Straight Life - Art Pepper [119]
My territory was East Los Angeles, downtown L.A., Glendale, and Pasadena, a pretty large area. I'd get three leads a night, and if I sold the kid, if I could get the parents to give me ten dollars, then the kid got a certain number of lessons and he'd use one of those accordians for a while. I'd keep the ten dollars. After he finished this series of lessons the high-pressure salesman went out. He'd say he's taking the little accordian away, but if the kid wants to continue, he can march in the Rose Parade and all that. And the salesman would show him a great big accordian that cost a fortune. The kids would cry, and the parents, who were just scuffling and starving to death ... It was really sad. But in another way it was good because some of the kids really did have musical talent.
I did that for a while and did fairly well. I remember my first time out I sold all three leads and got thirty dollars. But it was hard work, and it became harder and harder to mantain the payments on the car, and a Lincoln, it costs a lot of money to get them repaired. You have to keep them up. Fortunately, instead of starting to use again we continued with the Cosanyl. I was getting fat, and people saw me and thought I was clean. Finally, this guy Steve White-who is kind of a legend around L.A., extremely talented and likable but totally crazy-I ran into him; he was playing with a rock group from North Carolina and he asked me if I wanted a gig-replacing him on tenor with that group. So I started working at this club in the valley called the Palomino.
Then Les Koenig asked me to do another album. I was really down with the tenor so I made Art Pepper plus Eleven playing alto, tenor, and clarinet. Marty Paich wrote all the arrangements. They were modern jazz classics, and I used large bands, well-known people, good musicians. When I did that, things started to open up for me. Diane and I moved from the motel to a nice little house in Studio City. I got a job at the Lighthouse working steady. Marty Paich started using me on a lot of Mel Torme's things and with other singers.
THE RETURN OF ART PEPPER by Jack Tynan
Hollywood-For Art Pepper the long, lean years are over.
Fast reestablishing himself as one of the most important altoists in modern jazz, busy with Howard Rumsey's Lighthouse All-Stars five nights a week and Sunday afternoons, the 35-year-old musician today has put his troubled times well behind him and is now seeking greater expressiveness as an artist.
So busy is Pepper, in fact, that it is hard to believe that only a year ago, he was selling accordions-along with lessons on the instrument-to make a living. He had no work to speak of, and had become a stranger in the recording studios where his name had been linked with the foremost experimenters a scant five years previous. To those musicians with whom he occasionally came in contact, he seemed a ghost of his old self. He appeared to have lost all interest in jazz and the playing of it.
"It's true I was pretty disinterested in music at that time," Pepper admits today. "But I began to put down the music rather than the circumstances."
In Art's case, the "circumstances" stretch a long way back. They cover his youth in Gardena, Calif.; his early days of sitting in with jazz greats when Los Angeles' Central Avenue and Main Street were swinging with all-night sessions; his first big break with the Benny Carter band when, as a 17-year-old, he sat alongside the late trumpeter Freddie Webster and trombonist J. J. Johnson; the great days with the Stan Kenton orchestra, and the oblivion that followed.
All these "circumstances" added up for the sax player to a total sum of disillusionment with music and a jazz world that did not seem exactly ready to welcome back Art Pepper with open arms. There was a brief period of recording in 1955-56, and an alliance