't just happen. They don't run themselves, and they have to be self-supporting or they can't function.
As a consequence, Gil was a kind of guru to everyone, even though he really refused the role. There are things that happened to me during that period that if Gil had really offered advice, it's quite likely that I would have done things differently. But he didn't, so I went my way. After the fact, sometimes he would get mad at me because of what I did. I'd say that it's too late and I wasn't smart enough to go and undo what I had done.
For instance, at one point all of us, even though we were writing for Thornhill, needed to write for other bands to make money. And George Russell, he was always looking for other bands to write for, and Johnny Carisi, you know, we had to do it. One time I got an offer to write some stuff for Herbie Fields, a tune that he wanted that was a vocal for the girl singer. Herbie had a band that was kind of a stomping band. There were a couple of bands like that. I always liked them but I never really thought for myself that I had a feeling for writing for them. I was always trying for orchestral things, the interrelation of parts and counterpoints and all that kind of stuff, and these kinds of bands didn't function well in that kind of situation. These were ensemble bands, and that's what you should write for them.
Well, I did the best I could on this thing and brought it into the rehearsal and they liked it and it worked out all right, but Herbie wanted me to change the ending. Well, I was kind of stunned, not because I felt that it had been written in stone and that it couldn't be changed, it was because I couldn't change it. I didn't know what to do. I had done what I could do, and this was again my own limitations. So without saying anything to him, I collected the music and left. I'll never forget the look of astonishment on Herbie's face and on the musicians, like, "What happened?"
I went back and told Gil what had happened, and, you know, I was kind of being a little smart-ass about it I guess, like wanting somebody to give me a pat on the back or something, and he was furious with me. Well, I agreed with him, and I learned a little bit about being able to swallow false pride or to be able to overcome my own blustering, because I think we usually bluster, do dumb things in life, because of our basic inability to know the right way to do it. You make the worst mistakes trying to cover up what you're trying to hide. In this case, I was trying to cover up the fact that I didn't know what the hell to do, and I made a bunch of people unhappy. I really hurt Herbie's feelings. I never meant to do it and I didn't know how to undo it.
Gil, instead of offering any advice at all, was mad at me. That was no help. I really needed some direction. Somebody had to tell me because I didn't know how to deal with people. It was hard to get along because I've always, with my quick temper . . . things would erupt out of my mouth that were not what I wanted to say but then the damage would be done and I didn't know how to undo it. That led to a lot of personal trouble for me in dealing with people. I am embarrassed to this day to have hurt Herbie Fields' feelings when he had nothing to do with it. It was my inability to be able to do what he wanted with the arrangement. That was life. That was just one example.”
