Coming to blows

Nonetheless, "cool" is one of the key adjectives that non-fans use in describing jazz, and it's that elusive concept that's made crossover stars out of the likes of Miles and Chet Baker and Gerry Mulligan. Since the release of Bruce Weber's worshipful documentary about Baker, Let's Get Lost (1988), the record-store bins have been more stuffed than ever with product from the trumpeter, who died the year the film was released. As with Miles, familiar tracks are recycled endlessly, so that every season brings a "new" '50s-era Chet: the boxed set The Pacific Jazz Years, The Best of Chet Baker Sings, Embraceable You: Chet Baker Sings and Plays (with "previously unreleased" material), and Young Chet (all on Pacific Jazz). Now we get another repackaging of Mulligan and Baker, the four-CD The Complete Pacific Jazz Recordings of the Gerry Mulligan Quartet with Chet Baker, which overlaps not only previous Gerry and Chet single-CD packages, but the Baker Pacific box.

Mulligan himself was one of the architects of the "cool" sound, a prime composer and arranger within the Miles Davis Nonet sessions of 1949-'50 that were released first as individual 78s but were later collected on album as Birth of the Cool. It was a little-big-band sound modeled on the Claude Thornhill orchestra, its luxurious bottom filled out with Mulligan's baritone plus French horn and tuba. It's been a perennial bestseller for Capitol.

What makes this music, particularly that of the Mulligan-Baker groups, so commercially inexhaustible? For one, people are in love with the image. It's got the jazz mystique. Even at the time, the distinctive looks of Mulligan and Baker -- their twentysomething handsomeness combined with bewildering mastery -- were part of the sell. And there were the sharp suits and William Claxton's dramatic black-and-white movie-idol photos (especially of Baker), and the rail-thin Mulligan's angular dominance of his big horn. It's arguable that Mulligan's later piano-less groups with, variously, trombonist Bob Brookmeyer, tenor Zoot Sims, and trumpeter Art Farmer rival the Mulligan-Baker ensemble, but the people want Chet, the hipster junkie, the pretty-boy vocalist, the "romantic" soloist.

Then there was the sound itself. Tenor saxophonist Lester Young's smooth, flowing legato lines are often cited as the beginning. As has been noted, Young phrased slightly behind the beat, and the phrase lengths themselves crossed the bar lines in an elongated fashion that seemed to make 4/4 time itself disappear beneath his slippered feet, even as you heard that time being counted explicitly in the tock and swish of Jo Jones's drums. There was also the essential beauty of Young's light, vibratoless tone.

On the new Pacific set, Mulligan and Baker work with that light tone and dynamic restraint. Baker in particular plays in the middle and lower register, avoiding Miles's more dramatic effects -- no sneering half-valved notes, none of the "fluffed" high notes that arrived in Miles's work like shocked exclamations. Mulligan has smoothed out the knotty bebop style of baritone-sax trailblazer Serge Chaloff. And the design of the music itself bespeaks restraint: a minimalist quartet with no piano, a preference for pop-song structures rather than blues, drums that are more often played with brushes than sticks.

And yet this outfit (which originally recorded in 1952-'53) does play "intensively." The tempos are often up -- way up when you compare them with that later signpost of cool, Miles's 1959 Kind of Blue (Columbia). For minimalist music it sometimes feels impossibly busy -- the relentless whisk of Chico Hamilton's brushes, the brainy, hurtling counterlines that Mulligan and Baker play against each other, and the astute harmonic sense that allowed Baker and Mulligan and the bassists (there were several) to flesh out the sound, fill in the blanks left by the absent piano, and ultimately make the line-up feel bigger than it was. Bigger, even, than most quintets with a piano. That was part of the beauty of the Mulligan-Baker quartet; like masterful naturalistic oil painters, they created an illusion of space that was intimate, personal, all their own.

