Art Pepper - Omega Alpha
Released - 1981
Recording and Session Information
Audio Arts Studio, Hollywood, CA, April 1, 1957
Art Pepper, alto sax; Carl Perkins, piano; Ben Tucker, bass; Chuck Flores, drums.
AA2872-1 | IM-3980 Too Close For Comfort
AA2874-5 | IM-3858 Begin The Beguine
AA2876 | IM-3859 Webb City
AA2877-1 | IM-3857/3860 Summertime
AA2879 | IM-3854? Fascinatin' Rhythm
AA2880-3 | IM-3981 Body And Soul
AA2885-6 | IM-3982 Surf Ride
Track Listing
| Side One | ||
| Title | Author | Recording Date |
| Surf Ride | Art Pepper | April 1 1957 |
| Body And Soul | Heyman-Eyton-Green-Sour | April 1 1957 |
| Too Close For Comfort | Weiss-Bock-Holoscener | April 1 1957 |
| Summertime | G. Gershwin-D. Heyward | April 1 1957 |
| Side Two | ||
| Fascinatin' Rhythm | G. Gershwin-I. Gershwin | April 1 1957 |
| Begin The Beguine | C.Porter | April 1 1957 |
| Webb City | Bud Powell | April 1 1957 |
Liner Notes
ART PEPPER
With each passing year it's become increasingly evident that, far from being merely the best of the poor litter that most jazz writers have considered the West Coast jazz movement of the early to middle 1950s, altoist Art Pepper actually is one of the major saxophonists in modern jazz — and has been for some time, in fact. From the start of his long, turbulent, frequently interrupted career Pepper has been one of the music's true originals, with an instantly recognizable sound and style that are his alone, the hard-won results of years of dedicated effort to not only master his instrument and the art of playing jazz but to find and maintain a strong personal identity as well.
Pepper was one of the few young musicians to develop in the immediate post-bop period who did not fall under the influence of alto saxophonist Charlie Parker. The young altoist actually had developed his approach to the instrument through his deep admiration of tenor saxophonist Lester Young. "Even though I play alto," Pepper emphasized, "he was the man who influenced me more than anybody else — he and Zoot Sims (an early Pepper associate who himself had taken Young as his model). Before that I liked Joe Thomas, who played tenor with the old Jimmie Lunceford band. Naturally I liked the way Charlie Parker played but I never imitated him like almost all the other alto players did. He ruined a lot of alto players who were so taken by him that they became nothing more than imitations, and they lost their individuality. I loved his playing but not to the point where I wanted to copy him...Of course, I got put down by a lot of other people because if you didn't play Birdlicks, you weren't nothing! But I kept developing and playing myself throughout the whole period — say, from 1946 to 1951 — through that whole time I was with Stan Kenton's band. In the early '50s I started a group, recorded, and everyone knew who I was. They could immediately tell that it was Art Pepper playing, which was great."
It was while with Kenton — an association that began as early as 1943 and, with varying interruptions, lasted almost a decade — that Pepper first had attracted attention to the strong, clear, highly original approach towards which he was then working. During this period of sustained artistic growth he was featured prominently with the orchestra and recorded fairly widely, both within and without its ranks. He particularly shined in various extracurricular small-group sessions where his fast-maturing originality of conception and already impressive technical adroitness were more extensively deployed than in the large, at times cumbersome framework of the orchestra. In the 1951 and '52 Down Beat polls Pepper placed second to Charlie Parker in the alto saxophone category and, after Parker and Lee Konitz, placed third in Metronome's polls of 1952 and '53, evidence of the great strides he had made.
On the breakup of the orchestra in late 1951 Pepper returned to his native Los Angeles and formed the first of the many small groups he was to lead over the ensuing decades and with which he made his first recordings as leader. These served to affirm Pepper's widening reputation as an uncommonly original saxophonist whose improvisations revealed a striking command of harmony, great melodic fertility and rhythmic fluency. The personal musical voice towards which he had been working over the previous decade, which had grown steadily in assurance during the Kenton years, finally was heard with sure, commanding authority. The recordings both signaled the completion of the first stage of Pepper's growth to artistic maturity, and hinted at what was to come.
