Here, from my book, are two attempts to put the pieces of Art Pepper together. The second one is more to the point we're talking about, but the first adds some context:
ART PEPPER
The first of these two pieces about Art Pepper was written two years after the first; they appear here in reverse chronological order because, in effect, the obituary attempts to sum up Pepper’s life and artistic achievement, while the second piece, a response to Pepper’s autobiography, Straight Life, tries to explore the reasons why an artist who lived in such a turbulent, frequently self-destructive manner could produce music whose key trait was an often exquisite orderliness and grace.
[1982]
There will be no more of Art Pepper’s passionate, exquisitely structured music. One of jazz’s great alto saxophonists, Pepper died Tuesday morning of heart failure in a Los Angeles-area hospital, never having regained consciousness after he suffered a stroke six days before. He was fifty-six.
“A pioneer of progressive jazz” was the way one wire-service obituary spoke of him, and to the degree that there ever was such a music as “progressive jazz,” Pepper did bear some relation to it--but only because, having worked successfully within “progres¬sive” contexts he defined their limitations by effortlessly transcending them. An artist whose sense of musical order was seemingly innate, he was often stimulated by complex external structures, but in their absence his own form-giving qualities were rich. The “pioneer” tag is also dubious, for Pepper--unlike, say, Lester Young, John Coltrane, and Charlie Parker--did not inaugurate a broadly influential style (though there were a few Pepper disciples). Nor was his attitude toward the jazz artists who preceded him in any sense iconoclastic. A trio of Swing-Era players--alto saxophonists Benny Carter and Willie Smith and tenor saxophonist Joe Thomas--were his initial inspirations, and the symmetry and warmth that characterized their music were qualities Pepper never relinquished. But his own symmetries, for all their grace and apparent ease, bore the marks of intense internal pressure, while his warmth and humanity were those of a man who had to define and test himself anew each time he picked up his horn.
From the first, self-expression was Pepper’s goal, and in that sense, aided by his natural ear and burgeoning instrumental facility, he was a jazz musician long before he became familiar with the music. The vital familiarizing process took place while Pepper was still in his teens, at jam sessions in Los Angeles’s Central Avenue district. Joining Stan Kenton’s Orchestra after brief stints with the bands of Gus Arnheim and Carter, Pepper recorded his first solo, “Harlem Folk Dance,” in 1943 and, after Army service and work as a Los Angeles-based freelancer, he returned to Kenton in 1947. This was the period when Pepper became a star of sorts, and on “Art Pepper,” the piece that Kenton trumpeter Shorty Rogers wrote for him in 1950, and on the 1951 “Over the Rainbow,” recorded with Rogers’s octet, Pepper’s suave lyricism and knifelike rhythmic zeal already marked him as a special artist.
It was in this period that Pepper became a heroin addict, which led over the next two decades to long absences from the scene and several jail terms. But in the midst of this external chaos, Pepper was perfecting and deepening his music. From 1956 to 1960, his first stage of true maturity, he produced one masterly recorded performance after another: “Besame Mucho,” “I Surrender Dear,” “Pepper Pot,” “Old Croix,” “What Is This Thing Called Love?,” “ All the Things You Are,” “Rhythm-a-ning,” “Winter Moon”--the list is a long one. But eventually the authorities and Pepper’s personal demons had their way, and he was not to make another significant recording until 1975.
Pepper returned to jazz with all his skills intact and with his expressive range having increased under the weight of his long ordeal. On any given night until the very end--his last Chicago performance, which took place only two weeks before his stroke, was typical--Pepper challenged himself to the utmost. In his life, Art Pepper seemed to be skating at the edge of an abyss. And yet his music managed to encompass that sense of danger, seeking and finding a wholeness that was, so it seems, denied to its maker.
[1980]
Like most autobiographies that purport to tell all, Straight Life: The Story of Art Pepper is a tissue of genuine revelations and willful posing, in which the desire to speak the truth is at war with the author’s need to paint himself as a romantic victim. But because Straight Life was written by a major jazz musician, the book does tell us a great deal--about the so-called “jazz life” and also about the tensions that affect almost every artist who functions in the modern world.
There are any number of nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists whose lives and whose work expressed an inner emotional turmoil that bordered on self-destruction--Poe, Rimbaud, Van Gogh, Scriabin, Hart Crane, the list could go on and on. But the hallmarks of Art Pepper’s music are lucidity, grace, and a meticulous sense of order. How, one wonders, can those qualities be reconciled with a life so internally chaotic that much of Straight Life reads like a suicide note?
The title of the book, borrowed from that of Pepper’s swift little melody on the changes of “After You’ve Gone,” is deliberately ironic, because “straight” is the one thing the alto saxophonist’s life has never been. Born on September 1, 1925, in Gardena, California, he was the byproduct of a brief, stormy romance. His teenaged mother wanted an abortion, his father married her only because he wanted the child to live, and much of Pepper’s youth was spent away from both parents, in the care of his stern paternal grandmother.
