March and April Madness

 

March slipped away without a blog post and this one is late.

I had started a new day job in late February that was a

distraction, and now I’m involved in a move. Packing is no

fun at any age, but especially this time around.

No news yet on the release date for Pepper Adams:

Saxophone Trailblazer. Fall is still the projected date. Again,

it’s the abridged paperback version of

Reflectory: The Life and Music of Pepper Adams,but devoid of music links and many photographs. Reflectory

will remain in print, is likely $5 cheaper, and far more

authoritative. The music links are incredible! 250 solos you’ve

never heard!

https://www.pepperadams.com/Reflectory/index.html

The Pepper Adams Archive is now available for study at William

Paterson University. It’s becoming more likely that the last two

deliveries of my Adams stuff will get there by summer. Most of it,

still sitting at my sister-in laws, includes Adams’s charts for his

Charles Mingus tribute date for Motown, numerous photos, and

various ephemera.

The February 26 Adams panel discussion was a tremendous

success. It should be posted at pepperadams.com in a few weeks.

The delay is due to our opening speaker, Paul Tynan, who had

Zoom issues when demonstrating on trumpet Pepper’s licks and

phrases. Once he repairs his music examples, you’ll be delighted

with the new ground that he and all the participants broke. Here’s

the roster: 

Paul Tynan: “Clarion Calls” (1959)

Joseph Trahan: “‘Tis” (1958)

Ben Sidran: “Little Rootie Tootie” (1959)

Aaron Lington: “Each Time I Think of You” (1961)

Andrew Hadro: “Incarnation” (1963)

John Vana: "Azure-Te" (1963)

Logan Ivancik: “Once Around” (1966)

Frank Basile: “Currents/Pollen” (1973) and “Wind from the Indies” (1977)

Adam Schroeder: “Three and One” (1975)

Courtney Wright: “It Could Happen to You” (1980)

Noah Pettibon: “Three Little Words” (1981)

Additions to Pepper's Biography

 

In terms of moving ahead with Adams’s biography, May was quite a productive month and June has started with a bang. The three most important things that occurred were author Mark Stryker reviewing and improving Chapter Four, the discovery of Marc Vasey’s 1985 interview with Adams, and the emergence of Pepper’s cousin, Sandra Adams. Stryker was for years the jazz and arts writer for the Detroit Free Press, who in the last few years of his gig also covered for the newspaper local Detroit politics. Stryker is a wonderful writer who has many years of experience with Detroit’s jazz scene. Last year he published Jazz from Detroit, his account of Detroit’s jazz history. The book includes a number of vignettes about legendary Detroit musicians, though he told me he chose not to cover Pepper in a separate chapter because of restrictions on the length of the book and because of my work on him. Stryker had much to say about my chapter about Pepper and Detroit from 1953 through 1955, and his observations led to some significant corrections. Many thanks to him for improving the manuscript.

For sixty years trumpeter Marc Vasey was involved with jazz, most notably in the Edmonton, Alberta area. During that time, he became very friendly with Pepper, producing many concerts of his there beginning in 1972. In 1985 he sat down with Adams and conducted a far-ranging interview with him, intended for broadcast. I’m only a third of the way through the conversation but it’s already sent me back to the manuscript to add new info and alter some of my text. More, I’m sure, will be added in the next few weeks.

Lastly, thanks to pepperadams.com webmaster Dan Olson, only in the last few days I’ve been put in touch with Sandra Adams, Pepper’s cousin. Sandy is the grandchild of Harry Albert Adams, Pepper’s uncle. She has done considerable genealogical research about her family, and, like Vasey, her recollections sent me back to the manuscript to add color to the text. In the weeks to come, we do hope to post the Adams genealogy that Dan and I have been assembling for some time.

Notes from the first 25 minutes of Marc Vasey’s interview with Pepper Adams, November, 1985. Quotes are from Adams:

Little John and His Merrymen: Essentially, the house band at Club Valley was John Wilson’s band. Wilson was a good lead player who played with Lunceford, though not much of a soloist. 7 pieces: tp, as; ts; bs; plus three rhythm (p; b; dm). Alto was mostly Cleveland Willie Smith, a disciple of Tadd Dameron, who wrote most of the arrangements. Adams wrote a few and Frank Foster wrote some, once he joined the band. Tenor at first was Warren Hickey, who was in one of Gillespie’s first big bands. Yusef Lateef replaced him, then Foster. James Glover was their bassist, who had played with Dinah Washington.

