The Gerry Mulligan 1950s Quartets

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 work, The Gerry Mulligan 1950s Quartets offers an intimate look at Mulligan's musical development from the initial quartet with Chet Baker to its successors with Bob Brookmeyer, Jon Eardley, and Art Farmer. The backdrop is an unparalleled account of his musical life from his teen- age 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 many of 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 heroin addiction, imprisonment, sobriety, and eventual musical triumph.

Alyn Shipton is a writer, publisher, broadcaster and researcher, as well as a jazz musician. Since 2012 he has hosted BBC Radio 3's "Jazz Record Requests", the longest running jazz programme in the world. He previously hosted the BBC World Service show "Jazzmatazz" reaching over 150 million listeners worldwide, and earning him the Marian McPartland/ Willis Conover Lifetime Achievement Award in Jazz Broadcasting from the Jazz Journalists' Association. Throughout his career he has been a publisher, specialising in music, and was responsible for the Grove musical dictionaries during the 1980s including being Associate Editor for the New Grove Dictionary of Jazz (1988). His books Groovin' High: The Life of Dizzy Gillespie (1999) and Nilsson: The Life of a Singer Songwriter (2013) each won Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC) Awards for Excellence; and he is furthermore the recipient of an American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) Foundation Deems Taylor/Virgil Thompson Award for his book about Harry Nilsson. His most recent work is The Art of Jazz: A Visual History (2020). He has taught jazz history at Oxford Brookes University, City University (London), and is currently Lecturer in Jazz History and Research Fellow at the Royal Academy of Music. As a bassist, Alyn has performed and recorded with numerous bands, including a long association with the British jazz trumpeter Ken Colyer, tours with American stars such as Bud Freeman, Herbie Hall and Don Ewell, and most recently, co-leading the Buck Clayton Legacy Band, playing music bequeathed to him by the great swing trumpeter.