I Want To Live! - Gerry Mulligan - The Jazz Combo

 

Theme from I Want To Live 

The Jazz Combo From

I Want To Live!

Starring Susan Hayward

Gerry Mulligan, Shelly Manne & Art Farmer

Supervised by Jack Lewis

Cover Design by Paul Bacon

Shelly Manne appears by arrangement with Contemporary Records

United Artist Records UAL-4006

1959

From the back cover: The film is I Want To Live. It is about a girl sliding furiously downhill in the big city jungles of the West Coast, a girl who is, according to a psychologist, "totally amoral, a compulsive liar with no regard for law or order or the conventions of society." She falls, sometimes willingly, sometimes unwillingly, into almost everything on the wrong side of the law except murder. But it's on a murder rap that the law finally takes her.

The girl, Barbara Graham, moves through an atmosphere in San Francisco and San Diego where jazz hovers constantly in the background. One of the few stabilizing things in her life is her interest in jazz and, particularly, in the music of Gerry Mulligan.

Building on this foundation, the entire score of I Want To Live has been written by Johnny Mandel on a jazz basis. The bulk of his score displayed by a big band mad up of top West Coast jazzmen (their exciting sound track recordings met up Johnny Mandel's great jazz score from I Want To Live! Until Artist UAL-5005. But, to fill out the characterization of Barbara Graham, Mandel also wrote some small group charts to pinpoint her specific interest in Gerry Mulligan Played by Mulligan and a brilliantly compatible group of sidemen, this arrangements crop up all through the picture, emerging in a very natural way when a radio is turned on or a record drops on a phonograph, or subtly rising over the subdued murmur in a bar.

What results is a new dimension in the use of jazz in films. We are accustomed to isolated jazz sequences, to the exploitation of jazz devices in otherwise non-jazz scores. There has even been an entire score written by a jazz musician, John Lewis, and played by a jazz group, the Modern Jazz Quartet. But the film in which it was used, "No Sun In Venice," had no essential relationship to jazz. I Want To Live does have that relationship and because it does, it provides Johnny Mandel with an unprecedented opportunity for writing a jazz score.

However, the use that Mandel and producer Walter Wanger have made of the Mulligan small group goes far beyond the normal concept of film scoring. Here, for the first time, is a highly purposeful integration of jazzing a film. It saves as the evocative musical background that is expected of any good score – the customary, passive role that seasons and accents but does not distract attention from the visual part of the film. But at the same time jazz also plays an active role in this case as it takes an acute grasp of the viewer's awareness in the character delineation of Barbara Graham and, through the musical presence of Mulligan, becomes an explicit part of the story development. (In a meaningful scene, Barbara Graham, listening to a radio in her cell in the death house, remarks, "That's Gerry Mulligan." "How do you know?" an attendant asked. "I have all his records," say Barbara).

For both Mandel and Mulligan the situation posed a provocative challenge. Mandel had to write in terms of the needs of the picture and at the same time in a manner that would be thoroughly in the Mulligan mode (which is, fortunately, a broad one). Moreover, Mandel had to write for a musical who usually writes most of his own stuff and whose reputation as a composer and arranger is just as great as his reputation as a performer.

For his part, Mulligan was in the position of being cited by inference in the picture as one of the jazz greats and, through his playing in the film, of making that estimate valid even for people with only a vague knowledge of jazz. There was the inescapable knowledge that both the high citation and his performance were permanently locked together on the same strip of film, a huge potential target for the kickers' darts, and that the very validity and dramatic effectiveness of the entire film could be shattered if his performances were the merest whit below his highest capability.

How well both Mandel and Mulligan have succeeded is evident in this album (and how much their success adds to the portrait of Barbara Graham is equally evident in I Want To Live). The root of their success i that understanding interplay which is so crucial to jazz creativity. It starts, in this case, with the empathy that has long existed between Mandel and Mulligan. an empathy which guided Mandel in his writing and which gave Mulligan advance assurance that he was moving into a fully sympathetic situation. Actually, Mulligan discovered that it was far, far more than that once he had seen what Mandel had written and had had the exhilarating experience of playing it. He found the entire musical concept of the film so stimulating and became so anxious to have a part in creating the entire score that he offered to with with the big band (he had been singed only to play with the small group) – and he would have if the geography of prior commitments had not made in physical impossible.

In the playing, this basic empathy between Mandel and Mulligan was doubled and redoubled and multiplied innumerable times in the cross currents of inspiring reaction that flowed among the musicians Mandel group around Mulligan – Art Farmer, the vital alternate born in Mulligan's current Quartet; Bud Shank, eerily counterpoising his flute behind Mulligan's baritone sax on Barbara's Theme and during out a surging flow of alto lines on the other pieces, the volatile, exuberant trombone of Frank Rosolino; and a rhythm section top of Pete Jolly's fleet piano, the superbly firm bass of Red Mitchell and that ne plus ultra of the drums, Shelly Manne.

The music they play goes the whole route from a loose, easy framework for individual blowing on Frisco Club to a carefully developed mood setting in the I Want To Live Theme which is almost entirely an ensemble piece aside from a glowing muted solo by Farmer and some equally muted drumming by Manne.

This is one of the rare instances in which a firmly established creative artist deliberately sets out to top himself – and succeeds. If Gerry Mulligan had not already gained the musical reputation he wears in the script if I Want To Live, His playing in these selections from the sound track of that film would earn it for him. – William Johns

Black Mountain 

Theme From I Want To Live

Night Watch

Frisco Club

Barbara's Theme 

Life's A Funny Thing