BN-LA-591-H2

Art Pepper - Early Art

Released - 1976

Recording and Session Information

Capitol Tower, Los Angeles, CA, August 6, 1956
Jack Sheldon, trumpet #1,2,4-7,9,10; Art Pepper, alto sax; Russ Freeman, piano; Leroy Vinnegar, bass; Shelly Manne, drums.

IM-3827 Pepper Returns
IM-3828 Broadway
IM-3829 You Go To My Head
IM-3830 Angel Wings
IM-3831 Funny Blues
IM-3832 Five More
IM-3833 Minority
IM-3834 Patricia
IM-3835 Mambo De La Pinta
IM-3836 Walkin' Out Blues

Radio Recorders, Los Angeles, CA, December 28, 1956
Art Pepper, alto sax; Russ Freeman, piano #1,2,4; Ben Tucker, bass; Chuck Flores, drums #1,2,4.

RR2783 | IM-3837 What Is This Thing Called Love
RR2784 | IM-3838 Stompin' At The Savoy
RR2785 | IM-3839 Blues In
RR2786 | IM-3840 Bewitched

United Western Recorders, Los Angeles, CA, January 3, 1957
Art Pepper, alto, tenor sax; Red Norvo, vibes #1-3; Gerald Wiggins, piano; Ben Tucker, bass; Joe Morello, drums.

IM-3845 Tenor Blooz
IM-3846 You're Driving Me Crazy
IM-3849 Pepper Steak
IM-3773 Yardbird Suite
IM-5031 Straight Life

Master Recorders, Los Angeles, CA, January 14, 1957
Art Pepper, alto sax; Russ Freeman, piano; Ben Tucker, bass; Chuck Flores, drums.

MR2804 | IM-3842 When You're Smiling
MR2805 | IM-3843 Cool Bunny
MR2806 | IM-3844 Diane's Dilemma
Diane's Dilemma (alternate take) (as Blues Out)

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Straight Life	Art Pepper	January 3 1957
You're Driving Me Crazy	W. Donaldson	January 3 1957
Yardbird Suite	Charlie Parker	January 3 1957
Pepper Steak	Art Pepper	January 3 1957
Tenor Blooz	Art Pepper	January 3 1957
Pepper Returns	Art Pepper	January 3 1957
Side Two
Broadway	Woods-McRae-Bird	August 6 1956
You Go To My Head	Coots-Gillespie	August 6 1956
Angel Wings	Art Pepper	August 6 1956
Funny Blues	Art Pepper	August 6 1956
Five More	Art Pepper	August 6 1956
Minority	Art Pepper	August 6 1956
Side Three
Patricia	Art Pepper	August 6 1956
Mambo De La Pinta	Art Pepper	August 6 1956
Walkin' Out Blues	Art Pepper	August 6 1956
Blues In	Art Pepper	December 28 1956
What Is This Thing Called Love?	Cole Porter	December 28 1956
Side Four
Cool Bunny	Art Pepper	January 14 1957
Bewitched	R. Rodgers-L. Hart	December 28 1956
Diane's Dilemma	Art Pepper	January 14 1957
When You're Smiling	Fisher-Goodwin-Shay	January 14 1957
Stompin' At The Savoy	Sampson-Goodwin-Webb	December 28 1956
Blues Out	Art Pepper	January 14 1957

Liner Notes

EARLY ART

Art Pepper is one of the forgotten men of jazz — not because his name has been lost to us (it certainly hasn't), nor because he has physically disappeared (he has not), but because even the most conscientious students of bop and the musics that grew from it usually fail to remember the remarkable ingenuity and individuality with which he has played.

Pepper, at the time these tracks were recorded in the latter part of the 50's, was one of the most distinctive and imaginative saxophonists in the country — one of the most original, one of the least influenced tonally by Charlie Parker, one of the most eloquent technically. As these cuts demonstrate, he had a confident command of his instrument, an easily recognizable sound, and an energy as an improvisor that was never giddy, never frantic — but which never wavered for a moment.

He failed to achieve the prominence he deserved in the 60's, and to directly influence other players to the extent that he should have, both because of personal problems (he spent most of the years from 1959 to 1966 in jail, as a result of having fallen prey to the habit he has since described as "a kind of cultural tradition" among jazz musicians of that period), and because he worked mostly in and around Los Angeles — which has sometimes been taken less than seriously by Eastern urban jazz fans and promoters (quite unfairly, it might be added).

The irregularity of his appearances and the fact that he did not record an album under his own name from 1960 to 1976 have earned Pepper the epithet "Living Legend" — the title, in fact, of his 1976 album, on one of his old labels, Contemporary — which sounds very nice and complimentary and all, but which is usually applied to artists who are languishing, for one reason or another, in undeserved obscurity. His new work will presumably help to establish him as less of a legend and more of a formidable reality. These tracks from 20 years ago will presumably help to show why he has deserved to be called "legendary".

