Pepper Adams Biography News

© Gary Carner. Copyright Protected. All rights reserved.






A belated happy New Year to everybody! My apologies to those who have been awaiting a post from me. Yes, I've been away from the blog for some time. My life has been a little chaotic job-wise, though things have sorted themselves out recently.
I'm very pleased to announce that the first half of my Pepper Adams biography is now finished. I completed it a few days ago. It's about 100 pages. I began writing around the middle of April, 2017, upon my return from lecturing at four colleges in Utah. Looking back, I'm still amazed how I got all this done in eleven months. It sure helps to have 34 years of notes! During the next four weeks I'll be editing the manuscript, and going over my Pepper Adams interview transcript and listening to about 25 interviews, just to be sure I don't leave any important things out.

Here's an overview (finding aid) of Part I, what I call "Ascent":

Ch. 1:
Charlie Parker at the Mirror Ballroom
Move to Detroit, Rochester NY vs. Detroit
Skippy Williams
Arrival in Detroit, race relations
Detroit in the 1950s
History of Detroit, 1700-1900
History of Detroit, 1900-1950
Grinnell's
Lionel Hampton
Wayne University
The Music Box, Little John and His Merrymen
Getting the Berg Larsen and Selmer, Detroit's baritone history, Beans Bowles

Ch. 2:
Pepper's father in Detroit
Paternal genealogy
Family's musical roots
History of Rochester
Early life in Indiana, move to Rochester
Age 4-9, father's death
War years
Rochester musicians during World War II
Age 10-12, Everett Gates
Duke Ellington at the Temple Theatre, Rex Stewart, trip to Seattle
Ellington, Skippy Williams, classical music
Importance of elders (especially Rex Stewart), Duke Ellington
Raymond Murphy, Bob Wilber
John Huggler
Isolation
The Elite
John Albert

Ch. 3:
Service in the U.S. Army, Korean War
The Blue Bird Inn
The World Stage
The West End Hotel, Klein's Show Bar
Detroit's jazz history
Thad Jones, Wardell Gray, baritone players on the scene
Obscure Detroit jazz musicians
Pepper's personality, Detroit pianists
Maternal genealogy
Detroit musical education
Detroit's outlier jazz generation, Malcolm Gladwell outlier concepts related to Pepper
Pepper demo played for Prestige and Blue Note, Pepper sits in with Miles and Rollins
Stan Getz story, Pepper moves to New York City

I met with my trusted webmaster, Dan Olson, last week. We're planning important upgrades this year to pepperadams.com. New context will be added to "Radio Interviews" and "Big Band Performances." A link to a new WikiTree genealogy of Pepper Adams is planned.
I had to wipe clean the hard drive on my iPad a few months ago. By doing so, I lost my trusty app for Blogspot. If anyone has a recommendation for an app I can use that DOES NOT ask for my Google password, please let me know. It will help me format future posts.
I did submit my first section from Ch. 3 about Pepper's experience in the U.S. Army for publication in 2019. I'll let you know if it's approved. I'm

Biographical Excerpts

© Gary Carner. Copyright Protected. All rights reserved.

It's Labor Day Weekend but it seems that my Pepper work never takes a break. It's what centers me and pulls me through each day. There's just so much work to do! I expect that tomorrow will be no different. Maybe that's a true indication that this project is a real labor of love?

I'm excited to report that I'm on the verge of finishing the first half of Pepper's biography. Since my early April lectures in Utah, I've been on fire, much to my surprise. I wasn't expecting to begin writing upon my return home. The thing that I find so gratifying is that the writing has flowed out of me, sometimes effortlessly. Perhaps it was just the right time to start? That's not to say that writing is ever easy. Much like scupture, the craft of writing mandates the continuous polishing until it reaches its final form. Getting ideas out might be fun but editing is always arduous.

It's because of my extensive reading, writing and note-taking over the last couple of years that I've been able to move so quickly in the last five months. In about a month from now -- hopefully in the next blog installment -- I'll  be able to report that Pepper's life from 1930-1955 is complete. I'm now at around seventy pages and I expect that I'll be at around 100 pages in a few weeks. That implies around a 200 page biography, then John Vana's musicological analysis will make up Part Two. I expect great things from him!

