Blues Roots - Dave Burbeck & Gerry Mulligan

 

Journey

Blues Roots

The Dave Brubeck Trio

Featuring Gerry Mulligan

Produced by Teo Macero

Cover Photo: Bill Binzen

Engineering: Frank Laico, Stan Tonkel, Arthur Kendy, Murray Zimney

Columbia Records CS 9749

1968

Dave Burbeck - Piano and Honk Tonk Piano

Jack Six - Bass and Fender Bass

Alan Dawson - Drums

Gerry Mulligan - Baritone Sax

From the back cover: Dave Burbeck and the blues are old friends. He began is professional career playing the blues. He was a nineteen-year-old relief pianist in a club in Stockton, California, sustaining the mood between Cleo Brown's sessions of piano-playing and singing. The blues was Cleo's bag and Dave dug right into the blues, too. They both enjoyed the blues so much that Cleo often stayed on beyond her normal stint to play some four-handed boogie-woogie with Dave.

That was the beginning of Dave's conviction that the greatest statements in jazz are usually blues-based.

"The people that I've like most," he pointed out recently, "people like Charlie Parker and Art Tatum, moved me the most when they played the blues. It's the greatest form in jazz because it's the simplest form. And because of its simplicity, it gives you the greatest freedom. The musician and the audience both know the form so well that all the complexities and the musician gets involved in can be felt and understood by the audience."

During the seventeen years that he led the Dave Brubeck Quartet, the fact that he was working out of a jazz musician's natural wellspring, the blues, was often obscured by the emphasis placed on his use of classical devices and his ventures into unusual time signatures.

But the blues was always at the root of everything he played. It had to be because that's where Dave began as a jazz musician. And this was never more evident than when he recorded with such completely blues-oriented  musicians as Louis Armstrong and Jimmy Rushing.

This session with Gerry Mulligan took both of them back to their blues roots. Some of Gerry's earliest influences were the Jimmie Lunceford band and Jack Teagarden. The rolling swagger of his baritone saxophone has always been colored by a least a touch of the blues. Even when settled on the West Coast early in the 1950's, leading the quartet that – along with the Brubeck quartet – helped to establish the cool sound of West Coast jazz, the blues kept drifting through almost everything that Gerry played.

For both Dave and Gerry, the opportunity to focus the blues gave them the stimulation that comes from real freedom. This was the first time that this group, with Jack Six on bass and Alan Dawson on drums, had recorded in a studio. (Its only other album, Compadres, CS 9704, was made at a series of concerts in Mexico). But, largely because of the easy, old-shoe relationship that both of them have toward the blues, they found that a return to the real fundamentals of jazz created an excitement that is reflected in their playing. 

"You really get to  your roots this way!" Dave exclaimed as he listened to the playback of Blues Roots on which he uses a piano that is given a honky-tonk sound by spreading strips of copper over the strings. "I dig the way I play on that old piano.

"And notice that ending!" he added happily, "It's just like you always had to end the blues in the old days."

The sense of freedom was increased by the fact that Dave's musical relationship with Gerry is developing in a different fashion than his relationship with Paul Desmond in the old Brubeck Quartet.

"Gerry," Dave explained, "loves to play and he get very impatient. He keeps coming in on my solos all the time and I'm kind of digging it. Paul never interrupted me and I never interrupted Paul. But now I'm beginning to interrupt Gerry.

"In the old quartet, Paul and I left each other alone in our solos. For a while we had some improvised counterpoint but that kind of faded away because we liked the rhythm guys to stay out of it and they got bored.

"But in this group nobody cares if the bass player is on the root or if the drummer keeps the beat, so we can make the transition to complete freedom. Now we're going more and more to free improvisation. Sometimes we really sound like the new approach, but the way we do it is harder because we always keep a structure underneath so the listener has something to relate to."

Although the billing of the group is "The Dave Burbeck Trio featuring Gerry Mulligan," Brubeck invariably refers to it as "the quartet." He is thinking of it now more long-range terms than when it was first put together in the spring of 1968 to play a few concerts in Charlotte, New Orleans and Mexico. Then Mulligan seemed to be a visitor whose place might be taken by someone else at other concerts. But he is settling in as a regular part of the format.

"I never through things would work out this way with Gerry," Dave admitted, "He hates piano players." – Willie Johnson

Limehouse Blues

Journey

Cross Ties

Broke Blues

Things Ain't What They Used To Be

Movin' Out 

Blues Roots