Art Pepper was born in Gardena, near Los Angeles, in 1925. He studied alto and clarinet as a child, and at the age of 18 had his first regular job playing with the Gus Arnheim orchestra. He left that group to work with drummer Lee Young (Lester Young's brother), in a band that also included Charles Mingus, and was then hired by Benny Carter for the big band the multi-instrumentalist had formed. Next, Pepper joined Stan Kenton, and did several tours of duty with him, interrupted by periods of freelancing and of not working at all. In 1952, he made his first recording as a leader, for the Los Angeles-based Discovery label (the material was later rereleased on Savoy), with a quartet including pianist Hampton Hawes — who has just recorded again with Pepper, 24 years later, on the new Contemporary lp.

The late 40's and early 50's were rich times for jazz in Los Angeles. The East Coast-West Coast and Hard Bop-Cool Jazz battlelines had not yet been firmly drawn, and there was a generous interchange of styles and musical influences. (Drummers as different in background and sensibility as Max Roach and Shelly Manne both played for the Lighthouse All-Stars, the house band at the club of the same name in Hermosa Beach, led by bassist/ club-owner Howard Rumsey. Charles Mingus, who now seems as New York and angry as can be, played for a year with a group as innocuous and as West Coast as the Red Norvo trio.) In addition, there was simply a great plentitude of opportunities to play jazz in the vicinity. Any number of big bands played dance jazz on a long-running contract basis, Small clubs flourished. In some parts of Hollywood and the Midtown area, there seemed to be an independent record company on every block — continuations of a tradition which began in 1922 when Kid Ory recorded "Ory's Creole Trombone" and "Society Blues" for the Los Angeles-based Sunshine label, thus giving the city the honor of being the birthplace of recorded black jazz.

And there was an informal, relaxed atmosphere among musicians in Los Angeles in those years — an atmosphere which contributed to the quality of music being created because it allowed players to learn from one another, and to help one another. "Everyone was very nice," Pepper recalls. "There was no mistrust, Just good feelings. We'd have great sessions. You'd start with a house band, and then the group would just keep changing for hours and hours — people like Zoot Sims, Art Farmer, Harold Land, Hampton Hawes, Teddy Edwards, Russ Freeman, all the Lighthouse guys.. ."

In 1953, Pepper recorded more tunes for Discovery, first with a quartet featuring Freeman on piano and then with a quintet featuring Monte Budwig, Claude Williamson, Jack Montrose, and Larry Bunker — a standard West Coast crew at the time. On the latter session, Pepper first recorded his original, "Straight Life", which appears in another version on this album. Two years later, he worked as part of a sextet and quintet put together by drummer Joe Morello —recordings which are the earliest represented here — and shortly thereafter, following less than an album's worth of recording for World Pacific with tenor player Richie Kamuca, he cut ten songs for the Jazz West label, with Leroy Vinnegar, Shelly Manne, Russ Freeman, and Jack Sheldon; these form a large part of this compilation.

About the time that he was working on the World Pacific and Jazz West sessions, Pepper says now, things started to get bad in Los Angeles. "That was about when the racial thing started to happen. And people were getting into dope seriously. There were informers...other musicians were starting to be afraid to let you sit in, afraid you'd steal their jobs. The warmth and beauty left jazz. It became more difficult to play. It was less enjoyable. And the mistrust showed up in the music. There used to be a healthy spirit of competition. You'd go up on the stand with, say, Sonny Stitt, and you'd try to outplay him, and he'd try to outplay you, but it would all be done with good feelings, in the right spirit. Around the mid-50's, it got to be more like a battle to the death. Musicians even started getting suspicious of the audience and being contemptuous of them. The audience didn't know what was happening, and that ended up hurting jazz—the audiences felt alienated, and they were the ones who had to buy the records and pay the clubs if we were going to work. A lot of potentially good players were destroyed during that period. The trumpeter, Don Fagerquist, or reedmen like James Clay or Charlie Kennedy, ended up just going back where they came from, giving up."

Paradoxically, though, Pepper feels he was playing particularly well at the time he made the recordings represented here. "I was lucky first of all because I was able to record with a lot of good rhythm sections — Russ Freeman, Ben Tucker, Shelley Manne, Leroy Vinnegar, and so on. And I had a steady gig for a long time at the Lighthouse around then. I played with almost everybody in town at that point, either as members of the All-Stars or when they'd come to sit in there. Ornette, Don Cherry, Paul Bley... drummers like Frank Butler and Billy Higgins. I was really on..."