The wider acceptance he might have been expected to receive as one of the leading performers associated with the West Coast jazz movement, then just beginning to gather momentum, undoubtedly would have resulted in national prominence, more frequent and lucrative bookings, a regular group of his own, recording success, greater financial security and all the other appurtenances of popular success. But none of this was to be. Instead of riding to popularity on the gathering wave of interest in West Coast jazz, Pepper spent much of 1953 and the early part of the following year in prison. He had been busted.
In 1947 while on the road with the Kenton band, he had been introduced to heroin, which he found eased the difficulties he experienced at being separated from his wife and young daughter. He continued its use through the early 1950s by which time, of course, the drug had come to dominate his life. Finally the inevitable happened: he was apprehended, convicted and given a prison sentence for violating federal narcotics laws, in those days considerably harsher than they have since become. Pepper was sent to the Fort Worth, Texas, Federal Penitentiary where he remained for the next year.
On the completion of his sentence he returned to Los Angeles and sought to take up the threads of his career. An August, 1954, recording date, with tenor saxophonist Jack Montrose, with whom he had been playing club dates, demonstrated that Pepper had lost none of his riveting, distinctive artistry. Still, the next few years were relatively lean ones for him; forced to accept whatever work came his way, he played with a large number of ad-hoc bands, jazz and popular. Although he did little recording during this period, he continued to find an outlet for his fiery, intense music-making through frequent sitting-in, in addition to which such activities often led to bookings and other employment.
If 1954 and '55 were lean times for the altoist in terms of recording, he more than made up for it the following year, a particularly busy and fruitful period that saw him recording with Shorty Rogers, Chet Baker, Hoagy Carmichael, Russ Garcia, Ted Brown, Warne Marsh, Bill Perkins and Joe Morello, as well as four albums under his own name. This impressive body of recordings solidified Pepper's comeback and secured his reputation as one of the most authoritative, rewardingly original jazz musicians then on the scene. He had indeed recovered a great deal of the ground his prison term had lost him.
Early in 1957 with the rhythm section of the then Miles Davis Quintet — pianist Red Garland, bassist Paul Chambers and drummer Philly Joe Jones — he recorded a brilliant, entrancing set of performances, Art Pepper Meets The Rhythm Section, one of the key recordings of his career. Its importance was recognized instantly and the album cited by many commentators as one of the most important, satisfying jazz recitals of the year. This watershed recording was followed a month later by a Quincy Jones date. On March 31 Pepper appeared on the Stars of Jazz television show, and the following day — April Fool's Day, 1957 — the present recordings were undertaken for Imperial Records.
For some reason known only to Imperial executives of the day, the performances were released by Omegatape, one of the earliest U.S. firms engaged in the manufacture of prerecorded IA-track stereo tapes (now called open-reel) for the serious audiophile. The recordings were not issued in disc form at the time and this, coupled with the relatively limited sales enjoyed by 1/4-track tapes, accounts for the extreme rarity of these vintage Pepper performances. Combining as they do all the material released on Omegatape OMT 7020 and ST 2030, the present volumes mark the first U.S. LP release of these recordings in their original stereo configuration. An additional bonus is the inclusion in the second set, Omega/Beta, of several alternate takes: Fascinatin' Rhythm, Webb City and Begin the Beguine.
While Pepper retains only a faint recollection of the details of the record- ings, the product of a single session held in Hollywood's Audio Arts studios, he has a vivid impression of the music made that day, and recalls the session as having come off very well, primarily because the supporting players — pianist Carl Perkins, bassist Ben Tucker and drummer Chuck Flores — had been working regularly as a group in various local clubs. The session proceeded with the swiftness and smoothness of a club date, he recalled, few tunes requiring more than a single "take" (the exceptions are, of course, those included in the second volume).
One of the mainstays of the Los Angeles club scene of those days, the self-taught Perkins — a native of Indianapolis who had moved to L.A. in 1949 following several years' experience with Tiny Bradshaw and Big Jay McNeely, among others — had performed with Miles Davis, Oscar Moore, Harold Land, Chet Baker and others, as well as leading his own groups. His recording career embraced a single LP session of his own and appearances with the Clifford Brown-Max Roach Quintet, of which he was an early member; Illinois Jacquet; Dexter Gordon; Curtis Counce; Jim Hall; Quincy Jones; Buddy DeFranco and Leroy Vinnegar. The pianist had performed with Pepper on numerous occasions during the middle 1950s, and had participated in the Chet Baker Sextet recordings in which the altoist had been featured.
