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Five Videos: Gerry Mulligan

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Baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan was a potent artist whose reach extended into many different areas of jazz across six decades. As a dominant arranger and player in the 1940s, he influenced big bands led by Gene Krupa, Elliot Lawrence and Claude Thornhill, fusing bop and swing. In 1949 and '50, he was a member of Miles Davis's so-called Birth of the Cool band as a player, arranger and composer. In the early 1950s, he formed a contrapuntal pianoless quartet on the West Coast that was different than anything that had come before it. Throughout the 1950s, he was a major force with his quintet, sextet and tentet, and as a composer. And he recorded important albums in the 1960s, shifting to touring and running college clinics in the '70s, when jazz fusion dominated. With the return of acoustic jazz in the '80s and early '90s, Mulligan was a festival headliner. Gerry Mulligan died in 1996.

Here's a sampling of Mulligan in action in four newly uploaded videos and one that has been around for a few years:

Here's Gerry Mulligan with Jon Eardley on trumpet, Bob Brookmeyer on valve trombone, Zoot Sims on tenor saxophone, Bill Crow on bass and Dave Bailey on drums playing Walking Shoes on Italian TV in Milan in February 1956...



Here's Gerry Mulligan on Ralph J. Gleason's Jazz Casual TV show in San Francisco in July 1962, with Bob Brookmeyer (v-tb), Wyatt Ruther (b) and Gus Johnson (d)...



Here's Mulligan on the same show...



Here's an hour of Gerry Mulligan and his big band at the North Sea Jazz Festival in 1982...



And here's Mulligan in Japan in 1993...

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This story appears courtesy of JazzWax by Marc Myers.
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