Chapter 3 of my part has several components. The first section is about Pepper's time in the US Army. Then I discuss his transition to civilian life in 1953-54, with sections on the Blue Bird Inn and the World Stage Theater. What follows that is a three-part history of Detroit, then a short history of Detroit jazz (1928 or so through the late 1940s). The chapter concludes with Pepper's time in Detroit in 1955, including a section on his mother, Klein's, and the West End Hotel.  

Once I get the first half done, I'm going to take a break to consider how I want to treat the second half of his life. Pepper hated cliches and I feel that, in respect to him, a chronological narrative is far too predictable. I find it boring too. I've avoided such a rendering thus far by darting around thematically. Yet there's a limit to how much you can move about and not confuse the reader. Some biographical theorists recommend reverse engineering. That is, inventing the ending first, then figuring out how to get there. I didn't need to do that at all because my Prologue in some sense "ruins" the ending. It gives me cover because in it I intentionally divulged the broad strokes of Pepper's life to make a case for why anyone should care to read the book. The Prologue has, in a sense, liberated me to at least consider some kind of experimentation with the narrative. 

Yesterday on my two Facebook pages I included an except from the book regarding Pepper and Charlie Parker. Here's two more excerpts from the book:

Pepper’s bunk was at the edge of the camp. Across the street in an empty lot Adams, Kolber and a few of their buddies planted marijuana. “We set up a schedule,” said Kolber. “We marked down everybody’s name to take turns going out. We had a water can and a big hat. We had a schedule made up to water it.” In the early 1950s, smoking marijuana was still somewhat of an arcane activity. In a glorious touch of irony that created more than a few snickers and knowing winks, the guys in Pepper’s platoon would roll a joint and then ask the military police on the base for a light. The MPs had absolutely no idea what was going on.

“Whenever we took physical training, he was beautiful,” said an amused Kolber.

When we had to jump and meet our hands above our head, he would never jump. He said, “Listen, I can play, that’s what I’m here for in this band, to play, and I can’t do all these other things.” He says, “It doesn’t take that much physical energy to strap a baritone sax around your neck.” He told the sergeant that. The officers always used to call him into the office so I never heard too much about what they did. He always came out smiling, smoking a cigarette, saying, “It’s all straight,” and they never bothered him but they did shake him out. He was too well liked. No one could really dislike him because he was an intelligent man, knew what he was talking about, so people didn’t monkey around with him too much. They knew, whatever he did, there was a good reason for doing it and no one really picked on him.

Pepper Gets His Selmer and Berg Larsen

© Gary Carner. Copyright Protected. All rights reserved.

Welcome back to the Pepper Adams blog. The reason I moved to a once-a-month posting schedule is because I started a new gig in early July with a steep learning curve that demanded a great deal of my time. It's a challenging sales job that requires quite a bit of travel. Now that my acclimation process is over, I'm happy to be back in the saddle, writing about Pepper Adams again. I hope this new schedule hasn't inconvenienced anyone. Again, postings will be the first Sunday of each month for the foreseeable future.

With the little free time I had left over this month I did manage to get some Pepper Adams work done. Just last night I finished a new draft of Chapter Two of Pepper's biography. It basically covers the period 1930-1947. I say "basically" because I jump around thematically, not adhering to a chronological narrative.

It's now time to turn my attention to Chapter Three, Pepper's experience in the U.S. Army. From June, 1951 until June, 1953 Adams was in the Special Services, a group of musicians that performed nearly every day for troops in Korea to improve morale. Although it sounds like a cushy gig, it was fraught with danger. Typically, they performed near the front lines. Traveling around in convoys in some sense made them a moving target. At least once, Adams' jeep was strafed, flipping his vehicle over on its side. Adams found the entire war experience to be harrowing and wouldn't generally talk with interviewers about his time in Korea. When I interviewed him he did explain some aspects of it. Most of my research is with his  fellow soldiers. I'll report on my progress in September's post.