A spare, probing player whose economy of expression revealed both knowing musicianship and a sly, often humorous originality of conception, Perkins was one of the finer young pianists to have forged an individualized keyboard approach in the wake of Bud Powell and because of this was a favorite of some of the more adventurous Los Angeles players of the period. Certainly his work with Pepper — always crisp, authoritative and in rapport with the unfolding demands of the music — provides a convincing demonstration of his great skills as a sympathetic, responsive accompanist and a refreshing, uncliched soloist of lucidity, wit and imagination.
In Perkins Pepper found virtually the ideal pianist; it would be difficult to conceive of a more graceful, elegant or knowing second voice than that which he so consistently furnished the altoist in these marvelous performances. "Perkins," Michael James observed, "combines the advantages of mature vigor with those of harmonic and dynamic subtlety, every chorus an indictment of the frequency with which many other pianists operating in this stylistic field failed to draw out its full potential." The pianist was just beginning to gain the recognition he so richly deserved when, on March 17, 1958, he died in his adopted hometown. He was but 30 years of age, his great potential largely unfulfilled. Much of his finest work is to be heard herein.
Bassist Tucker had moved to Los Angeles in 1956 from his native Nashville for a three-year stay before moving on to New York City, work with Herbie Mann and Billy Taylor, among many others, and success as author of Mann's hit Comin' Home Baby. He was an even more frequent associate of Pepper's and had been on several recording dates with him. Like Pepper a native Californian drummer, Flores, a former student of Shelly Manne, had had several years experience in the big bands of Maynard Ferguson and Woody Herman. When these recordings were undertaken he had just come off the road with Herman and was in the process of establishing himself on the busy Los Angeles scene, working most regularly with his close friend, altoist Bud Shank, with whom he recorded extensively through the late 1950s and early '60s. He's still active.
In retrospect Pepper feels he was performing particularly well during the middle and late 1950s, an impression substantiated by his riveting, unremittingly creative playing on these albums, among his most perfectly realized, daring recordings of the period. They represent an important addition to his discography, along with the earlier mentioned Art Pepper Meets the Rhythm Section summing up the important second stage of Pepper's artistic development —the six-year period following his departure from the Kenton fold during which he had consolidated all he had come to learn about the art of jazz playing, perfected a thoroughly personal, immensely satisfying mode of expression, and achieved a degree of technical fluency and conceptual mastery that in the ensuing years were to enable him to extend his art even further, to play with even greater expressive freedom and daring.
But that's another chapter in Pepper's long, troubled, still continuing odyssey of self-discovery. To follow those developments, you are respectfully referred to the many recordings he's made since and which, happily for us, he's still making. To learn more about the man, his view of himself and his life experiences, including one of the most harrowing, unsparing accounts of heroin addiction ever written, and the painful process of reclamation that's literally brought him back from the grave, one can do no better than to read his remarkable autobiography, Straight Life.
—PETE WELDING
Complete Aladdin Recordings - Volume 1
The present album brings together 15 performances, products of two separate studio sessions, that alto saxophonist Art Pepper made during the middle 1950s when, having returned to jazz activity following a year's incarceration at The Fort Texas, Federal Penitentiary for narcotics violations, he was playing with great power and assurance. In the first two years of his freedom, 1954 and '55, he had sought to re-establish himself in his hometown of Los Angeles, where what was then called "West Coast jazz" was at the height of its wide popularity, and while he performed with a number of groups and big bands as well as leading his own group for club dates in Southern California, the years were somewhat disappointing in terms of committing his art to record.
1956 saw a turn in fortunes for him, as he once again found multiple recording outlets for his bursting, forcefully mature playing, appearing on record with, among others, Shorty Rogers, Chet Baker, Hoagy Carmichael, Russ Garcia, Ted Brown, Warne Marsh and Joe Morello, as well as making four albums under his own name. This impressive body of recordings solidified Pepper's comeback and secured his reputation as one of the most authoritative, absorbingly original jazz musicians then on the scene. He had, in fact, recovered a great deal of the ground his prison term had lost him and was well on the way to the wide acceptance his huge talent deserved.
This album reprises one of the four dates he had made as leader — The Return Of Art pepper, recorded in August, 1956, and first released as Jazz West JWLP 10 — as well as the five selections on which he was featured with the Joe Morello Sextet, the drummer's first date as leader, recorded on January 3, 1957, and released as Intro ILP 608. Taken together, they give a fine representation of the state of Art's art at this productive stage of his, sadly, frequently interrupted career. It's good to have them available again, particularly the five selections with the Morello Sextet, which contain some especially gripping, potent playing from the altoist.
