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 and waste and frequent despair. But they could see some of its ravages in Pepper's face, which was taut and sallow under his skullcap haircut, almost a death mask. And they could hear some of its pain in the soulful, impassioned 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 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 something, 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 performances showed how successfully he has brought all these strains together within a distinctive, fiery lyricism.
Pepper's life has been an ordeal of "searching for something and never stopping, never being satisfied," as he put it in Straight Life, the unsparing, tape-recorded autobiography (Schirmer; 1979) that he assembled with his third wife, Laurie. His parents, a hard-bitten merchant seaman and a teen-age bride, began breaking up shortly after Art's birth in suburban Los Angeles (which his mother tried to prevent by aborting herself). Art's lonely upbringing was entrusted to an unloving grandmother. He found an outlet in the clarinet at nine and switched to the saxophone at twelve. He proved such a natural that he was soon jamming around town with musicians like Zoot Sims and Dexter Gordon. At 17 he was married and playing lead alto with Stan Kenton.