I had a fascinating email exchange a few weeks ago with a baritone saxophonist friend of mine. He told me that he had done some research on his horn at the Selmer office in Paris, getting a copy of the production log that showed when his horn was built. Some time after that he went to the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University to take a look at Pepper's Selmer, the instrument that Pepper's widow asked me to deliver soon after his death. It turns out that the serial number of Pepper's horn is nearly identical to his, only seven numbers away, meaning that both were produced within a few weeks of each other.

Due to their near identical production date, information about Pepper's horn was on the log sheet that  he was given! It turns out that production on Pepper's horn began on October 14, 1949 and finished four days later. Knowing this necessitated me to go back and change around a few parts of Chapter One of the biography (and it's going to require me making some changes to the Chronology at pepperadams.com). I originally thought that Pepper got his horn about a half year after he first started playing the baritone sax in December, 1947 because that's the way Pepper remembered it. That led me to research Ellington's Detroit gigs in 1948 because Pepper brought Harry Carney with him to the shop to vet the instrument. My friend's startling discovery changed the timeline that all of this happened and shows how a person with a crystal clear memory can still very easily reorder facts 35 years later.

It now looks like Pepper bought his horn sometime in the period January 20-28, 1950, when Ellington played Detroit's Paradise Theater. The instrument was already destined for the USA upon its completion and it would have taken about six weeks by boat. Adams had almost twice that time to get it and that would have given some extra time for it to move from the distributor, probably on the East Coast, to Detroit. The reason it wasn't purchased later in the year at two other Ellington gigs (Sept 1-3 or Nov 30-Dec 6) is because my co-author, alto saxophonist John Vana, doesn't think that a Bundy could have given Pepper the warm sound that he gets on a recording he made in the summer of 1950.

Once I put all of that in order, I then had to figure out when Adams got his Berg Larsen mouthpiece. Pepper told me that Wardell Gray returned to Detroit with the mouthpiece after his European tour with Benny Goodman. According to research done by Leif Bo Peterson, that tour (BG's only one when Gray was in the band) was cancelled due to labor issues in England. Gray still went east with the presumption that a tour of Europe was in place. I suspect BG's band got stranded in NY; only Goodman, it turned out, went on to London. While Goodman went to London, Gray returned to Detroit and recorded live at the Blue Bird on July 20, 1949. I can only assume that around this time Pepper sat in with Wardell and fell in love with Gray's Berg Larsen when they switched horns on the bandstand. If he ordered it around August 1, then he might have gotten it as early as mid-September, 1949, some four months before the Selmer. Maybe getting the Berg Larsen impelled him to get the new horn? Could it be that he wasn't able to get as good a sound as he wanted on the Bundy that he heard on Gray's tenor and that finally compelled him to buy a new horn?

The end result is that Pepper played his Bundy for two full years before he fully committed to the instrument by purchasing a professional model. Moreover, he did get his Berg Larsen within only a few months of getting his new horn. Learning that Adams got his new horn and mouthpiece by early 1950 makes sense in light of my interview with Detroit baritone saxophonist Bean Bowles. He told me that Pepper came to him a few months later, still struggling to get a big sound on the instrument. Bowles advised him to change his reed set-up and a few other things you'll discover when you read my book.

                (Where Pepper Adams bought his Selmer.)

Pepper Adams Biography

© Gary Carner. Copyright Protected. All rights reserved.

Happy Mother's Day to everyone in the U.S. Woefully, mine passed away seven years ago. Life hasn't been the same since, but it rolls on nonetheless. 

For me, the biggest thing now in my life is writing Pepper Adams' biography. After many fits and starts over the last five or so years, about two years ago I finally completed the book's Prologue after wrestling with it for over a year. I had concluded that I needed an argument to present to those who didn't know anything about Adams. Why should they care to read a book about this guy? I wrote the Prologue in two parts. The first section was about Adams in crisis, giving notice to Thad and Mel, then going out on his own as a "single." It turned out to be a great decision for him. From 1977-1983 Adams wrote nearly 20 compositions, made a number of superb recordings as a leader, toured the world, was nominated for four Grammy Awards, and essentially burnished his legacy. Then came the fall: his bizarre car accident, his cancer, the dissolution of his marriage, and his death at age 55.

