Showing posts with label Coleman Hawkins. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Coleman Hawkins. Show all posts

Sunday, July 4, 2021

Pepper Adams with the Tommy Banks Trio

 



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

Sunday, May 6, 2018

Bob Cornfoot Remembers Pepper Adams












In the last month I've worked my way through two lengthy and significant interviews that I conducted in 1988. The first one is with Pepper's college roommate, Bob Cornfoot. The others is with the Detroit-born drummer Eddie Locke, who worked for four years with Coleman Hawkins. The only interviews yet to be heard before I'm officially done with Part I of Pepper's biography (1930-1955) are those with the singer Lodi Carr, the saxophonist Doc Holladay, the bassist Major Holley, and the pianists Hank Jones and Tommy Flanagan. Listening to, and taking notes about these last handful of interviews will help me finish Chapter 3, which covers Pepper's stint in the US Army and his time in Detroit from 1953 through the end of 1955.

Additionally, I finally located my interview with the saxophonist Bob Wilber. I'll listen to that one, too, to also see, as I do with all the others, if I've missed or misrepresented any important facts. In Wilber's case, I want to determine if I've overlooked anything important about Pepper's early days in Rochester, New York. Wilber attended the Eastman School of Music for one semester in the mid-1940s. While there, he, Pepper, Raymond Murphy and Bob Huggler spent a lot of time together, listening to jazz records and playing along on their instruments.

As it only relates to Pepper's time in Detroit before he moved to New York City in early 1956, the thrust of Cornfoot's interview was recalling a number of interesting facts about his time knowing Pepper at Wayne University (now Wayne State) and when they worked together at several record stores in Detroit. Cornfoot mentioned that Pepper liked Leo Parker's early work with Fats Navarro. They both adored Gilbert & Sullivan, and, apart from that, they listened together to recordings of Honegger's Pacific 231, and by Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Wardell Gray and Dexter Gordon. Pepper also liked Benny Bailey's trumpet playing. There was a lot of knocking on the walls at 3am, said Cornfoot, because of the late-night listening. The great Detroit pianist Bu Bu Turner used to come to their dorm a lot to listen to 78s at half speed and learn solos. In the dorm, Pepper practiced soprano sax.

While rooming together, he and Pepper in the middle of the week used to go to the Center Theater, about six blocks from Wayne, to catch matinees of older films that were made during the twenties and thirties. At all-night theaters they would catch comedies at the Mayfair Theater. They enjoyed shorts by Laurel and Hardy (with Charlie Chase), Bobby Clark, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and the Marx Brothers.

About Pepper's sense of humor, he said, "His humor seemed to be based more on human foibles, and bringing up short the pompous, the powerful. A tremendous punster. A lot of word play at times." When Pepper told a story, he would wait a few seconds, with a deadpan expression or a half-smile on his face, before laughing with his characteristic chuckle.

Cornfoot introduced Pepper to the works of Anthony Burgess. "He got all wrapped up in him," said Cornfoot. "When he got interested in something, he went thoroughly, all across the board."

Regarding classes at Wayne: "He used to use my notebooks because I was on the GI Bill. So they paid for my paper, and my notebooks, and that. So I'd come back from a class. Pepper would take the notebook and go to his class and make his notes. I remember he had a music appreciation class. They were covering Haydn. He had a marginal note that said, 'No wonder the guy write 104 symphonies. The son of a bitch only scored in octaves!'" Pepper did his term paper on Stravinsky. Pepper's favorite class was a film history course taught by Fran Striker. Striker wrote radio scripts for the Lone Ranger show.

Pepper told Cornfoot that he studied with Sidney Bechet. I've written Bob Wilber about that, because if true, it would have been when Wilber was living with Bechet.

"Hellure" is how Pepper answered the telephone, and "Cheers" is how he signed off on his correspondence.

Next month I'll tell you about the Eddie Locke interview and other things I've learned.

Sunday, December 3, 2017

Bird and Herbie










© Gary Carner. Copyright Protected. All rights reserved.




I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday and that you are anticipating a great Christmas season and new year. In the last few weeks one of my readers suggested that I open my Pepper Adams biography with the story of when Pepper heard Bird at Detroit's Mirror Ballroom in 1949. I end the opening section of Ch 1 with it, in a way building to it. He felt that, because it's about Bird, it would create far greater interest among readers than what I have now. Back to the drawing board, as they say.