Mulligan had a fascination with steam engines (one of his best known LPs, The Steam Age, pictured him in front of a locomotive), and his compositions often feel like little perpetual-motion machines. Listen to those interlocking seesawing opening lines from Baker and Mulligan on "Swinghouse" bursting into a unison fanfare, then baritone and trumpet solos (Mulligan "comping" behind Baker) and a last round of unison figures, two-bar drum breaks, and double-helix runs. The final held notes come to a skidding, hilarious stop.

The tunes are filled with details that reveal themselves on repeated listens, so that even the damned alternate takes (the academic taint of all boxed sets), rather than becoming tedious, feed your craving. The quartet's conception of collective improvisation, refined over their year together and in Mulligan's subsequent groups of the '50s, ensures that you're never listening to mere solo and accompaniment. Every part feeds and balances every other part, and the band are learning as they go, so each piece feels spontaneous and fresh. Brainy as the music is, there's nothing studied about it. Each chorus offers a new development -- the little up-and-down chase figures of "Bernie's Tune," bassist Carson's Smith's now-you-see-it/now-you-don't alternating patterns on "I'm Beginning To See the Light," Mulligan and Baker unpredictably switching off between "lead" melody lines and accompaniment throughout.

For music that's "cool," this stuff is full of tension and wit. And Mulligan's arrangements of standards are never conventional. "Get Happy" has a surprisingly suspenseful introduction, a long held baritone note over fast-walking bass and a cymbal-crash punctuation. The melody of "Love Me or Leave Me" gets an angular, rhythmically aggressive working over, and the bizarre "Tea for Two" is positively cubist. Nonetheless, even with Mulligan's piano versions of some songs, you can find yourself wishing for a broader range of dynamics and color. On a live version of the Burke/Van Heusen "Aren't You Glad You're You," when Mulligan lets out one wavering long note, he sounds momentarily out of character, and it's shocking -- in context, that little cry is a bellow, more Hamiet Bluiett than Gerry Mulligan.

Disc three chronicles the Mulligan/Baker reunion album, from 1957 (Mulligan's 1953 drug bust had broken up the band), with more extroverted solos and less emphasis on ensemble interaction. On disc four, "The Collaborations," Lee Konitz's alto brings a welcome new voice -- a light Lester Young tone that flies high above Mulligan and Baker, into the ether, double-timing sunny lyric arabesques against their brooding charcoal-gray chorus. When vocalist Annie Ross (of the vocal trio Lambert, Hendricks and Ross) joins the group, Mulligan himself finds a new lyric voice. No longer is he obsessed with wringing every harmonic possibility out of the chord changes of a tune. The abstractions fall away to reveal melodic grace, a singer's instrumental voice that would make him a worthy foil to Ben Webster on their 1959 duo album.

Cool, of course, is rarely about laid-back savoir faire. It is, as the artist and critic Barbara Kruger once pointed out, more often about contempt, a pair of shades, the shuffle in a walk, the turn of a collar, a wit that's withholding and parodic. Mulligan, as anyone who came into contact with him will tell you, was an intense guy. You can hear it explicitly when he threatens to punch out a noisy audience member on At Storyville (recorded in Boston in 1956, also on Pacific). But most of the time, on stage at least, he seems to have kept his cool. Baker is the more famous junkie (mostly because he so publicly deteriorated over the years), but it was Mulligan who got hooked first. Various writers have chronicled the tension between the two stars, but the dysfunction is easy to imagine. Mulligan was brainy, focused, ambitious. Baker was intuitive (he was, apparently, not much of a sight reader), passive (or passive-aggressive), a narcissist whose most ardent love songs simmer with a sinister reserve. Apply that formula for personal chemistry to any band you know.

Miles Davis still stands as the emblematic cool jazz dude, even though his propensity to violence (in language and deed) is chronicled frankly in his autobiography. Wynton Marsalis has defined swing as "relaxed intensity," and maybe that as much as anything sums up the musical aspect of cool. Miles, of course, was famous for turning his back to the audience, which some read as hostility, another form of cool contempt for the crowd. But the writer Leonard Michaels pointed out that in fact when Miles turned his back, he was in fact identifying himself with the audience, listening to the band, saying, "Don't look at me. Listen to it."