The quintet date Pepper led for Jazz West, which boasted a program of eight originals and the two standards Broadway and You Go To My Head, all 10 arranged by him, is, it must be admitted, somewhat erratic in character. While it contains several performances of absolutely riveting, beautiful power, the impression one has of much of the music is of considerably more mundane levels of achievement, workmanlike rather than truly inspired. Pepper, however, generally plays with passion and inspiration — the high points of the date are clearly his and the rhythm support furnished by three-fifths of the then Shelly Manne Quintet cannot be faulted.
Much of the trouble, if that's what it is, stems from two elements — the discursive quality of trumpeter Jack Sheldon's playing as well as the perfunctory character of some of the music and their settings provided by Pepper. It sounds to these ears as though Art were pulled in several directions in his writing for the group. Several of the selections reveal a pronounced influence from the hugely popular Gerry Mulligan Quartet of just a few years earlier — notably the heterophonic treatment accorded the opening. Pepper Returns (a thinly disguised Lover Come Back To Me) which is much too agitated to be truly effective, and Broadway which reveals close affinities with the version Lee Konitz recorded with the Mulligan quartet; a few others seem colored by Shorty Rogers' characteristic approach — Angel Wings is a good example; while others are simply "head" arrangements of the most functional sort, with little or no attempt at exploiting to any degree the potentials of the instrumentation. In short, it seems a very casual, offhanded sort of date with little real pre-planning evident in either the charts or the playing formats. But, then, Art always was thought of as a player rather than as a writer. And it is as a player that he clearly excels here.
While he does his manful, craftsmanlike best, and occasionally rises to the challenges, trumpeter Jack Sheldon is simply outclassed by Pepper, pianist Russ Freeman and the others. All too rarely is his playing focused to the degree the altoist's is, with the result that his solos have a meandering, discursive quality, and too often he indulges in gratuitous effects — excessive tonguing and pinching of notes, sputtering phrases, false climaxes, and the like — that impede the flow of the music. His solo on Pepper's rhythmically interesting Funny Blues is but one example of this overindulgence in the spurious. In fairness, it should be noted that Sheldon does turn in some fine playing on more than one occasion, of which his Clifford Brown-inflected spot on Broadway and his restrained, emotionally persuasive solo on the excellent Walkin' Out Blues are two of the better. Still, when compared with a player of such distinctive power and real originality of expression as Pepper, or even Freeman, Sheldon's much more eclectic approach was bound to come off second-best.
After Pepper, pianist Russ Freeman is the most consistently absorbing soloist, his playing always informed with clearly focused power, firm inner logic, harmonic ingenuity of a particularly original character, an equally distinctive approach to rhythm, and copious quantities of wry, mordant wit. Like Pepper's, his is an original voice of great distinctiveness, as is attested in every one of his improvisations here, of which those on Broadway (loping, characteristically elliptical), Angel Wings, (sort of a personalized adaptation of Horace Silver-like funk) and Funny Blues (beautifully modeled, full of sly wit, interesting dissonances and always perfectly controlled) are outstanding examples.
But it's Pepper who shines, time and again claiming our attention no less than our admiration with the gripping intensity and ravishing beauty of his artistry. Of particular interest are the several performances on which he is the sole soloist — the stunningly lovely treatment he accords You Co To My Head and the equally affecting Patricia, an original ballad of great, uncloying romantic ardor which he plays with sweeping lyrical fervor. He's clearly at, or close to the top of his game here.
One can find no fault with the remaining five selections, product of a recording session organized quickly to capitalize on drummer Joe Morello's presence in Los Angeles for but two days while on his way to join the Dave Brubeck Quartet in its home base of San Francisco. Happily for us this was one of those ad hoc sessions that, sparked by all the players, produced results far beyond what might have been anticipated. Pepper is at his glorious, intense best, playing with great heated fervor and plentiful resources of imagination, as he did so often on the Jazz West date, but here the crucial difference is that all the others are performing at comparable levels of expressive power and focused intensity. Not only this, but there is a real group gestalt developed that imparts to the performances a firmly ordered, seamless consistency— all the players united in common cause — only rarely achieved in the Pepper- Sheldon recordings.
