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| Photo by Dave Pell |
Sudden fame, being photogenic, and justified anger from Miles Davis and possibly other Afro-American musicians, have somewhat obscured the fact that the original Gerry Mulligan pianoless quartet with Chet Baker was quite a concept: a combo without piano, with an awkward front line of baritone sax and trumpet, who could and did play counterpoint, a counterpoint that at least sometimes sounded completely improvised. Bear in mind, too, that Mulligan was 25 (and Baker a mere 22) at the time and had already contributed half the arrangements to the studio recordings of Miles Davis's Birth of the Cool.
