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Here’s my original draft for liner notes to Pepper Adams
with the Tommy Banks Trio: Live at Room at the Top,
Reel to Reel’s forthcoming release.
That cat was something else on that horn!
–COLEMAN HAWKINS
Judging from the many accolades that he received from his
colleagues before and after his death, Pepper Adams was
equally esteemed by his elders, contemporaries, and younger
musicians. Among the old guard, Coleman Hawkins was one
of his biggest fans. “Hawkins admired Pepper,” said drummer
Eddie Locke. “He said, ‘That cat is something else on that
horn!’ . . . He didn’t say that about many people; he didn’t talk
about many guys.” According to Gunnar Windahl, Adams’s
close friend, Don Byas also adored Adams’s playing, and Milt
Hinton, out of respect for Pepper’s intellect, dubbed him “The
Master.” About Adams, Dizzy Gillespie once rhetorically asked
David Amram, “Man, that guy’s phenomenal, isn’t he?” And
backstage at a 1985 Adams benefit in New York City, Gillespie
told Cecil Bridgewater how much he admired what Pepper had
done harmonically with the instrument; how he had utilized the
baritone sax in a completely different way from other baritone
players. “His playing was unbelievable,” agreed Clark Terry,
“just fantastic! I never heard him jump into anything that
stymied him: any tune, any tempo, any key. He was a
phenomenal musician, one that could do anything. His
rhythmic sense wassuperb, his melodic sense was fantastic.
He was just a marvelous person and a marvelous musician.”
Adams’s contemporaries were just as effusive in their praise.
“He is one of my heroes,” said Bill Perkins. He’s one of the
true giants of jazz. He stood out in that rare group of jazz
soloists, the great giants of all time, people like Bird and Prez
—and John Coltrane has become that. I think Pepper was that
on his instrument—and Diz. They’re in an area where very
few have done the creative work that they’ve done. Nobody
is equal: There are some great young players around and they
owe a great debt to him, but Pepper was monolithic in his
playing. Bob Cranshaw concurred with Perkins. “Everyone
knew he was a superstar,” declared Cranshaw. “The rest of
the baritone saxophonists: They know! . . . In my book he’s
the Number One baritone saxophonist. I don’t even think of
anybody else.” Phil Woods heartily agreed: “Any baritone
player that’s around today,” he avowed in 1988, “knows that
he was Number One. It’s that simple. He was the best we
had.” Both Curtis Fuller and Don Friedman felt similarly:
“He was the greatest who ever played the baritone saxo-
phone,” proclaimed Fuller. Pepper, asserted Friedman,
“should be considered the number-one-of-all-time baritone
player. Nobody ever played as many years at that level that I
ever heard. There’s no question about it.”
According to Horace Silver, Adams “was an excellent jazz
soloist. He could handle any of the chord changes that you’d
throw up in front of him. That’s the mark of a true, great impro-
viser. In my opinion, this is why any of the great jazz soloists
get their reputation; because they’re consistent.” Bill Watrous
said about Adams, “Every time he played it was an adventure.
His ideas and his conception of the stuff that he was trying to
play was totally original.” Bassist Nabi Totah confessed, “I just
idolized Pepper. Every chorus, you’d think he’d be getting tired,
he’d play stronger than the one before. There seemed to be no
end to his ideas. He just forged ahead swinging.” Adams “gave
a personality to the baritone sax,” attested trumpeter Denny
Christianson, “that nobody else ever even came close to. No-
body could do what he did on his instrument. He could handle a
melody just like a great singer, but his improvisation was brilliant
and he had blinding speed.” Pepper, asserted Junior Cook, “was a
virtuoso, without a doubt. He exemplified all the best things that
any musician – jazz or otherwise–should aspire to: He had great
tone, he had great time, and he had great taste.”
For the younger generation, Adams was a paragon of individuality.
“There’s very few stylists, real heavyweights,” bassist Todd
Coolman once told drummer Ron Marabuto about Pepper.
“Maybe five of them. They’re really rare. He’s one of them.”
Adams was “a true master of his craft,” said Bennie Maupin, “and
absolutely one of the finest musicians of his generation.”