Given the caliber of the players, this should occasion no surprise. Joining the altoist on these performances are a number of the brightest lights then on the Los Angeles jazz scene. Working hand-in-glove with Morello in a rhythm section of unerring skill, subtlety and responsiveness are the vastly underappreciated pianist Gerry Wiggins and the young veteran bassist Ben Tucker, impeccable time-keepers all.
Sharing the front-line duties with Pepper is the perennially youthful Red Norvo, jazz's pioneering vibraphonist who over a long, distinguished career remained, always, a questing, exploratory musician who constantly sought to reinvigorate his playing by keeping abreast of innovations in the music and incorporating the best and most compatible into an approach of easy rhythmic power and real individuality. That he could work so effortlessly and naturally with modernists such as Pepper and Wiggins is proof of Norvo's vigorous, ageless, ever creative music-making. This, along with Pepper's consistently spark-producing playing, made this a joyous session that can be listened to time and again with utter pleasure in the heights so consistently scaled.
Complete Aladdin Recordings - Volume 2
The second of three Compact Disc albums on which are reprised alto saxophonist Art Pepper's complete recordings for Los Angeles' Aladdin Records consists of the full-length album Modern Art, originally issued in early 1957 as Intro ILP-606, plus two additional selections recorded at the sessions that produced that album (the alternate of Diane's Dilemma and the extended Summertime) and, if this weren't abundance enough, three alternate performances stemming from the April, 1957, recording sessions that have generally been known as the Omegatape recordings, since the bulk of these Pepper Quartet performances had originally been issued on a pair of 71/2-ips reel-to-reel tapes marketed by Omegatape under license from Aladdin Records. (The issued recordings are to be found in the third CD volume of this Pepper/ Aladdin series.)
As this and other recordings from the period attest, there can be little doubt that during the mid- to late-1950s Art Pepper was at one of the several performing peaks that characterized his career in jazz, playing with great assurance, imaginative resourcefulness, singing emotional ardor and the bursting intensity— always full-out, it seemed, never withholding any part of himself — that have marked his best and most gripping work. And always, too, with the singularity of expression — the instantly identifiable tonality and characteristic approach to phrasing — that made his one of the truly individualistic jazz voices of the time.
This was something the altoist had striven long and hard, from the earliest days of his career, to develop and maintain, constantly testing and stretching himself in his music. Pepper early came to the conclusion that jazz was not a music but an approach to music — a process, if you will — through which a performer constantly sought to define himself, to deepen, expand on and grow past what he already knew to something that was always just a little beyond his reach. The striving was what was important, what the music was all about.
And Pepper, make no mistake, was a striver. If anyone personified the view of the jazz musician as a risk-taker, one who always was flying by the seat of his pants in his music, it was Pepper. He loved, lived for, reveled in the challenge of the moment, fully living up to the ideal of the jazz performer as the maker of totally improvised music. That was the way he most liked to approach playing — unfettered, unrestricted, wholly free to be and play himself through the instantaneous creative act — the simultaneous process of recomposition and execution — that jazz, ideally at least, should constantly strive to be. Few achieved this ideal as often as did Pepper but, then, few of his West Coast confreres sought it as consistently or as determinedly as he. More than anything else, it was the very cornerstone of his conception of jazz, the reason he persevered with the music as long as he did, and to the exclusion of all else. It was the chief reason he eschewed the studio and session work — and its attendant financial rewards — that so many of his contemporaries on the Los Angeles jazz scene settled into so comfortably. He could easily have handled its demands, as on occasion he demonstrated, but this largely craftsmanlike approach to music was not for him. It ran counter to what he believed music was and could be.
The recordings that make up this valuable album offer a perfect distillation of Pepper's musical philosophy in stunningly actualized form. His was an art of the moment, and Pepper like his music came alive only in performance. The fundamental improvisatory spirit that was at the core of his approach courses through everything he plays here, for he approached recording no differently than he did casual club dates or full-blown concert settings. It was all one to him. The important thing was always to give of his best, to approach each and every performance, every standard or original as for the first and for the last time, never stinting, coasting, falling back on clichés or otherwise holding back. It was not in his nature to do so and we, of course, are the richer for it.