I've been rereading the very fine biographical primer The Biographer's Art, written by Milton Lomask. One of the things he recommends is for an author to conceive of an ending well in advance, then work your way there as a destination. I'm toying with ending my biography with Pepper's appearance on the Grammy Awards telecast. It seems to me that the way the New York chapter of NARAS rallied behind Pepper when his appearance on the show was threatened with cancellation is a metaphor for much that occurred in New York when Adams got ill. Maybe I don't need to worry that much about the ending? The way the book is set up, the second section of the book (analysis) follows mine. Is it perhaps more appropriate to have John Vana's work summarize the entire book?

Over the last few weeks I also came across this great piece about Herbie Hancock: https://onmilwaukee.com/music/articles/herbie-hancock-curros-milwaukee.html#_
Hancock discusses how he joined the ByrdAdams Quintet. Here's his only mention of Pepper:

"In December of 1960, a couple of months after the Coleman Hawkins gig, I got a call from John Cort, the owner of the Birdhouse, a small club in a second-floor walkup on Dearborn Street, on the North Side. ‘Donald Byrd and Pepper Adams are playing in Milwaukee this weekend,’ he told me. ‘You want to play with them?’ "‘Are you kidding?’ I said. ‘Yeah, I want to play with them!’ I couldn’t believe it – I’d just been invited to gig with one of the best jazz trumpeters around. Donald Byrd was a veteran of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, and he’d earned a master’s degree at the Manhattan School of Music. He’d performed with many of the jazz greats over the years, including John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk, and in 1958 he’d started a quintet with the baritone saxophonist Pepper Adams. That was the group I was being invited to play with."

This piece is the most in-depth one I've read about Hancock and his "discovery" by Donald Byrd. It turns out that John Cort deserves much of the credit for recommending Hancock to Byrd.


One thing that has always surprised me is how little Pepper Adams is mentioned by Hancock over the years. I know that Byrd is the one who met with Hancock's mother and assured her that young Herbie would be fine living with Byrd in New York once the band left Chicago. With that in mind, it seems likely that Pepper didn't have the same degree of responsibility for Hancock as Byrd. Still, you would think that Herbie would have absorbed some influences from Adams, perhaps his harmonic usage? It sure would be fascinating to know what kind of conversations the two of them had during the year that Herbie was in the Byrd-Adams Quintet.

Saturday, April 22, 2017

Utah State Does It The Right Way






© Gary Carner. Copyright Protected. All rights reserved.

I arrived in Logan, Utah on a Monday, just before dinner. Logan is a college town, the home of Utah State University. The drive north from Salt Lake City is picturesque, especially breathtaking on Route 89 as you drive up and over the mountain pass about twenty minutes outside of Logan.

Baritone saxophonist Jon Gudmundson (http://music.usu.edu/faculty/faculty_directory/Gudmundson) invited me to Utah State. He runs their jazz program. The occasion of my two hour journey from Salt Lake City was to fulfill Jon’s vision of a Pepper Adams celebration at Utah State.

Several years ago in an email to me, Jon said he’d like to produce a big band concert of Pepper Adams charts to feature both his students and a guest soloist. Also, he thought I should participate in some way. Jon’s idea was an outgrowth of purchasing Tony Faulkner’s charts in 2013 as part of my Kickstarter campaign.

Fast forward to 2016. I wrote Jon to tell him that my daughter had moved to Salt Lake and I’d be in Utah at least once a year. That brought Jon’s idea for an Adams celebration back to the foreground. Moving ahead, Jon invited baritone saxophonist Jason Marshall (http://jazzbarisax.com/marshall.php, http://www.pmauriatmusic.com/us/artists/artist/14-jason-marshall ) to be the soloist with his two student big bands. And he asked me to lecture about Pepper Adams to his jazz history class and do a pre-concert interview about Adams with Utah deejay Steve Williams as a way of kicking off the show.

                    (Jon Gudmundson)

Apart from the Pepper Adams agenda, the week was made even more interesting by the presence of guitarist Peter Bernstein (http://peterbernsteinmusic.com/). Since Bernstein was passing through on his way back to New York, he too was invited to do a clinic and perform a concert at USU’s beautiful Performance Hall. This confluence of heavyweight New York musicians way out west felt like a Smoke reunion. (Both play there on a weekly basis.)

Sitting in on Peter’s concert were Jason Marshall and guitarist Corey Christiansen (http://music.usu.edu/faculty/faculty_directory/Christiansen ). The concert consisted of standards and it revealed a more introspective side of Bernstein’s artistry than I expected. His playing throughout showcased the harmonic inventiveness and technical range that has made him one of the world’s foremost guitarists.

