Straight Life - Art Pepper [29]
But let me tell you this about Art. At that time, I think everybody in the band was young, but, at seventeen, Art was the youngest. And about musicians, you can always tell when a guy is going to be great because the potential is there, and the only thing that needs to happen is for him to get out and play. It's like my brother, Prez. I know how much he could play at seventeen, and I think that what happens is that they could play snakes at that age, but they just have not mellowed into the type of style they're going to play. I think that's all that happens after that. When a musician is young, every idea they have, they try to play at once. They're not necessarily any better-Art probably wasn't any better at twenty-seven than he was at seventeen; he probably didn't know the instrument any better; but he knew what to do with it. He knew how not to overplay. You learn to pace yourself. But if he was not able to play all those notes and hear all those things, then he would never have been able to create a style. He was destined: nobody at that time was taking a seventeen year old and putting him into a band. The nearest I remember is when Harry James had Corky Corcoran. He played tenor. At that time he was the child wonder; I think he was sixteen or seventeen. But he was never destined to reach the heights as a jazz player that Art reached because you knew then, in hearing Corky play, that he wasn't the instrumentalist, the technician, that Art was. Stan Getz was very young, too, but Stan, he copied a lot. Stan copied Prez. Now, I never did hear that in Art.
I lost track of Art for a long time, and then he did a lot of things on his own. When he went with Benny Carter, that's understandable. He went from nine pieces to fourteen, fifteen pieces; he went from three saxophones to five. That was an education in itself. And then to go on and join Stan Kenton, that's beautiful.
Art was talented, but let me tell you, I never would have hired him if I'd thought he didn't have the right personality. If it's going to be one of you and a lot of another race of people, you could have a problem. I didn't just take Art blindly because I thought he played so well. I knew he'd be able to get along with the guys. And I knew the type of guys I had in the band. They would only judge him by his playing. He was quiet, the way I remember him. As a matter of fact the whole damn band was quiet! Hahahaha! That was a quiet band, but it was a good band. It could play.
The Club Alabam had had many names. When I came out here as a kid, you know, I used to be a singer and dancer, and it was one of the first places I worked. It was called the Apex. That was in the thirties, when all the movie stars used to frequent the club, so it was really a big business. And the same man who owned the Apex wound up owning the Club Alabam. How can I describe it? You had to buy your tickets at a ticket window, and then you'd go in, and they had tables all around the dance floor, maybe three deep, and they had a balcony, and right on the railing they had tables all the way around. I think you could get nine hundred people in there. And there was a long bar, maybe eighty, ninety feet, and all the hustlers and pimps, they stayed at the bar to fire their shots, so it was like something