Perfection: Elliot Lawrence - 'But Not For Me' (1955)

In need of cash in the late 1940s, Gerry Mulligan sold bandleader Elliot Lawrence a trove of his arrangements. As Elliot told me in an interview before his death in 2021, "Early on, I had bought all of Gerry's arrangements. I paid him $50 per chart. If he wrote an original and arranged it, I’d pay him $150. Naturally, I signed up the publishing so they …