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
New York is still where I live most of the time.
I'm fascinated with the electronic devices that we can mess around with.
I like what I hear other guys doing, but the thing that really attracts me is melodic playing.
The recording industry has changed; they're enjoying such incredible success in the pop field
Then, of course, I played alto and tenor, wherever there were jobs.
You can make a saxophone into an electric organ; you can do everything with it
The baritone can serve functions that the alto and tenor cannot, in orchestral voicing
This life of being a transient human being has gotten to a point when it's very hard to bear
Because if you've got the wit, you can make anything into a melody, ultimately.
In a way, I started out to be a baritone player.
So I played alto for quite a while until I saved up the money for the baritone
In fact, I heard Bird first, and had got well into listening to him. You know, it's the kind of accidental thing that awareness of a player is: what's available, what somebody happens to play for you.
And the other thing we do: we periodically have softball games with the band, because they're all baseball nuts that helps to keep the spirit alive.
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.