Art Pepper - The Art Of Pepper [1957]

Art Pepper - The Art Of Pepper


1. Holiday Flight
2. Too Close For Comfort
3. Long Ago And Far Away
4. Begine The Beguine
5. I Can't Believe That Your In Love With Me
6. Webb City
7. Summertime
8. Fascinating Rhythm
9. Body And Soul
10. Without A Song
11. The Breeze And I
12. Surf Ride

Recorded in Los Angeles, California on April 1, 1957

Personnel: Art Pepper (alto saxophone); Carl Perkins (piano): Ben Tucker (bass); Chuck Flores (drums)

This was originally supposed to be an audiophiles-only session, recorded on Ampeg reel-to-reel, and released in that format to jazz hi-fi afficionados. It doesn't quite sound that way now. While Pepper rarely has been better (and that's saying a lot!), pianist Carl Perkins's blunt semi-pro attack on the keys makes this a sort of roughhewn avant-garde session. There's some distortion in the mix too, cymbals crashing and wooshing around.

So much for state-of-the-art in 1957! But don't let that put you off. This is one explosive date with Pepper in his prime. Just finger-popping swing and fresh musical invention on track after track - "Fascinating Rhythm," "Webb City," "I Can't Believe You're In Love With Me" just burst out of the speakers. That direct-to-two-track experiment provides a living room intimacy if nothing else.

I have to confess that Art Pepper is sometimes a mystery to me. He just might be the greatest mainstream player who ever took up the horn after Charlie Parker. And unlike all the other major white jazz musicians, he had no special identifiable trait--neither Getz's lyricism, Mulligan's contrapuntal swing, Konitz's abstractness, Desmond's urbanity, Cohn's dry logic, not even Zoot Sim's down home warmth and time. He is closer to someone like the formidable Sonny Stitt except that he doesn't have that underlying blues feeling which was second nature to the black musicians of that generation.

In fact, Pepper most reminds me of the protean Frank Sinatra, an artist (and human being) who was both completely alive and utterly familiar, and whose artisty never depended on a narrow definition of style.