The art of the latest Mulligan at its best. Giuseppe Piacentino, from liner notes

In the role of leader, Mulligan prepared scores that always made jazz a conversation between musicians. Playing was first and foremost an exchange of ideas. Mulligan had an unwavering sense of logic and had shown it from a very young age. The first great result came in the historic recordings of ‘Birth of the Cool’: the leader was Miles Davis but the minence grise was above all this boy in his early twenties.
‘It was a concert recorded in Bologna exactly the day after Jeru’s sixty-fifth birthday. For that evening in Bologna Mulligan had brought his trusty Dean Johnson and RonVincent, who accompanied him in the last part of his career (he would die a little less than four years later). At the piano sat Harold Danko, whose contribution in mainstream contexts has always been first-rate. And yet his gaze, his sense of humor, his style – and anyone who attended