Gerry Mulligan
Gerry Mulligan
Gerald Joseph "Gerry" Mulliganwas an American jazz saxophonist, clarinetist, composer and arranger. Though Mulligan is primarily known as one of the leading baritone saxophonists in jazz history – playing the instrument with a light and airy tone in the era of cool jazz – he was also a notable arranger, working with Claude Thornhill, Miles Davis, Stan Kenton, and others. Mulligan's pianoless quartet of the early 1950s with trumpeter Chet Baker is still regarded as one of the more important...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionSaxophonist
Date of Birth6 April 1927
CountryUnited States of America
But it's been kind of a sequence of events you know those sorts of things: you meet people and things happen, without thinking about it.
What I came back to is that jazz is a music to be played and not to be intellectualized on.
So I played alto for quite a while until I saved up the money for the baritone
I've always wanted a C trumpet on top, to have that same kind of facility without shouting.
This life of being a transient human being has gotten to a point when it's very hard to bear
Life on the road is murder. It's as though life begins and ends when you have your horn in your mouth.
You can make a saxophone into an electric organ; you can do everything with it
The other saxophones, except as solo instruments, really don't have much point in the orchestra
If you've only got one horn playing, I still want the sense of ensemble.
Only the French, I guess, really use tenor and alto to any great extent in the orchestra
The recording industry has changed; they're enjoying such incredible success in the pop field
Now, the instrumentation in the jazz band and the jazz dance band has gone through many evolutions. For instance, in the 'twenties the tradition was two or three saxophones
The Russian composers, especially, tricked the symphony orchestra into the kind of dynamic, rhythmic thing
When [Billy] Strayhorn came on the scene, he just blew us away.