The following morning I lectured on Pepper Adams in Jon’s class. It was comprised mostly on non-music majors. I only had 75 minutes. Much like my lecture at Brigham Young University the previous week I needed to keep my comments brief. Unlike BYU, however, I was able to read to the students part of my Prologue to my forthcoming Adams biography and interlace two YouTube videos for context: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCnWKm5uYhs and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfI6ljMgvuQ).

During my lecture, Jon Gudmundson said that he and Jason Marshall were talking about Pepper. Marshall questioned whether Adams on ballad performances ever stayed in a tender mood for an entire tune without double-timing. Partly on Marshall's behalf, Gudmundson asked me, “Does Pepper always scramble eggs?” “Yes,” I nodded. I mentioned that Adams in some ways was a frustrated soloist, spending too much time with big bands and not nearly enough recording or playing on his own with small groups. Jon, understanding my reply, said in summation, “He had a lot of notes inside that needed to come out.”

In addressing Jon and Jason’s question further, I then played for the class “Star-Crossed Lovers” from Adams’ great recording Encounter (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ie3hWHklEG0&list=PLEE675BC1DD76B95E) to show Adams’ interest in a more sublime, lyrical aesthetic. On that, unfortunately, Pepper only embellishes the melody. Much like Coltrane’s “Naima,” Pepper doesn’t take a solo, instead giving it to Tommy Flanagan as Trane did with McCoy Tyner. I thought to next play Pepper’s solo on “East of the Sun” with Toots Thielemans from Man Bites Harmonica but the class was coming to a close.

After the talk I thought more about the issue of Adams as an “extreme player.” Does that detract from what he does? Some musicians, such as bassist Major Holley, would ask him why he plays so many notes. Did they ask Art Tatum the same thing? Does that suggest a double standard? Is there a different aesthetic expected of piano soloists than saxophonists or low-pitched instrumentalists?

I remembered something Gary Smulyan once said to me about the audience perception of baritone playing, something he’s been trying to get away from as his career continues to evolve. He told me it’s always expected that he play aggressively. If he doesn’t, his fans are let down. Perhaps Pepper Adams felt the same pressure?

Basically, it seems to me that Pepper’s playing is characterized one way based on the bulk of his commercial recordings. Yet some of his little known audience tapes show an entirely different side to his playing. If Pepper, on commercial recordings, preferred a bravura, virtuosic style of playing, is that necessarily a bad thing?

I thought first about medium tempo Pepper solos, such as the audience recording Bye, Bye Blackbird (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fC2vilxFqpk ) where Adams strikes a perfect balance between behind-the-beat, swinging eighth-note choruses and double-timing. But then I remembered some commercial recordings. There’s this early Pepper solo on “A Winter’s Tale”: http://www.pepperadams.com/Compositions/compList/WintersTale/index.html#anchor
Pepper plays very lyrically until he doubles up at the end as a climactic denouement. How about his great solo on Excerent?: http://www.pepperadams.com/Compositions/compList/Excerent/index.html#anchor Do you have any lyrical Pepper solos you can recommend?

Back to Marshall and Gudmundson's point, how about Adams’ ballad playing in particular? Did Pepper ever hold back and not double-time? This ties into a criticism that Lewis Porter once articulated to me about Adams. He said, after listening to a Pepper solo at my house in the mid 1980s, that Adams is “an anxious player.” Do you in any way agree? Is he too quick to double up, too eager (= anxious) to slowly build up a solo? Do some of his lines, or his rhythmic patterns, add an anxious sensibility, especially when they’re staccato? Does Martin Williams’ comment to me many years ago about Pepper--“He’s playing Coleman Hawkins paradiddles”-- have any merit?

Lip scoops. Remember Brian Williams’ comment a year or so ago about Pepper’s overuse of them? Is this unique to Pepper? Is it part of his articulational concept?

Apart from all the time I spent thinking about the implications of Jon and Jason's observation, one of the highlights of my Logan experience was a jam session held at Jack’s Wood Fired Oven. Mostly an enthusiastic Tuesday night hang for Utah State music students and their retinue, the night was made particularly exciting thanks to the added presence of Jason Marshall, Peter Bernstein, various Utah State faculty, and especially Detroit trumpeter Kris Johnson (http://krisjohnsonmusic.com/), who drove up from Salt Lake with one of his bari students to see Marshall (his old Count Basie Band buddy). All took turns sitting in and Johnson was dazzling!