The second part of the Prologue discusses my personal association with Adams. How I met him, the work we did together on his memoirs, what I witnessed, and so forth. I figured the reader would be interested in that and I wanted to, in a sense, get me out of the way of the book. Nevertheless, I wanted to further my case for how important Adams is, listing a few additional reasons why I feel he's a worthy subject and to set up a few themes in the reader's mind.

Now, several years after writing the Prologue, I'm finding that the writing is really flowing out of me, that I'm on a roll. I've written the first 5-10 pages of Chapter 1. It may not seem like much production but it takes so much time to polish and fully refine each point. I begin with Pepper seeing Charlie Parker for the first time in Detroit at the Mirror Ballroom in 1949. For him, it was a magical moment. Then I write about the transition from Rochester to Detroit: how his relocation came to be and why it was so life-altering. Then, I include a section about Adams' pivotal four-week experience in New York City studying with Ellington tenor saxophonist Skippy Williams. 

My first chapter is entitled "What Is It?," taken from one of Pepper's compositions (from the arcane 1969 MPS date Muses for Richard Davis). Chapter 1 is all about Pepper's Detroit experience. That's the core of his being and where he became a great musician. I just now decided that I'll have a separate chapter on his Korean War experience, unless I feel there's not enough material to make it into a full chpater. Continuing the concept of using Pepper's colorful compositional titles as chapter headings, for the Korea chapter do you prefer "Witches Pit" or "Etude Diabolique?" 

That presupposes a separate chapter for his return to Detroit, 1953-55, before he leaves for New York City. Since I like the title "Urban Dreams" for the New York City chapter, what should I call his three-year period in Detroit? "Joy Road?" "Excerent?" Twelfth and Pingree?" I kind of prefer the third one. As it stands, there will also be a separate chapter on his experience growing up in Rochester, New York. That will be entitled "Inanout."

Working on the Detroit chapter, I've had to go through a ton of material I've accumulated over the years. The last few days I've been sorting stuff germane to Detroit from the rest of it. While doing so, I've found some things worthy of posting on my Instagram site. Have any of you seen it? There's a wealth of material there. You can always get to it by clicking the Instagram icon at the top of pepperadams.com.

For those of you who didn't see the following posted on my Facebook page a few backs ago, here's a quote from Detroit pianist Willie Metcalf (brother of Freddie "Freddie Froo" Metcalf) about Pepper and Sonny Stitt. 

"From roughly 1953 to 1955, Stitt was traveling with three horns including baritone sax. At the Blue Bird one night, Stitt was the featured soloist with a local rhythm section and Pepper Adams. Clarence Edding, the Blue Bird owner, preferred having local horn players, along with the house rhythm section, perform with a guest soloist. This gig would have likely been in the second half of 1953 or 1954, after Adams was discharged from the Army and returned to Detroit for two and a half years. Metcalf said to me in an interview, "Sonny was playing the baritone then, and Pepper was giving him so much static on the baritone. Sonny said, 'Shit, I better put this motherfucker down and pick up my alto!' I heard that [Metcalf said, laughing]. Pepper is just so fluent!" Can we assume that Pepper is one the reasons Stitt dropped the baritone and reverted back to just tenor and alto?"

To a question I asked Metcalf in my interview with him about whether it was ever awkward for Pepper as a white guy in the 1940s and 50s to play in Detroit almost exclusively with black musicians, Metcalf said, "Not the fellas, but more so on the white musicians, because they would comment. I never heard it personally but people have said that some of the white musicians have said 'he played too black.'" About Pepper, Metcalf said, "He was a for-real cat."

Charles Boles Looks Back

© Gary Carner. Copyright Protected. All rights reserved.