Saxophonist Kirk MacDonald agreed: “He really owned the music
on a very high level.” As bassist Andy McCloud pointed out,
Pepper “recorded with all the cats. He was an unknown genius. He
was like Dexter [Gordon] and one of them.” Guitarist Peter Leitch
said, “When I started to play, I realized that here’s a white person
who really played this music authentically and was still able to be
himself.” And Gary Smulyan acknowledged that Pepper “inspired
me to make a life-long study of the instrument”: It kind of made
me realize why I got into music. It was not to be a doubler. It was
not to play all these instruments and get a Broadway show. It
was to try to find a voice, and to express your life through an
instrument. That was it. Pepper was the inspiration for that.
* * *
It was Pepper’s blistering, spellbinding solo on “Three and
One” from this date that reminded me of Coleman Hawkins’s
comment and made me think of including the above excerpt
from my forthcoming Adams biography. You see, musicians
have always sung Adams’s praises, yet even to this day he’s
mostly overlooked, even by jazz historians, as one the great
postwar virtuosos. Just check the index of any jazz history
and you’ll see what I mean. Fortunately, with his extraordi-
nary playing on this marvelous release, Adams’s place among
the greatest of all jazz soloists should finally be irrefutable.
And it’s no surprise at all that it took Cory Weeds, a working
musician, to recognize this radio broadcast’s intrinsic value.
Besides revealing Adams’s brilliance as a soloist, this perfor-
mance is a vitally important document because virtually
nothing exists of his small-group work from this period. Be-
tween Encounter (Prestige, 1968), his terrific solo date with
Zoot Sims, Tommy Flanagan, Ron Carter, and Elvin Jones,
and Ephemera (Spotlite, 1973), his equally superb quartet
session with Roland Hanna, George Mraz, and Mel Lewis,
there’s barely a handful of recordings in which Pepper takes
a solo. Furthermore, just a few obscure Adams audience re-
cordings exist from this five-year span that only a few col-
lectors have heard. What I found especially fascinating was
hearing both “Patrice” and “Civilization and Its Discontents,”
two very special Adams originals, performed a full year
before he recorded them for Spotlite. This indicates that even
at this stage of his career, five years before he left the Thad
Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra to go out on his own as a “single,”
he was composing new tunes not solely for record dates, as I
previously believed. “Patrice,” it turns out, was registered at
the Library of Congress on October 29, 1970, but might this
be the world premiere of “Civ?” For this show, Adams’s select-
ion of tunes was highly representative of what he often chose to
play. With a competent band, he usually selected a few originals,
a few Thad Jones tunes, a standard or two, and he’d customarily
close his sets with “’Tis.” He especially liked old show tunes,
such as “Time on My Hands” (1930). “Stella by Starlight, of
course, was by 1972 a very well-known standard. “’Tis” was
Thad’s brief, uptempo out-theme that since 1954 Pepper almost
always utilized. “Oleo” served a similar function, though typical-
ly to both conclude a concert and stretch out a bit. And “Three
and One?” One of Thad Jones’s great compositions, it was an
Adams feature while he was a member of Jones/Lewis, and a
tune that he often called in small-group settings. Adams was a
musician who lived to play, yet whose lust for life was eroded
by his long-simmering disappointment at being defined by pro-
moters as a big-band baritonist not available for hire, ignored as
a true innovator for much of his career, and barely recorded as a
leader for most of the 1960s and ’70s. Part of his uniqueness
was due to his pedigree as a “jazz man.” As Eddie Locke explain-
ed it to me during my 1988 interview with him, “A real jazz man
will play his instrument no matter what”: He’s gonna play. He’s
not gonna make an excuse for not playing by saying, “Something
is going wrong, I can’t play.” If you love it so much, it doesn’t
make any difference. No dollars, bad musicians, good musicians,
mediocre musicians: You’re gonna blow! Pepper just happened to
also be a great player. But he was a real jazz man. . . . A real jazz
man is rare. That’s a lifestyle. That’s not just going to school. And
that’s what Pepper was about. In Detroit, you played in the joints:
slop jobs in those old, funky places. That’s a jazz man. He wasn’t
trying to play in Carnegie Hall every night. He was just going to
play some music because he loved to play. . . . People wanted to
play with him because he was a jazz man. . . . I don’t care who he
was playing with; he’s gonna sound good because he’s gonna
blow! He doesn’t give a shit about the other cats. If they play the
wrong change, he’ll play the wrong one. That’s a true jazz musician.
Bird was like that. Coleman Hawkins was like that. I put him in
some heavy company there but that’s what I’m talking about.
Enjoy!
Gary Carner Author of Pepper Adams’ Joy Road and Reflectory:
The Life and Music of Pepper Adams