1950s Detroit club scene: “It was then in the process of changing, in that the money was fleeing downtown for the suburbs, and once it got to the suburbs it stayed there.”

On moving back to Detroit after discharge from the army: “It seemed like a good time to accumulate a little money, not a great deal, but enough to get a start going in New York.” Clarinet: “I actually continued playing clarinet much longer than I really wanted to because Thad wrote a few things in my book calling for clarinet. And I hated it. As much as I loved to play clarinet, when you have a baritone book there with about five or six pieces calling for clarinet, no matter how well you warm up at the beginning of the evening, the first piece isn’t going to be called until about three hours later, and the reed has now become corrugated, and the instrument is cold and out of tune. And so that’s no fun at all. Fortunately, clarinets are pretty small and are easy to steal. By the time about the third one got stolen, I convinced Thaddeus it just wasn’t worth it. So since that event, I have happily subsisted with only the one instrument to worry about.”

Leo Parker: “. . . Leo Parker, who I heard live a couple of times. I think he played better than the records tend to indicate.”

Tate Houston: “. . . Tate Houston in Detroit, who was a fine baritone player, a fine soloist. . . .Tate was not very much into harmonic exploration, but just playing the simple changes and playing with good time, which, in itself, was extraordinary on the baritone.”

About his NYC union-card transfer: “For six months you were not supposed to take more than two jobs a week and you’re not supposed to travel at all.” Because he joined Stan Kenton’s band before the six-month period was over, he gave the union Elvin Jones’s address of 202 Thompson Street and asked him to cover for him if and when the union’s representative came around to verify Adams’s whereabouts. On one day, Elvin signed for Pepper when an out-of-shape, exasperated union rep looking for Adams trudged too many times on the same day up to Jones’s apartment on the top floor of a five-floor walk-up.

First NYC gigs: Some were small-group things with Oscar Pettiford.

Charles Mingus: “I would go and work with him for a week or two if he had some extra payroll and could squeeze another horn into a gig and make it a sextet rather than a quintet. I would often get the call because I knew at least some of the music and could figure out enough so I wouldn’t be totally out of place. . . . Some of the bands were fun and some of the music was good, but some of the 45-minute speeches from the bandstand were rather embarrassing. . . . He could be a difficult man to deal with at times.”

Byrd-Adams recordings: “Some of them are not up to the standard that the band played night after night. . . . Blue Note seemed to want to add another horn, so of course it’s not the band that’s working all the time. So we had to write new arrangements and change everything. Blue Note always wanted some things a shuffle, no matter what, on every album, which we were able to avoid on the live album [from the Half Note] . . . to make it commercial. They were very interested in trying to get something that was saleable.”

Duke Pearson Big Band: “Duke Pearson had a really nice band. . . how ill-served that band was by Blue Note. The band only made two albums and neither one really showed how really musical that band is. Each one did have its boogaloo attempt in it, and one of them is really poorly recorded. . . Although each album does have some terrific things in it, neither one shows what a good band that band was.

The Homestretch

© Gary Carner. Copyright Protected. All rights reserved.

I’m only a few weeks away from finishing Chapter Ten of the Pepper Adams
biography. It’s the last one that I still have to complete, Chapter Eleven, already
written, is my summation of his life and accomplishments. Ten includes my lengthy
discussion of the Byrd–Adams Quintet, plus a section about Adams's post-West
Coast work in late 1957. I've recently updated subchapters on Monk, Mingus,
Bobby Timmons, critics, heroin use, and living with Elvin Jones, among other
topics. All that's left is to polish what’s written, discuss Pepper's only known original
poem, write about his time on the West Coast and with Stan Kenton, and then
finish up my concluding comments about Adams’s first months in NYC. I have tons
of notes, so it should move quickly. I hope in a month’s time I can report to you that
the book is finished.

