Straight Life - Art Pepper [209]
I got drafted. I went overseas and played there, and everybody liked me. I came home three years later and just assumed everything was the same as it was when I left. I'm not home more than a few days when this friend comes over and he says, "Man, have you heard Bird or Diz?" I said, "Bird or Diz who?" "Have you heard bebop?" "Be-bop?" I hadn't heard a word, I swear to God. I was feeling good. I'd been playing in England, built up a style of my own.
He put on a record, Sonny Stitt and Dizzy Gillespie. On one side was "Salt Peanuts" and on the other was "Oop Bop Sh'Bam..." Ahahaha! "...A Klug Ya Mop!" They played these charts-"Salt Peanuts" was so fast ... Jimmy Lunceford used to have a tune called "White Heat" that was real, real fast, beyond comprehension at the time. These guys played faster than that, and they really played. Not only were they fast, technically, but it all had meaning, and they swung! They were playing notes in the chords that I'd never heard before. It was more intricate, more bluesy, more swinging, more everything. They had gone from one decade to another, one culture to another. Straight up! I heard it and I thought, "Oh, Jesus Christ! What am I going to do?" I heard this Sonny Stitt just roaring, flying over the keys, swinging, shouting. It moved me so much-and it scared me to death.
The guy said, "Well, what do you think of that?" I said, "Yeah, well." I had to protect myself so I said, "Yeah, but, boy, it's so ... They never relax. When are they going to settle back and groove? Where's the warmth and the feeling? Their tones . . ." I tried everything. Anything to justify my own position. He played a thing by Dizzy and Charlie Parker, and I heard Charlie Parker, and I really didn't like his tone. It sounded coarse to me. I finally had something to hang on to. I said, "I don't dig his tone." My friend said, "Well, what about Dizzy?" I had to admit, "Yeah, he's got a nice tone. It's a little thin though."
He'left. I got ill. What was I going to do now? I decided the only thing I could do was just practice and play and play and develop my own thing. The tenor was always the more popular instrument. It used to be there was never a solo written in a stock band arrangement for alto. It was all tenor solos-that was the "jazz saxophone." Charlie Parker made the alto popular, and I thought, "Well, that's good. That's good." I noticed that all the tenor players had switched to alto, and they all sounded just like Charlie Parker.
Books came out. Bird's solo on this, Bird's solo on that. They'd copy these things off the records and practice by the hour Bird's solos and his licks. Everybody sounded like him with the same ugly sound. Guys I'd heard before who had had beautiful tones now, all of a sudden, had ugly tones like Bird. Out of tune. Squalling. Squawking. I didn't want to play that way at all, but I realized that I had to upgrade my playing and I had to really learn chords and scales. So I didn't copy anyone. I didn't practice much, but I went out and blew and blew and blew. Then I rejoined Kenton, and I sounded only like me.
Bird had a great ear for changes, a great blues sense, great technical ability. He was able to play real fast, and his lines were beautiful. Everything was thought out and made sense. I never used to like his tone, but that's personal. A tone is like a person's voice. Now when I listen to him I love the whole thing, tone and all. He was a genius. But when I heard Coltrane!
In the late fifties I heard John Coltrane with Miles Davis. I heard the Kind of Blue album. On that album he played everything you can imagine. He played more notes than Bird, more involved than Bird, and I loved his tone. Everything he played held together and meant something to me, and he really moved me. He's the only guy I ever heard in my life that I said, "I'd give my right arm to play like that."
It happened slowly, but by 1964, when I got out of San Quentin and started playing again, more and more I found myself sounding like Coltrane. Never copied any of his licks consciously, but from