From the opening number, the totally improvised slow, moody Blues In, with Pepper's graceful, liquid-toned alto discoursing so effortlessly and eloquently, with a perfect inner logic all the more remarkable for having been developed in the very act of playing, over the sole support of Ben Tucker's lightly swinging but oh-so-right bass, Pepper shows us time and again what his art was all about, never giving less than his all and always playing with total, engaged commitment and utter artistry. He was so fully commited to wholly spontaneous playing that even his thematic statements of the ballad standards he so liked to perform are never merely that but from their opening notes are always thoroughly imbued with Pepper's musical identity— the smeared notes, slurred emotional phrasing, interjected commentaries, unusual rhythmic displacements and occasional rests and all the many other elements of his strikingly individual conception, not forgetting that lovely, immediately recognizable saxophone tonality, that stamped Pepper's music as his and his alone. It is this that shines so brightly through every one of the performances here, and makes this an album of special importance to us. Ultimately, however, it is the sheer intensity of his playing that commands our attention and that, happily, is in plentiful supply in these recordings, made at the very pinnacle of one of Art's finest playing periods.
In making these observations, it is not my intention to scant in any wise the contributions of Pepper's co-workers. This music is very much the product of a concerted group effort, and without the unerring support of the vastly underappreciated pianist Russ Freeman, bassist Ben Tucker and drummer Chuck Flores on the 10 Modern Art selections, and Carl Perkins (another largely unsung keyboard genius), Tucker and Flores on the three alternates from the Omegatape session, none of it would have come off as well as it did.
Both in support of the altoist and in his own solo efforts, Freeman constantly demonstrates the qualities of harmonic and rhythmic ingenuity, imaginative fertility and the wry humor of conception that have distinguished his playing as among the more interesting and wittily personal of all modern piano approaches. So too, the largely self-taught Perkins enlivens the three Omegatape alternates with the tensile linearity and broadened harmonic palette that, combined with his vigorous, personal handling of rhythm, made his such an absorbingly satisfying keyboard voice, one which, moreover, demonstrated a warm, individualistic development of a fundamental Bud Powell-influenced modernism. The participation of bassist Tucker and drummer Flores in the rhythm sections of both groups of sessions provides for a consistently invigorating pulsation that links the two dates nicely.
Songs 1-8 were originally issued as Modern Art by Art Pepper, Intro ILP 606 and later issued on Score SLP 4030 and Blue Note BNLA 591-2. Song 9 was mistakenly issued on some pressings of Blue Note BNLA 591-2 in place of "Blues Out." It was later issued on a Japanese edition of Intro ILP 606.
Song 10 is previously unissued.
Songs 11-13 are alternate takes of tunes from the Aladdin recording session that produced the Omega Tapes, which comprised the third CD of THE COMPLETE ART PEPPER ALADDIN RECORDINGS. These alternate takes were issued on the Japanese Trio label briefly in the late seventies. Songs 1-10 are monaural recordings. Songs 11-13 are stereo recordings.
Complete Aladdin Recordings - Volume 3
Early in 1957, following a year of fairly extensive recording during which he had successfully re-established his reputation as a jazz player of the first rank, altoist Art Pepper in the company of Red Garland, Paul Chambers and Philly Joe Jones, the rhythm section of the then Miles Davis Quintet, recorded a brilliant, entrancing set of performances, Art Pepper Meets The Rhythm Section, one of the key recordings of his career. Its singular power and beauty were recognized instantly and the album was cited by many commentators as one of the important, deeply satisfying jazz recitals of the year, then as now a classic of the altoist's oeuvre. This watershed recording was followed a month later by a Quincy Jones date. On March 31 Pepper appeared on the "Stars of Jazz" television show, and the following day — April Fool's Day, 1957 — the present recordings were undertaken for Aladdin Records.
For some reason known only to Aladdin executives of the day, the recordings were released by Omegatape, one of the earliest U.S. firms engaged in the manufacture of prerecorded 1/4-track stereo tapes (now called open-reel) for the serious audiophile. The recordings were not issued in disc form at the time and this, coupled with the relatively limited sales enjoyed by 1/4-track tapes, accounts for the extreme rarity of these vintage Pepper performances. Combining all the material released on Omegatape OMT 7020 and ST 2030, the present volume restores to currency, and in Compact Disc form, some of the finest and rarest of all Art Pepper recordings in their original stereo configuration and in their original recording order. As an added bonus, three alternate takes are to be found in the second CD album in this Pepper-Aladdin series.