Considering all of the anxiety and anguish that’s being experienced all over the
world, here’s an excerpt from Chapter Eight regarding Pepper’s sense of humor:

Although Pepper Adams at root was a very private person, his friends knew him
as a funny guy with an extremely wry sense of humor. “That cat had one of the
keenest and quickest wits,” said the bassist Ray Drummond. The first time that
Adams met the young baritone saxophonist Howard Johnson was in Boston in
1962, when he and the drummer Tony Williams asked Adams to sit in at his gig
at Connolly’s. At the time, Howard Johnson’s was a well-known U.S. restaurant
chain, noted for its ice cream that was widely sold in supermarkets throughout
the country. When it came time for Johnson to step up to the bandstand and play
a number, Adams ad-libbed his brief introduction: “Here’s Howard Johnson,
who is responsible for the ice cream flavor mint clam.” 

Kenny Burrell felt that Pepper’s sense of humor was indicative of his “keen
intellect and a great awareness of current events. “He was a funny guy,” said
Burrell, “but it wasn’t just funny in terms of old wisecracks. He was right up to
date on what was happening.” Bob Wilber agreed that Adams was an amusing
guy. “He had a marvelous sense of humor,” said Wilber. “He could see the funny
things, the ironic things.” One such example took place at a saxophone clinic,
when a student asked members of the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis reed section who
they suggested aspiring players like himself should copy. When it was Pepper’s
turn to respond, he broke up everyone in attendance by responding, “If you copy
from one person, it’s plagiarism. If you copy from everybody, it’s research.”

The saxophonist Bob Mover remembered a hilarious moment in Cambridge,
Massachusetts at Adams’s early April, 1982 gig at the Hasty Pudding Club.
When he, Pepper, and the guitarist Joe Cohn were trying to decide what tune
to play, Pepper said, “Let’s do one everybody knows, like Death and
Transfiguration.” Another time, before a concert in New York and very ill
with cancer, the photographer Mitchell Seidel asked Adams if he felt good
enough to play. “It beats staying at home pondering the term ‘life expectancy,’”
was his mordant response. 

Adams liked using puns and one-liners. On the birth of Bess Bonnier’s child,
Adams called her with congratulations, leaving on her answering machine the
concluding quip, “We all knew you had it in you.” Occasionally, rather than
use profanity, Pepper enjoyed using silly euphemisms a la the comedian W.C.
Fields, such as “mother of pearl” or “Godfrey Daniels.” When he told an
amusing story, he would wait a few seconds, with a deadpan expression or a
half-smile on his face, before breaking into laughter.

“He always had me in stitches,” said Frank Foster. “I saw him as a great
American humorist.” Foster spent a lot of time laughing at Pepper’s comments
while they were members of the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis reed section. He felt
that Adams, much like the Danish pianist and comedian Victor Borge, could
have very successfully combined music and humor if he had chosen that route. 

In the right setting, Adams enjoyed doing physical comedy bits on stage. In 1960,
at Montreal’s Little Vienna, the guitarist and harmonica player Toots Thielemans
dropped by to sit in with Pepper. Thielemans was in town, working with the singer
and actor Yves Montand. “Toots was playing harmonica,” wrote Keith White,
“and Pepper was doing some bits with his cigarette. He would put it in his mouth
by manipulating his lips, as if to swallow it, and then he would pop it out again.
During one of these episodes, he inhaled deeply, the cigarette was flipped back into
his mouth by his lips maneuvering it, and then he just looked at the audience for a
moment, who didn’t know what exactly to expect, when, suddenly, smoke seemed
to shoot out of both of his ears! Everybody started to break up. Toots even had to
stop playing for a moment.” 

Sometimes he would try to amuse himself. “He was a very warm, outgoing person,”
remembered Ron Kolber, “misunderstood because some people did not appreciate
his sense of humor. They didn’t know what to make of it. They always thought he
was putting them on. If a friend of his would say, ‘I’ll see you later, Pepper,’ he
would say, ‘Thanks for the warning’ or ‘Don’t threaten me,’” and then utter his
customary, idiosyncratic chortle. Adams had a great smile, recalled Ray Mosca, and
Pepper’s ears would stick up like an elf. 

Plenty of musicians admired the droll wit that Adams exuded in his saxophone
solos. One time, the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra was playing for a large group
of jazz fans in Belgium, who rented space for their get-togethers above a police
station. “Pepper’s right in the middle of “Once Around,” remembered John Mosca,
“which is a fast, minor solo for him. He’s burning away, really tearing it up, and a
police car comes with a siren on, and he goes right into “I Don’t Want to Set the
World on Fire.” I swear, right in the middle of this solo, and it broke everybody up.
It was very funny!” Another time, when Jones/Lewis was performing a concert at
an amphitheater in Italy, the venue had also been presenting Verdi’s Aida. “Most of
the stage had been cleared,” wrote Lucinda Chodan, “but the props for the opera –
Egyptian-style artifacts – cluttered one side, in full view of the audience. When it
came to Adams’s first solo, his big baritone blasted out a couple of bars of Celeste
Aida, one of the opera’s arias. The crowd was impassive. Thad Jones was laughing
so hard he had to stop playing.”

