Straight Life - Art Pepper [3]
What sobered the critics and fans (many of them musicians) about those last years was the aggressiveness of his creativity, a refusal to coast that made every performance a conscientious statement--a "trip," in the prison lingo he favored. If you thought you were going to sit back, sip your whiskey, and drowsily tap your foot, you were in the wrong place. Pepper could draw blood (usually his own), especially on ballads. He was always thinking, thinking, thinking. And he made you think; he reminded you how you came to love this music in the first place.
Armstrong once said, "Jazz is only what you are." Pepper's understanding of that was profound. He had lived a dark, cold life and this was his last stand. He shamelessly set it all out on the table, in writing and in music. He was a drug user, and he put that into his music. He was white in a music in which most of the innovators were black, and he accepted that as a challenge. "It looks to me like life begins at fifty," he wrote, "and I never thought I'd live to see fifty, let alone start a new life at this age." He set up an ambitious agenda for himself (to be the best saxophonist in the world, for starters), and, driven in part by a paranoia that convinced him that everyone wanted him to fail, he found new ways to stretch his endurance. You could hear that in his playing, and it was riveting.
The subject of music is not ignored in Straight Life. Pepper discusses his influences at length, his concern with tone, his conviction that a man's music must respect the moral rightness of his life-he gives Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Zoot Sims, Dizzy Gillespie as examples. There's a revealing description of his famous '50s session with Red Garland-I wish there were more of the same-and sharply observed anecdotes about road trips with Kenton, Buddy Rich, and others. His account of a jam session with Sonny Stitt that closes the book is as lyrical a celebration of a bandstand plight as I know of. When he wails like this, Pepper the memoirist isn't too far from Pepper the recording artist.
But it is Laurie Pepper who is responsible for the book's shape and much of its literary texture, and her efforts can hardly be overpraised. Using the standard oral history techniques of modern anthropology, she crafted a brutal montage of voices-relatives, acquaintances, and friends, as well as disingenuous magazine interviews-that amplify and contradict Pepper's steely narrative. She allows Pepper to come through whole, boasting of a crime on one page and declaring absolute innocence on the next. The text is eloquent, witty, and credible. When I reviewed the book for The Village Voice, I wrote that Pepper was better than William Burroughs on the subject of drugs and better than Malcolm Braly on prison life, an evaluation that is easier to make today, when neither Bur roughs's junky nor Braly's On the Yard are as well remembered. But it hardly matters that Laurie Pepper brought the book to life; her ear and editorial instinct turned Art's stories and obsessions into a hellfire narrative. The collaboration was seamless, and every page is wounding and real.
When Art returned to New York in May 1980, he asked me to come by with my copy of Straight Life so that he could inscribe it. One of the things he wrote was, "[Thanks] for being so honest in the last article." That was the Voice review, in which I had enumerated many of the least appealing aspects of his character, as detailed in his book. He liked people to be polite, but honest. Our first encounter had followed his 1977 debut at the Village Vanguard. I had sat there opening night mesmerized, and then went home to write a reverie in which there were even more egregious puns than the title, "The Whiteness