Presenting The Gerry Mulligan Sextet

Recorded in New York during September and October 1955, this was the first album by Mulligan's short-lived sextet and his first session as a leader for EmArcy. Mulligan formed the group after dissolving his celebrated pianoless quartet and taking several months away to reassess his musical direction. The new band expanded the quartet's spare, contrapuntal language into a four-horn ensemble while retaining an unusually open rhythmic foundation. Mulligan originals such as "Apple Core" and "Nights Of The Turntable" sit beside radically reworked standards, while "Broadway" and "Bernie's Tune" give the musicians room for extended collective interplay. Mulligan was already a central figure in modern jazz through his writing for Miles Davis's Birth of the Cool sessions, his big-band arrangements, and his success in bringing the baritone saxophone forward as a nimble lead voice. Contemporary reviewers praised the sextet's organic interplay, swing, and taste, with Whitney Balliett calling it perhaps the best modern small band then working. The group's brief existence and the overshadowing fame of Mulligan's earlier quartet long kept the album underrated, but it remains an important bridge between his pianoless small groups and his later Concert Jazz Band.