• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1335 0

should constantly change by absorbing playing from other great players. You should never stop growing. But the one thing you have when you're playing the way you feel, you have an individual way of playing. And I felt when I first heard Art, when he came out of prison and did his first club date, I didn't like what I heard. Not because he wasn't doing it well. But I didn't feel that it was an honest expression of the person I was listening to, after listening to him for all those years. It's okay to borrow from somebody like John Coltrane, but Art lost a lot of that lyrical quality that I love about him. When Art overblows his horn, the individual sound he has just disappears. I love Art on tenor, too. He has an individual sound, which is one of the things all the great players have, whether it be Charlie Parker, Lester Young, Art. He was destroying that, and I was sorry to see it, and now, more recently, I heard him reverting to himself. And that other stuff is absorbed into his playing and is expressed by his own identity, which makes it still an individual thing. But there was a period when I thought he was losing his way as far as Art Pepper is concerned. That happens to a lot of players, but they find that the best thing to do is just go play the way you feel because nobody can do it the way you feel, and if it's good, it's good. And not to be influenced by what's happening at the moment. Everybody has great favorites of the moment.

WHEN I went into San Quentin I didn't know what was going to happen with Diane. She'd gotten out of Norwalk after her suicide attempt, and I told her if she wanted to go ahead and get a divorce she could do that. There was no telling how long I'd have to stay in San Quentin. I'd rather have her get a divorce. But she said, "Oh, no, no! I love you! I want to be able to take care of you! I want to do everything I can for you! Please, please don't deny me the chance!" So I said alright-against my better judgment.

Diane came to visit me after I'd been in San Quentin for several months. She got a ride up with someone. She'd been straightening up, and she looked like she was fairly clean, and I thought, "Well, maybe she'll be cool." She went back and wrote all the time, nice letters, and finally she got another ride up and came to visit me again. She told me she couldn't stand to go back to L.A. She'd decided she was going to get her stuff and come and stay in San Francisco and wait for me to get out. I didn't feel that she was together enough, and I didn't want her uprooting herself. In Los Angeles she had her mother, who was a lesbian, but nevertheless she was her mother and would help her. She had her sister and her father, who was a good man, and her father's wife. But I couldn't talk her out of it. She went back to L.A. to my dad and, I didn't know about this, but she told my dad I had said it would be okay for him to give her all my things. She wanted to move to Frisco and she wanted to have everything of mine there so when I came out I would have a place and all my stuff. She got all the things I'd sent my dadshoes, a lot of nice clothes, and scrapbooks and pictures and stuff. I had all my school things, report cards, pictures of my army career, mementos of my time with Kenton, clippings, awards I'd won, and a bunch of music. My dad didn't want to do it, but Diane conned him out of my stuff.

She moved to San Francisco, rented a little place, and she got a job in some nightclub, some bar. She put my clothes in the closet and the music and scrapbooks all around the little apartment so it would look like I was living there. And she told me she was imagining that I was just out playing someplace and I'd be back. She lived in a little dreamworld, and I thought, "Oh, well, I guess it's alright if she can make it." She seemed to be doing fine.

It was approaching Christmas. That's the only time you're allowed to receive anything in San Quentin. They give you a list of things you're allowed to have. You're not allowed cigarettes but you can have candy and nuts and cigars. There were a bunch