Customer Reviews

The Art of Pepper (The Complete Aladdin Recordings, Vol. 3)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This music is from Art Pepper's greates session. It competes with Modern Art in contention for his best recording. The recording quality is excellent (even by today's standards) although a couple of the 12 tracks are a bit crackly. Most of it is essential.

Here are the famous "Omega Tapes," a cookin' session with a perfect rhythm section. The definitive version of "Holiday Flight" and killer playing on "Webb City" and "Begin the Beguine." All in all, one of the best 1950's sessions from Pepper--right up there with the Contemporary Records classics that followed it.

This is small group jazz at its most exciting and quite simply one of the greatest jazz albums of all time, so what is it doing out of print? No one could match Art Pepper in melodic invention or swing, and he had the best tone of any alto player ever. Pepper's style was so distinct and so exciting, he remains readily identifiable within about three notes. And while Pepper made masses of great recordings, he is really on fire for this one, on which he was joined by another great -- and fellow heroin addict -- pianist Carl Perkins, whose addiction turned deadly and cut short his career. Perkins nevertheless left behind a monumental body of work in his recordings with the Curtis Counce Group and with this album. The combination of Pepper and Perkins, who had a regular working band for a few months, was explosive, and these recording suggest that this was truly the lost great band of the 1950s. Its intense swing and immense improvisatory invention is almost too much to be contained in a single album. Hey, Amazon, is there any way to give six stars?

This album contains the strongest Art Pepper I've ever heard on record. His articulations are consistent and precise, his phrases harmonically complex and coherent, his sound commanding and assertive. At no point does he climb into the altissimo register and "shatter" his tones with emotive shrieks, as was so often the case on his later recordings. He's closer to realizing his dream of being "the best there ever was" than on either the slightly earlier session featuring him with Miles Davis' rhythm section ("Art Pepper Meets the Rhythm Section") or on his later sessions, where he might be termed "the most soulful, emotional player there ever was," not necessarily the best. On one of the late sessions, Art, like Sonny Stitt, has a head-to-head meeting with the incredibly facile Richie Cole but is content to remain in the background while Richie runs circles all over the horn. (Stitt, on the other hand, rises to the challenge and ends up teaching Cole a few valuable lessons--"Just in Case You Forgot How Bad He Really Was").

What's mystifying about this session is the decidedly inferior quality of the audio. Supposedly struck from open reel audio tapes intended for a small audiophile market, there are problems with the audio throughout. On the first six tracks, the enabling, inimitable piano of the great Carl Perkins is slightly distorted, reminiscent of CDs struck from old LPs rather than from master prints. Then beginning with the 7th track, Bud Powell's "Webb City" (favored these days by Phil Woods as well as the young alto prodigy, Grace Kelly), the listener is jolted out of his seat by dense, other-worldly, abrasive sounds which turn out to be Chuck Flores' ride cymbal!

Despite the foregoing problems, Pepper's alto is up-front and crystal clear, as are bass and drums, for the first six tracks, and Perkins' piano is so intuitively "in synch" during Art's solos and imaginative in its own solo flights (grittier and funkier that the Perkins of the Curtis Counce Quintet recordings) that the injury inflicted on the sound of the piano is insufficient to spoil the session. The tracks beginning with "Webb City" are another matter, and are more likely to appeal only to the most ardent collectors of Pepper and Perkins. In any case, the music remains unsurpassed.