From 1956 to 1960, under his own name, Pepper cut at least seven albums, two tape albums for Omega (about one-and-a-half of which have been rereleased recently on the Onyx label as "Omega Man" and a number of individual tracks. The tape albums featured the incredible pianist Carl Perkins; two of the other lps allowed Pepper to play with two different Miles Davis rhythm sections — Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers, and Jimmy Cobb in one case and Red Garland, Chambers, and Philly Joe Jones in the other. ("Straight Life" showed up yet again on the Garland sessions, incidentally.)

That he was indeed playing particularly well at the time is amply illustrated by the music at hand. Pepper sounds totally relaxed, totally at ease, but he is never flaccid — he never suffers from that languid, drawling, out-of-breath sound West Coast hornmen of the period were all too often afflicted with. His reputation as a fine technician holds up well, too: his fingering is fast and clean, his tone is pure and bright—wide awake.

A healthy proportion of the tracks presented here are Pepper originals. With the exception of "Straight Life", they were mostly spur-of-the-moment compositions, "I'd just wait until the night before the date," Pepper says, "and then sit down and write however many tunes were needed. I didn't have a piano, and I wasn't writing on the alto, so I'd just compose them in my head and write them down. They were very loose, just arrangements to play from, but some of them were pretty good, I think. I liked 'Straight Life', of course. And 'Pepper Returns' and 'Angel Wings' both have two-part counterpoint lines for Jack Sheldon and me that came off very well. And 'Patricia', which I wrote for my daughter, is a good tune. And 'Mambo de la Pinta', which I wrote for guys in different jails I'd been in — 'la pinta' is 'the joint'. Also, I really enjoyed playing 'Blues In' and 'Blues Out'. I'd always wanted to blow with just a bass, and we had some recording time left at the end of each session, so Ben Tucker and I would just play these blues. It was a very good feeling. Naturally, I enjoyed playing the ballads, too, like 'You Go To My Head'. I was lucky, because I could pretty much choose the standards I wanted to play, too."

Most of the musicians Pepper played with on these tracks were old associates. Trumpeter Jack Sheldon had been a fixture in Los Angeles jazz clubs since 1948, frequently playing with the area's top reedmen — Dexter Gordon, Wardell Gray, Harold Land, Herb Geller, Jimmy Giuffre, et al., in addition to Pepper. Pianist Russ Freeman, who had grown up in Los Angeles, was one of Pepper's earliest musical partners. Leroy Vinnegar and Shelly Manne had been established names on the West Coast for two years in the former case and almost ten years in the latter by the time they recorded with Pepper for Jazz West.

Bassist Ben Tucker, not to be confused with the late bassist George Tucker, was something of a newcomer to Los Angeles in 1956, on the other hand, and he left the West Coast again three years later for New York (where he eventually achieved some fame as the composer of Herbie Mann's hit "Comin' Home Baby"). Drummer Chuck Flores, born and raised in Southern California, had recently come off tour with Woody Herman when he went into the studio with Pepper.

Drummer Joe Morello was, at the time he led the date represented here, almost unknown in jazz. He had played briefly with Stan Kenton and then with Marian McPartland (who has always been well known for discovering and encouraging young talent), but had not yet replaced Joe Dodge as Dave Brubeck's drummer—the position that was to bring him to his richly deserved later prominence. "I remember being amazed at what a good drummer this Morello was," Pepper says now. "Nobody had ever heard him on record, or anything, and we didn't know what to expect. But he was fantastic."

The other star of the Morello sessions, of course, was vibraharpist Red Norvo, who had been back and forth across the country for some years, playing excellent music in a variety of styles and contexts and with a variety of fine musicians, and who had, by 1956, established a firm reputation on both coasts. His drumless trios, first with Mingus and guitarist Tal Farlow and later with Red Mitchell and Jimmy Raney playing bass and guitar respectively, had encouraged the refinement of his light, understated, but unfailingly swinging style, and he seems the perfect emotional foil for Pepper's strong and carefree playing.

Pepper's style has changed today, reasonably enough, but it is amazing to listen to him now and to hear how clearly and proudly he has been able to keep many of the best elements of his earlier playing. He plays more urgently today, and perhaps with more dynamic constancy; he certainly improvises on more adventurous principles. "Once you stop searching," he says, "your playing stops. You've always got to have a challenge, something that you have to stretch out to reach. If you can keep doing that, it tends to keep you young, no matter what happens to you physically. As long as you create, you can't get old. That's why I think I'm playing better than ever today."

In saying this, though, Pepper luckily does not have to apologize for the way he played 20 years ago. He has certainly taken his music much further since then, but even in the mid 50's, he played wonderfully with both technical and spiritual maturity — beautiful music, made up out of the head of a man then at the first of several peaks of his creative power. Music that is, today, as living as it is legendary.

COLMAN ANDREWS