When I questioned Pepper about these recordings some years ago, he retained only faint details of their circumstances — how they came to be made or what led to their appearance on Omegatape — but had a vivid impression of the music, product of a single marathon session held in Hollywood's Audio Arts studios, and remembered the session as having come off particularly well, primarily because the supporting players — pianist Carl Perkins, bassist Ben Tucker and drummer Chuck Flores — had been working regularly as a group in various Los Angeles clubs. The session proceeded with the swiftness and smoothness of a club date, he recalled, few tunes requiring more than a single take (the exceptions, of course, are those included in the second volume).
One of the mainstays of the Los Angeles jazz scene of those days, the self-taught Perkins — a native of Indianapolis who had moved to Southern California in 1949 following several years' experience with Tiny Bradshaw and Big Jay McNeely, among others — had performed with Miles Davis, Oscar Moore, Harold Land, Chet Baker and others, as well as leading his own groups. His recording career embraced a single LP session of his own and appearances with the Clifford Brown-Max Roach Quintet of which he was an early member, Illinois Jacquet, Dexter Gordon, Curtis Counce, Jim Hall, Quincy Jones, Buddy DeFranco and Leroy Vinnegar. The pianist had performed with Pepper on numerous occasions during the middle 1950s, and had participated in the Chet Baker Sextet recordings on which the altoist had been featured.
A spare, probing player whose economy of expression revealed both knowing musicianship and a sly, often humorous originality of expression, Perkins was one of the finer young players to have forged an individualized keyboard approach in the wake of Bud Powell and because of this was a favorite of some of the more venturesome Los Angeles players of the period. Certainly his work with Pepper — always crisp, authoritative and in perfect rapport with the unfolding demands of the music — provides a convincing demonstration of his great skills as a sympathetic, responsive accompanist and a refreshingly uncliched soloist of lucidity, wit and imagination. In him Pepper found virtually the ideal pianist. It would be difficult, in fact, to conceive of a more graceful, elegant or knowing second voice than that which he so consistently provided the altoist in these marvelous performances. "Perkins," Michael James observed, "combines the advantages of mature vigor with those of harmonic and dynamic subtlety, every chorus an indictment of the frequency with which many other pianists operating in this stylistic field failed to draw out its full potential'.' The pianist was just beginning to gain the recognition he so patently deserved when, on March 17, 1958, he died in his adopted hometown. He was but 30 years of age, his great potential largely unfulfilled. Much of his finest work is to be heard herein.
Bassist Tucker had moved to Los Angeles from his native Nashville for a three-year stay before moving on to New York City, work with Herbie Mann and Billy Taylor, among many others, and success as author of Mann's hit Comin' Home Baby. He was an even more frequent associate of Pepper's and had earlier been on several recording dates with him. His big warm tone and unerring time help these performances not inconsiderably.
Like Pepper a native Californian, drummer Flores, a former student of the premier West Coast drummer Shelly Manne, had had several years experience in the big bands of Maynard Ferguson and Woody Herman. When these recordings were undertaken he had just come off the road with Herman and was in the process of establishing himself on the busy Los Angeles scene, working most regularly with his close friend, altoist Bud Shank, with whom he recorded extensively through the late 1950s and early '60s.
In casting back over his career some years later, Pepper felt he was performing particularly well during the middle and late 1950s, an impression substantiated by his riveting, unremittingly creative playing on this album, among his most perfectly realized, daring recordings of the period. The Omegatape recordings represent a significant addition to his discography, and take their place with the earlier mentioned Art Pepper Meets The Rhythm Section in summing up the important second stage of Pepper's artistic development — the six-year period following his departure from the Stan Kenton Orchestra during which he had consolidated all he had come to learn about the art of jazz playing, perfected a thoroughly personal, immensely satisfying mode of expression, and in addition achieved a degree of technical fluency and conceptual mastery that in the ensuing years were to enable him to extend his art even further, to play with even greater expressive freedom and daring.
- Pete Welding
These are the complete master takes of the Aladdin recording session, which was leased to Omega Tapes. Omega issued all 12 titles on two reel-to-reel stereo tapes. Seven of the titles were issued as "Omega Alpha" by Art Pepper, Blue Note LT-1064. Various unauthorized editions of this material have appeared on disc on various labels. This CD is made from the original tapes and is in the original recording order.
