Gerry Mulligan Quartet - What Is There To Say? (1973 Japanese CBS/Sony Vinyl LP)

Gerry Mulligan Quartet - What Is There to Say? | Vinyl LP - 1973 Japanese CBS/Sony (SOPZ 19, CBS Sony Jazz 1100 series)

Gerry Mulligan spent the 1950s proving that a jazz quartet did not need a piano. Starting with his famous group with Chet Baker in 1952, he built a light, conversational sound in which the two horns had to carry the harmony between them, and What Is There to Say? is the last and one of the very best of those pianoless records. By 1959 the trumpet chair belonged to Art Farmer, whose warm, singing tone was a perfect foil for Mulligan's agile baritone, and the two of them trade and intertwine throughout, sometimes stating a melody in loose counterpoint, sometimes simply getting out of each other's way. Bill Crow on bass and Dave Bailey on drums keep it swinging without ever cluttering the space. The programme mixes Mulligan's own tunes, "Festive Minor", "As Catch Can" and "Utter Chaos", with a handful of standards, and the reading of "My Funny Valentine" is as lovely as any he recorded. It is West Coast cool jazz at its most refined, all air and conversation.

The Mulligan and Farmer partnership did not last long. Within a year Mulligan had launched his Concert Jazz Band and Farmer had left to co-found the Jazztet with Benny Golson, so this album stands as the main studio document of a short, happy collaboration. It has been a favourite of cool-jazz listeners ever since, and Teo Macero, the producer who would go on to shape Miles Davis's electric records, was behind the board.

This copy is the 1973 Japanese pressing on CBS/Sony, part of the Jazz 1100 series, catalogue number SOPZ 19, with a Japanese lyric sheet.