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By Root 1257 0

with some pretty radical players. Art heard those guys in Quentin, and at first he didn't like it so much, he said, but after hearing them practice day after day, he started to pick up on what they were doing and to like it more and more. And then, when he came out, he was pretty well exploding, I can tell you, musically. So much so that when we went into Shelly's in 1964, Shelly Manne and some of the other guys criticized him terribly, "Oh, no, that's not the old Art." You know, "Doesn't sound like Art Pepper." And Art is so sensitive. When people start criticizing, he immediately starts bending. So he started coming off what he was doing. He started using shit again because he was getting some criticism. Diane said she liked the "pretty" Art Pepper better. She didn't like the harshness he was playing with. And I think some of the harshness came from the fact that Art had spent a lot of time in jail. There was a lot of hostility, a lot of pent-up emotion, and when he played he was barkin', boy! It was raw emotion, and it was great. Incredible. Whether he might think so now or not. If we could have recorded at that time! Les recorded us on a few tunes, but he didn't like it.

We went up to San Francisco at that time. I got some jobs for us and we worked at Don Mupo's club in Oakland for two nights. We started Friday night; on Saturday night the last tune we played was "The Trip," and the people were standing on top of the tables. I kid you not. The place was packed solid. You couldn't get into the club or out, hardly. People were standing on the tables, cheering, while we were playing. I've never seen anything like it; in jazz this very rarely happens.

Art wasn't using much then. Drinking some. But a couple of months later we came back to Frisco, to the jazz Workshop, and he was using. Funny thing, on a night when he wasn't using, he'd come in and complain about Frank Strazzeri and be real uptight with all of us and be really nervous about all the tunes. One night we played our ass off, the rhythm section just burned, and he was uptight all night. The next night, he came in all stoned out of his mind, and I didn't think we sounded anywhere near as good, and he was just smiling, knocked out with everything. So it wasn't really the way the band sounded, it was the way Art felt. But at that time, the level we were playing on was very, very good.

(Shelly Manne) When Art came out of prison, a lot of music had been happening. I always loved the way Art played. His lyricism was the main thing I really loved, a very emotional way of playing. And very coherent, well-constructed solos. Well, sometimes a musician feels challenged, feels that he's going to be left behind, that what he's saying isn't the in thing at the moment. The problem is, too many people, critics, magazines, newspapers, they make music a competition like a sporting event. It's not a sporting event. You don't go to a museum and say, "Well, I give four votes for Rembrandt and five for Van Gogh." You can't do that. Each person, if they can really play and they are artists, which I consider them to be because jazz is definitely an art form, if they have that inner ability, that creative drive to say something very personal ... There are no "greatests," you know what I mean?

If I tried as a drummer to play like Tony Williams or Elvin Jones, I'd fall on my ass. It doesn't make me not love them any less as artists because I can't do it. And in my own experience, I found myself going through a period, when I owned a nightclub, of having these guys work in my club, and the next thing you know, I'd be trying to play like them because I'd be so strongly influenced, so delighted, by what they're doing. And I saw how the crowds reacted to it. I thought, "Oh, they consider me old hat." But I'm older and a little wiser: the festival I was just on, there were a lot of drummers there and I didn't go up there fearing that they're watching me or that I'm not going to play my best. I just go, play, and have fun because music is fun.

Everybody should try to improve; their playing