Creativity Quote by Gerry Mulligan

There’s a sly, almost throwaway humility in Mulligan’s line, and that’s the point: it frames a towering career as a sideways accident rather than a conquest. “In a way” is doing heavy lifting. It’s a hedge that signals self-awareness about how messy artistic origin stories really are, especially in jazz, where identity is often welded to a single horn. Mulligan doesn’t announce destiny; he shrugs into it.

The phrase also carries a musician’s inside joke: you don’t “be” a baritone player the way you “be” a tenor or alto player. Bari is the section’s muscle, the anchor that fills out the harmony and keeps the band honest. Starting out aiming for that role suggests a temperament: someone more interested in architecture than spotlight, in making an ensemble sound inevitable. That subtext lines up with Mulligan’s real cultural footprint, from his writing in big bands to the pianoless quartet that made emptiness feel like arrangement.

Context matters, too. Mid-century jazz rewarded virtuoso front-line heroics; the baritone sax sat lower in the prestige economy. By joking that he “started out” that way, Mulligan quietly flips the hierarchy. He implies the so-called supporting voice was his entry point to authorship: hearing how parts interlock, how counterpoint tells the truth, how coolness can be engineered rather than performed.

It’s a compact statement of aesthetic politics: don’t mythologize the self, mythologize the sound.