The Gerry Mulligan 1950s Quartets

★★★★

Alyn Shipton

OUP. £12.99

Meticulously detailed but intensely readable analysis of the baritone sax giant’s creative heyday.

Non-musicians should not be intimidated by a glimpse of the trombone charts for Bweebida Bobbida. From Henry Grimes’ poetic depiction of Gerry Mulligan’s audition process – “Like you are laying on a rug that was woven by the man before you” – to Dizzy Gillespie mocking Art Farmer’s too-snugly fitting linen slacks at the 1958 Great South Bay Festival (“You cats got some buns back there!”), BBC Radio 3’s Jazz Record Requests host Alyn Shipton adds a generous spoonful of anecdotal sugar to help the musicological medicine go down. I’ve rarely seen the nuts and bolts of the arranger’s art so clearly laid out, and Shipton’s portrait of Mulligan – the cool jazz cat with a very hot temper, whose original Pacific Jazz Gerry Mulligan Quartet album cover could be a 2 Tone picture sleeve – is all the more compelling for its several contradictions.

Ben Thompson

Getty

The Story Of The B-52’s: Neon Side Of Town

★★★

Scott Creney & Brigette Herron

PALGRAVE MACMILLAN. £27.99

Some Good Stuff here, but not quite a Whammy!

In 1978, John Peel played the original small-label cut of Rock Lobster by the then-unknown B-52’s on his BBC show, then read out their Athens, Georgia mail order address so British listeners could buy it direct. A year later they were signed to a major and recording their debut LP with Chris Blackwell in the Bahamas. Even John Lennon was a fan. Authors Creney and Herron rightly acknowledge their debt to Mats Sexton’s pioneering 2002 book The B-52’s Universe, which now sells for hundreds of pounds. By contrast, their focus is to specifically consider the band’s history from a gender studies and feminist perspective, but also as fans themselves, sometimes very defensively on the group’s behalf – indeed, the authors once played in a support band at a B-52’s reunion gig. Many vintage sources have been consulted, and key successes, setbacks, line-up changes and comebacks are detailed, but no band members agreed to be interviewed.