The

Progress with the Biography

{SEE BELOW]

Much of my free time in November was consumed by proofreading

and polishing the galleys of Chapters 1-3 of my Pepper Adams

biography. Chapter 1 is currently being reviewed by two readers, after

having been read by another. Chapters 2-3 are following the same

process. Obviously, the more feedback I get, the stronger the book

becomes. The Prologue has already been put to bed.

Each chapter has an epigraph, which helps me underscore why I chose

each chapter title. The book’s central epigraph, essentially my lead

argument, is this:

How many musicians out

there are really different?

- RAN BLAKE

I’ve begun hunting for an ebook publisher. Nothing tangible yet, but

I’ve made progress nonetheless.

As for the second half of the biography, to be published in 2021,

Chapters 4-6, 8 and 10 are done. Chapter 7 is in progress, about a

third finished. 9 remains as a major task, though I have a ton of notes. 

Chapters 7-10 will follow this basic format:

Chapter 7:

1. Solos with Thad/Mel
2. Solos as a single, 1963-1977
3. Solos as a sideman, 1963-1977

Chapter 8:

1.  Marriage proposal; Girlfriend #1
2. Girlfriend #2
3. New York loft scene
4. Girlfriend #3

Chapter 9:

1. Racial relations

       2.   Journeyman, original poem

       3.   Drugs/Bobby Timmons/Elvin Jones

       4.   Interlude: Bohemian New York in the Fifties

5. Byrd/Adams
6. Goodman, Monk, Mingus
7. Kenton, West Coast Scene, early New York experiences

Chapter 10:

1. Accolades
2. Six reasons why Adams didn’t gain popularity
3. Conclusion

The process of working through all of my taped interviews was very

well worth it. I was able to add some really great excerpts to the book:

Lew Tabackin, for example, discussing the bleak 1960s, the difference

between Thad and Duke Pearson as bandleaders, and why Thad and

Mel were crazy to put their band in the hands of Keiko Jones for the ill-

fated 1968 trip to Japan that almost finished off the orchestra. 

My Mel Lewis interview was equally good. What a rich trove of information

about the intricacies of Thad/Mel and the Stan Kenton band. Some very

important information also came from the two physicians who owned

Uptown Records, Pepper’s last record label. They had much to say about

his final illness, and the role they played when advising him about his

health. Many other quotes were added from other interviewees; subtle but

important comments that added depth to my existing text.

My biggest discovery, however, wasn’t testimony from an interview, as

valuable as they are to the project. The most startling find was the Norma

Desmond-like letter (remember the film Sunset Boulevard?) that Pepper’s

mother wrote to her son when he moved out of her house in late 1955. It

really put her character into perspective. Previously, I had all these friends

of Pepper’s commenting about her, but nothing at all from her in her voice.

This is the only letter that exists written by her, and it’s quite telling that

Pepper would save it. 

Next to that, my interview with Bob Cornfoot was very important. It made me

completely revise when Pepper moved back to Detroit in 1947, and when he

began working at Al’s Record Mart. It necessitated a complete revision of

Pepper’s chronology from late 1953 to the end of 1955, plus changing some

language in my text.

One of the enormous benefits of working through all the interviews yet again

is correcting errors, and discovering so many new facts about where and what

Adams did during his lifetime. Accordingly, many changes have been made

to Pepper Adams’ chronology:

https://www.pepperadams.com/Compositions/compList/index.html 

I expect the updates to be posted soon.

I’ve organized all of my remaining Pepper materials for donation to William

Paterson University. Pepper’s recordings and other materials that belong to

the estate are still in my possession. It looks like it will be 2020 before I

deliver the first batch of goods. Then, it's up to the university to make room

for the rest of it.

I’ve corresponded with Chick Corea, asking him to consider writing a foreword
to the book. I was pleased that he bought a copy of Joy Road. Any suggestions
about who else I should contact for a foreword?