The account in Straight Life of those early years is grim, but it would have meaning only to Pepper’s friends if it were not for his great musical gifts. From the first he seems to have been a “natural,” with a drive toward self-expression that logically led him toward jazz, although the account of his youthful initiation into that world strikes a note of naïveté that echoes throughout the book. Told by a guitarist that “these are the chords to the blues . . . this is black music, from Africa, from the slave ships that came to America,” Pepper recalls that “I asked him if he thought I might have the right to play jazz.” Musically, the answer to Pepper’s question obviously was “yes,” as it was for Bix Beiderbecke, Pee Wee Russell, and many other white jazzmen. But the fact that Pepper felt compelled to ask (or says that he did--the anecdote sounds a little too pat to be literally true) suggests that emotionally he would forever feel uncertain that his unquestioned ability to play jazz made him part of the jazz community.
While still in his teens Pepper worked in predominantly black bands led by Lee Young and Benny Carter and hung out in Los Angeles’s Central Avenue district, where a free and easy racial comradeship prevailed. “There,” Pepper recalls, “everybody just loved everybody else, or if they didn’t, I didn’t know about it.” Young, remembering that same era, says, “It wasn’t about ‘whitey’ this and ‘whitey’ that. It was about good musicianship and people respecting one another for the talents that they had.”
Pepper’s talents, which evolved further during a stint with Stan Kenton’s orchestra, required him to forge his own style, one that owed a debt to black jazzmen but was significantly different in that his music seemed increasingly to have uncertainty and isolation as its subject. Then, after a tour of Army duty that led to the disintegration of his first marriage, Pepper returned to Kenton and found, in 1950, what was for him to be the “answer”--heroin. At this point in Straight Life, Pepper makes no excuses. Having found “no peace at all except when I was playing,” he felt, under the influence of the drug, that “I loved myself…I loved my talent. I said, ‘This is it. This is the only answer for me…whatever dues I have to pay.’ I realized that from that moment on I would be, if you want to use the word, a junkie. And that’s what I still am.”
If Straight Life were an exemplary tale, Pepper’s career from then until now would be an unbroken account of personal and artistic disintegration. But while he would spend more than a third of the following three decades in jail on various narcotics charges and would involve himself in a mutually self-destructive second marriage, these are also the years of Pepper’s greatest musical triumphs. One answer to this seeming paradox might be that Straight Life is a con job, an attempt by the author to paint himself as a larger-than-life-size rogue. But even if the grimmer anecdotes in the book are discounted, Pepper’s physical presence today is enough to confirm their essential truth. A strikingly handsome man at one time--reminiscent of Tyrone Power, according to a friend--Pepper is now someone whose haunted, ravaged face clearly proclaims that he has never needed to conjure up imaginary demons.
Straight Life finally does give us the information we need to resolve the split between Pepper’s willfully disordered life and his carefully ordered music. Indeed, the answer may be found in an aspect of the book that at first seems quite frustrating--in the author’s reluctance to talk about his music and in his corresponding eagerness to relate the lurid details of his sex life, drug addiction, and prison experiences.
That music is important to Pepper is believable only if we already know his music; otherwise Straight Life might be the story of any junkie. But soon we realize that, for Pepper, music, drugs, sex, and prison life are, in one sense, all of a piece--or rather, they all seem to be jumbled together in one area of his mind, a realm in which instinctual intelligence exists alongside childlike cunning, in which self-determined forms of order and expression blend into the trials of shame and pride that a lawbreaker’s life tends to bring. For example, Pepper states with special pride that he has never been an informer, never turned in a drug connection. From his point of view, that is an honorable, certain, and essentially private act, a matter between peers in a closed society. And in their various ways, both drug use and sex share similar qualities. One gets high or one does not, in the privacy of one’s own nervous system. One satisfies oneself and one’s partner or one does not, also in relatively private circumstances. And so Pepper feels free to boast about all these things.
But music is an exception for him because, like all forms of art, its ultimate meaning cannot be private, cannot be controlled by the artist; other people will take what the artist creates and make of it what they will. Of course, in the jazz world, particularly the world of the black jazz musician, communal agreements have often prevailed between the musicians and the audience , and almost almost always among the musicians themselves . But Pepper no longer seems to trust either of those communities, if he ever did. From his point of view, the comradeship of Central Avenue is gone forever. Instead, the isolated modern artist par excellence, he tries to create his own private world--striving for perfect, spontaneous order because only then will what he creates remain within his control. And, of course, every time he performs, he fails, for his music becomes more lucid and moving to us, and less private to him, the closer he comes to formal perfection.
So, for Art Pepper, the tensions remain; and as Straight Life demonstrates, they periodically become too great to be borne. But for us, one step removed from Pepper, the tensions are resolved. And that is the final paradox, that his music may do more for us than it can ever do for him.
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Meredith D'Ambrosio does a version of "Moon Dreams" here: http://www.sunnysiderecords.com/release_de...p?releaseID=161 that is clearly informed (as they say) by the Evans-Birth of the Cool recording. Amazing how much of it she conveys with just her voice and a rhythm section.