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Art Pepper was tense and
perspiring, and he had not
played a note yet.
From the bandstand, he looked
out at the opening-night crowd in Fat Tuesday's, a sleek Manhattan jazz
club. "If you onlyknew the route," he said to them, "whatI
had to do, to get here."
They may not have known the grim
details of that route: the heavy drinking at 15, the heroin addiction at
25, the two broken marriages, the ten years in hospitals, prisons and
other institutions, the illness and
waste and frequent despair. But they could see some of its
ravages on Pepper's face, which was taut and
sallow under his skullcap haircut, amost a death mask. And they
could hear some of its pain in the
soulful, im-
passioned solos that Pepper poured out when he picked up his alto sax.
At
54, Art Pepper had come back, as he had had to many times before.
Last week, following his
engagement at Fat Tuesday's and at clubs in such other cities as
Philadelphia and Washington,
he wound up a rare swing .through the East with a performance for the
Atlanta Jazz Alliance. He had a first-rate
trio in tow: Pianist Milcho Leviev. Bassist Bob Magnusson and Drummer
Carl Burnett.
His repertory ranged brilliantly
over a variety of :moods and rhythms, from standards (What Is This
Thing Called Love?) to
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appealing originals (Ophelia,
Blues for Blanche), and from wistful
ballads (Over the Rainbow) through
funky Latin beats (Mambo Koyama) to awesome, high-speed pyrotechnics (Cherokee). Amazingly, after all his debilitating periods
of obscurity and silence, his full, ringing tone was unimpaired, his
melodic gift intact, his instinct for pace and structure still solid.
If anything, instead of
deteriorating over the years, Pepper's style has expanded and deepened.
He has always been an original; but in the late 1940s and early 50s, when
his recordings with Stan
Kenton, Shorty Rogers and other West Coast jazzmen first brought him to
prominence, his sound combined traces of Lester Young's cool obliqueness
with Charlie Parker's harmonic and rhythmic complexities. Later he took
on a darker sometimes harsher quality as he came under the influence of
John Coltrane's stabbing, honking outcries and modal sheets of sound.
Last week's peformances showed how successfully he
has brought all these strains together within a
distinctive, fiery lyricism.
[etc. etc]
By Christopher
Porterfield
TIME. MAY 26. 1980
Copyright Time Magazine
2006
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