Being Gerry Mulligan by Gerry Mulligan & Ken Poston

Author:Gerry Mulligan & Ken Poston
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Backbeat
Published: 2022-08-12T00:00:00+00:00

They did all right in the first couple of years, but then, of course, the profits of one would eat into the profits of the other. You can’t do it all at the same time. People don’t have the time and they don’t have the money to do all of this stuff, nor do they want to dedicate their lives to going to all of these shows. I mean, I’m going to see Duke and all these guys on Tuesday and I’m going over to see Count and all those people on Thursday. Forget it.

So by about the third or fourth year of these things, there were four shows out that included most of the big names. We were all out on shows at the same time and it killed it. The last year of them, in order to protect his show, Norman brought our show. That was Duke and Dave and me. So he tried to route them in ways that we would be separated, and in ways to give our show a breather so we wouldn’t show up in the same towns with these other people.

Well, there are only so many cities and so many halls and, wouldn’t you know it, we wound up in Kansas City, where they’ve got an auditorium that’s got two theaters back to back. On this side of the stage is Duke Ellington’s band set up doing our show and we had a pretty good crowd. It wasn’t full by any means. We had maybe a thousand or twelve hundred people. In the theater on the other side was Count Basie and his show, and they had about seventy-five people in the audience. Well, that show closed that night, that was the end of their thing, and for the rest of us that was the end of the whole thing of touring.

All these guys milked the thing dry. It’s not as if they ever could get together and talk about it and say, “Listen, we’ve got a good thing going here. It will be good for the music and it will be good for the audience. Let’s pace it in a way so that throughout the year we can service the audience by bringing them these shows and not kill the goose that laid the golden egg.” Well, they did kill the goose that laid the golden egg. It took them four years to do it, and that was the end of the touring show in this country, the touring jazz show as a success. Any attempts after that have been mostly failures. So instead of that came the jazz festival syndrome.

The festivals today are not true festivals. They’re big productions where, again, in most cases the music is kind of separated from the atmosphere. It’s like the music is an excuse for putting on this big money-making circus. That’s maybe kind of an oversimplified and cruel way to look at it, but they are hard work.

In the early days of the festivals in Newport, there was another element involved.

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