Smack Up [Vinyl]

Art Pepper | Format: Vinyl

Product Details

• Vinyl (July 1, 1991)
• Label: Ojc
• ASIN: B000000Y9X
• Also Available in: Audio CD  |  Audio Cassette  |  Vinyl
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,644,699 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Track Listings

1. Smack Up

2. Las Cuevas de Mario

3. A Bit of Basie

4. How Can You Lose

5. Maybe Next Year

6. Tears Inside

7. Solid Citizens [Take 33][*]

8. Solid Citizens [Take 37][*]

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars an overlooked classic, September 29, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Smack Up (Audio CD)

Art Pepper should be far more popular among born-again jazz freaks. This is a great place to start if you're unfamiliar with his work from the late 50s-early 60s period. I believe this was recorded between jail stints and he was pretty desperate--as he often was in the studio. Nice diverse selections and top-notch talent.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Art's art, October 7, 2002

By 

Samuel Chell (Kenosha,, WI United States) - See all my reviews
(TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Smack Up (Audio CD)

Many people have difficulty separating the life of the artist from the imaginative life of his work. When the life of the artist takes on mythic proportions, especially those accompanying Romantic self-destructive genius, the task of evaluating the art with any sort of objectivity is even more daunting.

To my ears, Pepper's is an engaging voice on this session, alternately lyrical and cerebral, taking a few risks but quickly retreating. He hasn't made the commitment to achieving the "emotional moment" that seemed to characterize his work after 1975, making each of his solos a kind of epiphanic quest.

Sheldon sounds bolder than ever on this recording, providing strong hints of the extroverted trumpet soloist he's become since the mid-nineties (his relative obscurity is a sad commentary not just on the music scene in general but the elitist jazz critics who declare who belongs in the church of what's happening now). Jolly is plenty nimble, but his left-hand voicings are pretty basic and his melodic lines fail to elevate the proceedings. Butler is still the world's most underrated drummer; without him, this session would have been little more than a period piece. Finally, Contemporary deserves some kind words. The miking of the individual instruments, the balance between the rhythm section and soloists, the attention to dynamic nuance (missing on the Blue Note recordings of this period) all contribute to a sound that, though recorded over 40 years ago, could have been captured just yesterday.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Overshadowed by Intensity, June 8, 2009

By 

Matthew Watters (Vietnam) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Smack Up (Audio CD)

Any other musician would kill to have made this record, but Smack Up always pales a bit for me because it was recorded back-to-back with the monumental Intensity, Pepper's last record before going into a six-year lock-down at San Quentin. It's hard to tell why this one doesn't quite measure up. Jack Sheldon does great work in the vein of his stint with the Curtis Counce Group, but, while Pepper is all conflicted feelings boiling under the surface, Sheldon is just on the sunny side. Drummer Frank Butler (like Pepper, one of my favourite musicians, bar none) is his usually fantastic self on both records. So maybe it's the material, which here -- with the exception of Pepper's own 5/4 "Cuevos de Mario" -- is a bunch of tunes by other saxophonists (not coincidentally licensed to Contemporary, shame on you, Lester Koenig), while on Intensity, Pepper gets to really dig into the chords of some familiar standards, undistracted by fellow soloists, and comes up with one of his most emotionally resonant records. Don't get me wrong: Smack Up is a great album. It's fun and it swings like mad and you can't have my copy. But it lacks .... Intensity.