Equally enjoyable was my opportunity to speak to the large pre-concert audience on my final night in Logan. For thirty minutes I was asked a handful of questions by Steve Williams before an appreciative house prior to USU’s “Tribute to Pepper Adams.” At the Tribute (see program), Greg Wheeler conducted two Tony Faulkner charts: “Mary’s Blues” and “Trentino.” Later, Jon Gudmundson conducted three others: 
Bossallegro,” “Doctor Deep” and “Etude Diabolique.” 





Featured soloist Jason Marshall played beautifully throughout the night. He had a chance to work with the USU faculty small group (Aggie Music Project) on two tunes between the big band sets, and added an absolutely exquisite surprise ballad duet, backed by piano. He prefaced it by saying (and I paraphrase), “I want to play something pretty. We need more pretty in our lives. It delays the oxidative process.”

Saturday, November 29, 2014

Body and Soul, Sonny Rollins and Pepper Adams

© Gary Carner. Copyright Protected. All rights reserved.

We know that the 1939 Coleman Hawkins recording of Body and Soul is an iconic masterpiece of the jazz canon but don't we lose sight of how it influenced a generation of musicians? I recently read a piece by Marc Myers and was struck by how Sonny Rollins' experience as a young musician paralleled Pepper Adams'. Here's what Sonny Rollins recently told Marc Myers in the Wall Street Journal about Coleman Hawkins' recording:

"It's hard today to fully appreciate how different Coleman Hawkins' Body and Soul sounded when it hit Harlem jukeboxes in late 1939. On that three-minute record, Coleman took a popular torch song and, with his tenor saxophone, turned it into a personal statement without ever losing track of the original melody. Wow, that was completely new and it really changed me.

I first heard Body and Soul when I was 10 years old. I was standing outside the Big Apple Bar on the corner of 135th Street and Seventh Avenue, across from Small's Paradise, and heard it on the jukebox through an open window. Back then, I was playing alto saxophone and idolized Louis Jordan — and still do. But when I heard Coleman's Body and Soul, a light went off in my head. If he could personalize a popular song like that without lyrics, any song was possible if you had that intellectual capacity.

People in Harlem know their music, and I remember marveling at how many of them were touched by his record. Coleman went beyond what musicians were doing then by creating new harmonic inventions. Right after hearing the record, I bought a tenor reed and began using it on my alto mouthpiece to get that big Coleman Hawkins sound. Some years later, after much pleading on my part, my mother bought me a tenor sax and I was on my way."

For Pepper Adams, Hawkins' recording also propelled him to get a tenor saxophone and emulate Hawkins' big sound and more aggressive style. Up until that time Adams was playing clarinet, imitating the melismatic and lighter New Orleans playing of Jimmy Noone and Johnny Dodds. Here's a touching excerpt from my book, Pepper's Adams' Joy Road, as told to me by the noted Eastman School educator Everett Gates. I interviewed Gates about Pepper and Pepper's March, 1978 performance at Eastman:

"Adams dedicated Body and Soul to Everett Gates, a professor at Eastman and an early mentor to Adams who was in the audience. Regarding Adams’ performance of Body and Soul, Gates said, “That completely floored me!” In 1942, when Pepper Adams was eleven years old, Adams started visiting Gates on a regular basis at Gates’ home in Rochester, New York. They used to listen to music and discuss jazz and music theory. “He came to the house,” Gates continued, “and one day he said,

“Do you know Body and Soul?” I said, “Sure.” “Well,” he said, “could you write it out for me?” I said, “Sure.” At that time he was going to get a saxophone. So I wrote it out in D-flat, which of course was the key we always used, rather than any other when we’re playing. When we were improvising, it was always D-flat. And, so I wrote it out with the chords. He said, “There’s a record by Coleman Hawkins.” I said, “Yes, he made that a couple of years ago.” He said, “Well, he’s all over the place.” I said, “Yes, it’s very complicated and he gets up even to the high harmonics on the saxophone, like high G, so you have to be pretty advanced to control those.” So he said, “I wonder: Could you write me out a little improvisation that’s simple? Something simple I can play?” I said, “Sure. You can play this either on tenor, or you can play it on a clarinet.” So he got so he could play that, [and] this is what [he began his solo with] when he played at the Eastman Theater with the Eastman Jazz Ensemble. (He played this just with a rhythm section, and the other things he had played with a big band.) And, unbelievably, he played that, and then, of course, he went into his own [thing]. Well, of course, I was just overcome with what he had done there!"

Portrait of Everett Gates that hangs in a gallery at the Eastman School: http://instagram.com/p/t20Ku4pnv3/?modal=true