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.

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."

Pepper Tour Revised

© Gary Carner. Copyright Protected. All rights reserved.

Some of you may have seen my Facebook posting a few days ago of the historic Pepper Adams performance from the Grammy Awards television broadcast on February 24, 1982. Although I've had a copy of it in my collection since around 1988, it's remained very rare, only traded by collectors. Unfortunately, until this week's YouTube posting, very few had seen it. Finally, I got it digitized and here's the link: https://youtu.be/4PWTkf6MsZ0

Also, I posted this flyer. What a night of music!:

Below is an updated itinerary of my Pepper Adams tour in October. As of now, I'm doing five university lectures, plus functioning as an emcee for a concert in Rochester of Pepper Adams tunes. I'm still trying to fit in something on the 22nd or 23rd, but I'm running out of options:

M, Oct. 19: 12:30-1:45: Wayne NJ: Lecture at William Paterson University.

M, Oct. 19: 7-8:30: Poughkeepsie NY: Lecture at Vassar College.

T, Oct. 20: Travel.

W, Oct. 21: 3-4:30: Rochester NY: Lecture ("Pepper Adams in Rochester, 1935-1947"), Rochester  Institute of Technology, Liberal Arts Hall A-201. Book signing to follow.

W, Oct. 21, 8:30-10: Rochester NY: Book talk/signing, then concert of Pepper's music by the Mike Melito Trio (Doug Stone ts; unknown b; Mike Melito dm) at the Bop Shop.

Th, Oct. 22: Travel.

F, Oct. 23: Off.

Sat, Oct. 24: Off.

Sun, Oct. 25: Travel.

M, Oct. 26: 5:30-7: Boone NC: Lecture at Appalachian State University.

T, Oct. 27: 2-3:15: Charlotte NC: Lecture at University of North Carolina.

As I mentioned last week, due to exigencies (that I can not explain at this time), I will need to take a break from this blog for the foreseeable future. The same goes for my Facebook account. I hope to update readers before too long, but no worries about my work on the Pepper biography. That will definitely continue unabated. Please continue to consult pepperadams.com for updates and all things Pepper Adams. Lastly, don't forget that October 8 is Pepper's birthday.