Straight Life - Art Pepper [1]
I looked at myself in the mirror and I looked at Sheila [a pseudonym for the singer] and I looked at the few remaining lines of heroin and I took the dollar bill and horned the rest of them down. I said, "This is it. This is the only answer for me. If this is what it takes, then this is what I'm going to do, whatever dues I have to pay...... And I knew that I would go to prison and that I wouldn't be weak; I wouldn't be an informer like all the phonies, the no-account, the non-real, the zero people that roam around, the scum that slither out from under rocks, the people that destroyed music, that destroyed this country, that destroyed the world, the rotten, fucking, lousy people that for their own little ends-the black power people, stinking motherfuckers that play on the fact that they're black, and all this fucking shit that happened later on-the rotten, no-account filthy women that have no feeling for anything....
He continues in that vein for a while and concludes, with no trace of irony, "All I can say is, at that moment I saw that I'd found peace of mind."
This is alienation with a trudgeon, a narcissist's ravings. Yet it's a side of a man who in those same years revealed in his music a gentility and generosity of spirit that made him one of the most distinctive and emotive improvisers of his generation. He attempts in his book to justify his indulgences by parading them nakedly, giving and asking for no quarter.
Pepper had already achieved a measure of stardom in the straight world. He'd appeared with Benny Carter's band, and for five years (1946-51), following his stint in the Army, he emerged as the most admired soloist in the Stan Kenton orchestra. Yet he was sinking deeper and deeper into the netherworld. His first marriage broke up, and a second one became a grotesque and vindictive battle between two junkies who tortured each other relentlessly until she informed on him. Then Pepper, who felt more for his long-suffering dog than for his second wife ("The Story of Diane-The Great Zeeeero"), embarked on a maniacal revenge that was shortcircuited, like so much else in his life, by the requirements of his addiction. The music seemed to come last, though it's impossible to suspect that when you hear the fugitive recordings from the early Fifties. In those days, he seems to have chosen as his models Lester Young, Zoot Sims, Charlie Parker, and Lee Konitz-a matrix of hot and cool stylings, girded by fierce rhythms, rich in exquisite harmonies. Still, except for a couple of beguiling Savoy dates and two private sessions with Hampton Hawes, Pepper hardly recorded at all.
Then, in 1956, he started making the rounds as a sideman. He appeared on numerous sessions led by Shorty Rogers, Chet Baker, Marty Paich, Hoagy Carmichael, John Graas, Mel Torme, Barney Kessel, June Christy, Henry Mancini, Andre Previn, Helen Humes, and others. During the same years, 1956 to 1960, he hooked up with Les Koenig's Contemporary Records, and produced a series of masterful albums. Those sessions were a respite, a period of grace. With his lithe, dry-ice sound, he emerged as the sharpest white player in L.A.-a qualitative and racial distinction of profound importance to him. Even in his last years, he wanted nothing less than to be the first white player to loom as "the inspiration for the whole jazz world."
It's astounding to read in Straight Life that Art had to be propped up to play on sessions that became epiphanies of the West Coast jazz movement. Pepper's intonation was clear and balmy (on clarinet and tenor as well as alto), but the texts of his solos were shaded with longings. The tensile and deliberated phrasing was a means to a direct and manly emotional expressiveness