Being Gerry Mulligan


Book Description

Being Gerry Mulligan: My Life in Music is an intimate chronicle of Gerry Mulligan’s life and career, told in his own words. This personal narrative reveals great insight into the musician’s complex personality. He speaks freely about the important milestones in both his personal and professional life, bringing a new understanding to the man behind the music. Gerry Mulligan was one of the most important figures in the history of jazz. He was extremely influential as both a composer/arranger and as an instrumentalist. His career spanned an amazing six decades, beginning in the 1940s and continuing up to his death in 1996. Within that time, he worked with almost every major jazz figure, including Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday, Thelonious Monk, and Dizzy Gillespie, as well as his own illustrious groups that featured the likes of Chet Baker, Bob Brookmeyer, Art Farmer, and Chico Hamilton. As a composer, his music was distinct and original. His melodies were masterpieces, logically structured and filled with wit and humor. As an arranger, his linear approach and clever use of counterpoint helped define a new standard for modern jazz orchestration. As an instrumentalist, he is the most significant baritone saxophonist in the history of jazz. Gerry Mulligan single-handedly established the baritone saxophone as a solo voice. As one of the great jazz innovators, his writing and playing influenced entire stylistic movements, including cool jazz and bossa nova. This is his story, the way he wanted it told.




Listen, Gerry Mulligan


Book Description

Mulligan began with Gene Krupa, and since then has played with Miles Davis in the "Birth of the Cool" sessions, and formed his own groups, including a much-acclaimed piano quartet. This book provides a commentary on Mulligan's recorded output




Jeru's Journey


Book Description

JERU'S JOURNEY: THE LIFE & MUSIC OF GERRY MULLIGAN




Fifties Jazz Talk


Book Description

More than 25 muscians who first came to prominence during the 1950s are the subject of this collection of interviews. The author's purpose has been to help preserve the oral history of a great American artform, and this book reveals that jazz musicians who can 'tell a story' with their horn when improvising can be just as articulate in conversation.




West Coast Jazz


Book Description

Ted Gioia tells the story of jazz as it has never been told before, in a book that brilliantly portrays the legendary players, the breakthrough styles, and the world in which it evolved. Gioia provides readers with lively portraits of great musicians, intertwined with vibrant commentary on the music they created. 9 photos.




101 Classical Themes for Tenor Sax


Book Description

(Instrumental Folio). This huge collection offers instrumentalists the chance to play 101 classical themes, including: Ave Maria (J.S. Bach/C. Gounod) * Ave Maria (Schubert) * Bist du bei mir (You Are with Me) (Stozel) * Canon in D (Pachelbel) * Clair de Lune (Debussy) * Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy (Tchaikovsky) * 1812 Overture (Tchaikovsky) * Eine Kleine Nachtmusik ("Serenade") (Mozart) * The Flight of the Bumble Bee (Rimsky-Korsakov) * Funeral March of a Marionette (Gounod) * Fur Elise (Beethoven) * Gymnopedie No. 1 (Satie) * Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring (J.S. Bach) * Lullaby (Brahms) * Minuet in G (Bach) * Ode to Joy (Beethoven) * Piano Sonata in C Major (Mozart) * Pie Jesu (Faure) * Rondeau (Mouret) * Theme from Swan Lake (Tchaikovsky) * Wedding March (Mendelssohn) * William Tell Overture (Rossini) * and many more.




The Gerry Mulligan 1950s Quartets


Book Description

The Gerry Mulligan Quartet, founded in Los Angeles in 1952, was widely acclaimed as the first small ensemble in jazz that did not include a chordal instrument such as a piano or guitar. Using original scores and detailed transcriptions of Mulligan's early work, The Gerry Mulligan 1950s Quartets offers an intimate look at Mulligan's musical development from his teenage years to adulthood, analyzing the ways in which his compositions and arrangements evolved through collaborations with Elliot Lawrence, Gene Krupa, and Claude Thornhill, culminating with Miles Davis's Birth of the Cool nonet. Featuring original interviews with Mulligan's associates, author Alyn Shipton presents a fresh take on Mulligan's harmonic creativity, in the process tracing the ups and downs of Mulligan's personal life, heroin addiction, imprisonment, and eventual sobriety.




The Birth of the Cool of Miles Davis and His Associates


Book Description

Jazz, from its origins until World War II, was America's hot new music of the 20th century, and this music spread like wildfire to Europe and beyond. Shortly after the war ended a calming influence manifested itself in jazz and a new genre emerged with its own soundscape and quickly rose to worldwide popularity and influence--Cool Jazz. This book traces the history of this music to its roots in French Impressionism and European Neo-Classicism, describes the key roles played by Bix Beiderbecke, Lester Young, Lennie Tristano, Claude Thornhill, and Dave Brubeck in the development of this genre, and focuses on the major figures associated with a group of landmark recordings and on an ensemble that felicitously came to be known as The Birth of the Cool. The contributions of Miles Davis, Gil Evans, Gerry Mulligan, John Lewis, and John Carisi are considered in detail, and the scores of this music, arranged for Davis's nine-piece band, are analyzed and compared. The influence of this music persists to the present day, and the final chapter of The Birth of the Cool of Miles Davis and His Associates suggests continuities and developments that might still be explored by interested readers. The book is illustrated with photos of musicians and manuscripts, contains many musical examples and a detailed index, has both a bibliography and a short discography, and it includes a compact disc that contains many of the key recordings discussed in the text [Publisher description].




Deep in a Dream


Book Description

This first major biography of the most romanticized icon in jazz thrillingly recounts his wild ride. From his emergence in the 1950s--when an uncannily beautiful young man from Oklahoma appeard on the West Coast to become, seemingly overnight, the prince of "cool" jazz--until his violent, drug-related death in Amsterdam in 1988, Chet Baker lived a life that has become an American myth. Here, drawing on hundreds of interviews and previously untapped sources, James Gavin gives a hair-raising account of the trumpeter's dark journey.




Chet Baker, His Life and Music


Book Description

Finally: the ultimate revised, updated, and expanded edition! Chet Baker was a star at 23 years old, winning the polls of America's leading magazines. But much of his later life was overshadowed by his drug use and problems with the law. 'Chet Baker: His Life and Music' was Baker's first biography, published a year after Baker's passing in 1988. It was available in five languages. Now Jeroen de Valk's thoroughly updated and expanded edition is finally here. De Valk spoke to Baker himself, his friends and colleagues, the police inspector who investigated his death, and many others. He read virtually every relevant word ever published about Chet and listened to every recording, issued or unissued. The result of all this is a book which clears up quite a few misunderstandings. Chet was not the 'washed-up' musician we saw in the 'documentary' Let's Get Lost. His death was not thát mysterious. According to De Valk, Chet was an incredible improviser, someone who could invent endless streams of melody. "He delivered these melodies with a highly individual, mellow sound. He turned his heart inside out, almost to the point of embarrassing his listeners." Jazz Times: "A solidly researched biography... a believable portrait of Baker... a number of enlightening interviews...." Library Journal: "De Valk's sympathetic yet gritty rendering of Baker's life blends well with his account of Baker's recording career." Cadence: "A classic of modern jazz biography. De Valk's writing is so straightforward as to be stark, yet this is just what makes it so rich." Jazzwise: "... it's going to be definitive." Jeroen de Valk (1958) is a Dutch musician and journalist. He also authored an acclaimed biography about tenor saxophonist Ben Webster.