Listen-Gerry Mulligan: An Aural Narrative in Jazz

by Jerome Klinkowitz

y First Edition

400 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1991

Reviews

[Ken Dryden · Rating 3 out of 5]

I reviewed this book when it was published in 1991. The author's goal was to assemble a discography of Gerry Mulligan's recordings and critique them. There are several problems with this goal, the first being that Klinkowitz frequently lists details but states that the sessions were "not heard." Since I owned a number of these recordings myself, it would have seemed possible for him to contact jazz professionals, collectors, libraries, etc. about getting copies of a number of these recordings. Since downloadable music wasn't so readily available when the book was published, there are some that would have been harder to acquire, since they were unauthorized bootlegs.

The other problem with this book is that Klinkowitz isn't all that knowledgeable a jazz writer. When I interviewed Gerry Mulligan in 1994, something Klinkowitz didn't do, I learned that he didn't think much of this book and cited the example of claiming that "Mulligan didn't like clarinets since there weren't any in his composition 'Lament For Two Clarinets.'" Mulligan told me that the reason that there weren't any clarinets in the piece is that it was a memorial tribute to two clarinetists whom he admired. As a liner note writer myself, I have always taken the opportunity to do as much research as possible about any story behind a song title, rather than just making an assumption on my own.

There were no major problems with the discography itself, though many recordings have since appeared that are missing from this book.