I had a wonderful, hourlong conversation yesterday with Detroit pianist Charles Boles. Boles attended Northern High School with Paul Chambers, Donald Byrd and Sonny Red, and studied privately, as so many of that era did, with Barry Harris. Boles witnessed and participated in Detroit's Golden Age of Jazz. His career spans seven decades and he's still performing in Detroit. Boles has worked with a who’s who of musicians, including Aretha Franklin, John Lee Hooker and B.B. King. Many thanks to Ken Kellett for setting up the FaceTime call and for participating as an amused and valuable observer. Rather than summarize my conversation, I'm going to let Charles speak for himself:

Miles at the Blue Bird in the summer of 1954:

Miles didn’t want to see Thad come in there because Thad would eat him up! . . . Miles would come to work and he would ask the owner even before he hit a note, ‘Can I get $50?’ Clarence Eddins would say, ‘Well, you gotta play at least one tune!’ So Miles would go up there and say, ‘Blues in F.’ He’d hit one note and then he’d walk off the bandstand and say, ‘Gimme $50.’ While the band was playing, [with] this guy ‘No Neck’ (who was a frightening looking guy), they would come out of the Blue Bird, go to the corner. (There was a light at the corner of Tireman and Beechwood.) They’d just be waiting for any car that would come along where the door was unlocked and they’d just get in. ‘No Neck’ would say, ‘Take us downtown.’ They’d go down to this hotel. I think it was called the Hotel Theresa then. It was right there on Adams and Hastings. They would go into this hotel to get high, and they’d come back outside of the hotel, after they got high, and they’d repeat the same scenario: Go to the corner, wait for a car to come along with an unlocked door, and they’d open the door and just get in and say, 'Take us to the Blue Bird.’

Pepper Adams:

I saw him all the time. I saw him at Barry’s house. He’d be always at the World Stage but he’d be at Barry’s house a lot. It was on Russell, upstairs over a grocery store.

Paradise Valley:

The Valley was only maybe two or three or four blocks long, from Hastings Street and Adams to, say, John R and Adams.

Northern High School:

Of course, we were there for band rehearsal, and to go to Choral at Fifth Hour. Claude [Black] was in the choral group with me. We all did the Messiah every year. We were very good. They had a very good music teacher there, Claire Weimer. . . . I couldn’t play in the concert band because I couldn’t read as well as Donald Byrd’s sister, Margie Byrd. She was a classical pianist. So I ended up playing bells in the concert band, and then I played piano in the dance band. They very rarely played any dances. We just played jazz tunes, and blues of course. In that band were people like Donald Byrd and Sonny Red, Paul [Chambers]. Paul and I used to eat lunch together every day. When he got to the Tenth Grade, he went to Cass. Him and Donald Byrd both.

The reason why Paul Chambers and Donald Byrd went to Northern High School the first year of high school was because Northern started in Ninth Grade. Donald Byrd was a neighbor of mine, maybe three or four blocks from me in Detroit, in the North End. Paul lived on the East Side somewhere. . . In that class at Northern was Claude Black. . . He was switching from trombone to piano, and there was Sonny Red there. He was in the band. There was Donald Byrd, Paul Chambers, Bobby Barnes. . . . The teacher was Orvis Lawrence, a barroom, stride piano player, if you will. A very good Teddy-Wilson-type piano player. A very good musician. He could really tell you what to do musically. He was knowledgeable. He kept a bottle in his desk drawer and he’d always go back there and get laced. The best thing about that era--and even after Donald Byrd and them left--was at the Seventh Hour there would always be people like Tommy Flanagan, Bess Bonnier, Roland Hanna. These guys showed up every day at the Seventh Hour to jam. What you didn’t know you could learn from hanging out with these guys. . . Orville Lawrence would allow you to continue to stay there and play until maybe 4 o’clock. School got out at 3 o’clock. 

We would leave and go to one of two houses after school. At Bobby Barnes’ house, Roland Hanna was the piano player, Gene Taylor was the bass player, Claude Black played trombone, and Bobby Barnes played the sax. Sometimes we’d go to Bobby Barnes’ house, who lived on Russell on the North End, or we’d go to Barry Harris’ house. Sonny Red would go back and forth. . . . We would come out of Northern High School--me and Paul Chambers and Sonny Red--and we’d catch the Woodward bus (the Woodward bus ran north and south) downtown to, say, Warren, and then you’d catch the crosstown bus to Russell. And then you’d catch the Russell bus to Barry’s house. I tell you what: When we went to Barry Harris’ house, more than likely you’re gonna get slaughtered! You know what they do? They would egg you on, and do everything they could do to get you to play, and then they’d play something like Cherokee or some hard-ass tune. Of course they’d play it at some ridiculous speed but you couldn’t keep up. So you’d go home and you’d practice that all week long, and you go back and they’d play it in A or play it in some other ridiculous key that would have nothing to do with the tune at all. They’d say, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I’m in A. Whatever you practiced would be null and void. You could barely play in B-flat! When you get your butt kicked at Barry Harris’ house, then you’d slink on over to Bobby Barnes’ house the next two or three days. You wouldn’t dare show your face at Barry Harris’ house when you got killed already. He was a master teacher, though. I tell you what: If you continued to go there, he would help you. He would teach you how to improvise.

