Antecedents

Abstract By his late teens, Gerry Mulligan was already arranging music and playing the saxophone, working with Elliot Lawrence and then touring nationally with Gene Krupa, for whom he wrote the hit “Disc Jockey Jump.” From there he went to New York, and played and arranged for Claude Thornhill’s orchestra, as a result of which he started to cooperate with several of the musicians who would go on to work in Miles Davis’s “Birth of the Cool” nonet. Mulligan himself was to arrange half the material that this group recorded for Capitol, including “Jeru” and “Venus De Milo,” which were central to its repertoire, along with arrangements by Gil Evans, John Lewis, and John Carisi. He made his first recordings as a leader for the Prestige label, both the extended “Mulligan’s Too” (his longest ever solo) and a group of arrangements for ten-piece band. His early arrangements and autograph scores are discussed.