Saxophonist Art Pepper's fight back from junkie to jazzman
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 only knew the route," he said to them, "what I 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...
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