Legendary trumpeter Claire Rocquemore:

The great Claire Rocquemore? He could play anything. He’d wear Miles out. He’d wear anybody out. Donald didn’t want to get on the bandstand with him. He ended up being strung out. And he didn’t go anywhere. He would always be around, when he could keep it together, and kick everybody’s butt. He was at Barry’s house all the time.

Kenny Burrell:

He and I went to the same church together. I knew his mother and his grandmother. It was a church in Greektown called Second Baptist. The oldest black church. 200 years old.

Doug Watkins:

Doug was around at Northern too. Definitely at Barry’s house. It was almost a situation where it was either Doug or Paul. They were in fierce competition.

Tommy Flanagan and Barry Harris:

Nobody could be like Willie Anderson. Everybody tried to be like Barry. . . . Here are two different guys that played the same style but in a different way. My explanation of it is that Barry is a direct link from Bud whereas Tommy Flanagan is a direct link from Teddy Wilson. It’s a difference in the touch, the way they play. . . In the beginning, Barry really wanted to be like Art Tatum but he didn’t have the strength. Tatum played really light but he was fleet. . . . The competition was so fierce here. You’d be around people like Barry, you’d be around people like Tommy Flanagan. These guys were like mythical!

Roland Hanna:

Roland was completely different. I went over to Bobby Barnes’ house and there was Roland. He and Gene Taylor had drank up a half a gallon of wine. Every day they would get together at 10, 11 o’clock playing classical music. I never knew where Roland went to school. Roland said to me, ‘I wanna be a classical pianist. I don’t want to play jazz.’ He could read fly shit. He was scary to be around.”

Hastings Street Scene:

I played on Hastings Street, which was a red light district. I played on that street for ten damn years. The cops came down on Hastings Street. The deal was that you either got, ‘Give me some head or give me some booty, or give me all your money.’ I saw them shoot a prostitute in the back and kill her. Her name was Charlene. I’ll never forget it. Killed her dead, right? And the people know the police did it but they got away with it because she refused to give them any money and she wasn’t going to give them booty that night. She was tired of screwing the police for free. That was in the fifties. I played on Hastings Street off and on from 48 to 58. The deal was you give up some booty or you give up some money, or else you’re going to jail.

                       (Charles Boles)

Heaven Was Detroit

© Gary Carner. Copyright Protected. All rights reserved.

Several weeks ago, an anthology of articles mostly about Detroit's popular music culture was published in paperback by Wayne State University Press. Edited by poet and long-time Wayne professor M.L. Liebler, the collection covers a lot of terrain as suggested by its subtitle From Jazz to Hip-Hop and Beyond. The nearly 500 page book--the first of its kind to address the great breadth of Detroit's jazz and vernacular music history--is divided into nine chapters. Eight articles in Chapter 1 are about Detroit jazz. Chapter 2 covers Detroit blues; 3 and 4: Early Soul and Motown; 5 and 6: Rock and Punk; 7 and 8: Hip-Hop and Country; 9 is "Detroit Music Miscellanea." Despite the book's breadth, there are surprising jazz anecdotes sprinkled throughout the collection. That's because Detroit's versatile jazz musicians played in jump bands, worked at Motown Records, and cross-pollinated in other ways.

The anthology is beautifully packaged, with a groovy cover and very attractive typesetting. Black and white photos grace the work instead of color ones, keeping the book affordable. The book weighs a ton, giving it an even more commanding authority that belies its $34.95 list price. "And, if you act now" . . . Yes, you can even save 40%! Buy the book before January 14, 2017 and use the order code here: http://www.wsupress.wayne.edu/books/detail/heaven-was-detroit

Dave Marsh's foreword lays the groundwork, integrating Detroit's disparate musical genres in a compelling way. I especially like his evocative opening two paragraphs about Detroit's auto industry. In the way he describes its many tentacles, his piece provides a welcome context for all that follows. Marsh even elicited a sense of nostalgic longing in me when he mentions hearing the J. Geils Band for the first time at the Eastown Theatre. (Hailing from Worcester, Massachusetts, the ensemble nonetheless considered Detroit their second home.) I heard them nearly steal the show from the Allman Brothers at the Fillmore East in New York City when I was a kid.

Heaven Was Detroit's opening article is poet Al Young's memoir of his days growing up in Detroit. As a teenage friend of drummer Louis Hayes, Young was first getting involved with jazz in the 1950s. At fifteen, the author was underage, not able to experience the extraordinarily vibrant Detroit club scene. Instead, he had the good fortune of attending Sunday matinees at the World Stage.Young  then got involved  with the production of the venue's periodical. This allowed him to write about many of his local heroes--Sonny Stitt, Tommy Flanagan, Pepper Adams and so many others--that were jamming weekly there on Woodward Avenue and who went on to international prominence.

The anthology's second piece, "Bebop in Detroit: Nights at the Blue Bird Inn," is written by Lars Bjorn and Jim Gallert. This overview of the jazz club's history is written by the noted authors who in 2001 published the pioneering study Before Motown: A History of Jazz in Detroit, 1920-1960. Their contribution provides a real sense of place, something invaluable to me as Adams' biographer.

Although the Blue Bird presented jazz intermittently from the 1930s until after the war, it didn't become a haven for bebop until 1948, when pianist Phil Hill organized a house band with vibist Abe Woodley and drummer Art Mardigan. Typically, Hill's group supported soloists such as tenor saxophonist Wardell Gray who were passing through town. A few years later, the Hill band was replaced by the Billy Mitchell Quintet. That superb group included both Thad and Elvin Jones. Obviously, the level of musicianship remained just as intense. The custom of supporting itinerant guest soloists also remained in place.

"The Blue Bird Inn," write Bjorn and Gallert, "was the hippest modern jazz nightspot during the city's bebop heyday."

It was a neighborhood bar that welcomed jazz lovers. The late Detroit baritone    
       saxophonist Pepper Adams once recalled its "great atmosphere": "Nothing phony
about it in any way. . . no pretensions and great swinging music." Musicians not
only graced the bandstand, they were an important part of the audience. As
bassist James "Beans" Richardson points out, "The majority of people in there
played an instrument, so, musicwise, they were very 'up,' you know? When
there was a lousy record on the jukebox, even the bartenders would say, 'Get
that record off!'"

Part of the appeal of playing at the Blue Bird was the ability within the idiom to play whatever one cared to play. As Tommy Flanagan noted about the club, "It had all the support a jazz club needed. Everyone who loved jazz in Detroit came. We were always able to play what we wanted to play and the people liked what they heard." Part of the appeal of the club was its atmosphere. Marketed as "the West Side's most beautiful and exclusive bar," said the authors,

it attracted a mainly black audience from both the immediate neighborhood
and the city at large. Those who visited the place were first struck by its
distinctive exterior--a pure blue facade accented with a New York City-style
awning that ran across the sidewalk and right up to the curb. It was just as
attractive inside. The acoustics were excellent, and the small, understated
semicircular bandstand could hold a quintet with something close to comfort. . .
Besides its music policy, the Blue Bird became nationally known for its friendly
but fierce jam sessions and its penchant for attracting visits from national stars
when they were in town for concerts at larger venues.

In 1953, before he was a household name, Miles Davis lived in Detroit and often played with Mitchell's band at the Blue Bird. In the summer of '54, Miles returned to the Blue Bird as a guest soloist. By then, the house band included Pepper Adams.

Next week I'll continue my review of Heaven Was Detroit, revealing still more Detroit jazz lore.