More Pepper Biography News

It's been a dense month of listening to the many interviews that I conducted with a bunch of Detroiters, such as Hugh Lawson, Bess Bonnier, Phil Levine, Curtis Fuller and others. I still have a number of them to hear. All of them relate to Pepper's early days in Detroit.
The value of listening to them is to find little gems of information that I can still add to the book, or to make factual corrections to the existing text. When I add new text, of course, I have to take my time writing a new paragraph here and there, and then go through a series of rewrites. Here's a few examples of some new text. (I'm still researching what instrument Vigiletti played):


Adams’ friends mostly referred to him as “Pepper.” Some affectionately shortened his nickname to “Pep.” Others, such as Barry Harris, called him “Mr. Peepers,” because of his similarity, in appearance and affect, to the mild-mannered, bespectacled actor Wally Cox who portrayed Mr. Peepers on the popular American television comedy of the same name that ran from 1952-55. Some of Pepper’s oldest friends, such as Elvin Jones, preferred his birth name, “Park.”


Some Detroit musicians, however, didn’t care for Pepper’s playing. “When I got home from the army,” said Adams, “I discovered that what was mod and fashionable on baritone then was the very light, tender sound, and I had a number of people tell me quite seriously that if I ever expected to stay in music I would have to alter the way I was playing.” Several of these judgmental white musicians not only objected to Adams’ big sound, thinking it old-fashioned and too “black,” but they didn’t like his use of harmony, thinking that he didn’t know what he was doing. “He was so far in front of everybody,” said Hugh Lawson. “They mocked him because they didn’t understand it. That’s like Elvin Jones. They were so far in front.”
Three white players, however, did admire what Pepper was doing: Joe Vigiletti, the drummer Norman Purple, and the baritone saxophonist Frank Morelli. All three of them, according to Lawson, followed Pepper around from gig to gig. Morelli, who would much later take Curtis Fuller’s place in Yusef Lateef’s group, idolized Adams and wanted to study with him. Although Pepper was grateful for the admiration, as a “self-taught” player he somehow felt ill-equipped, despite his many accomplishments already, to teach the baritone saxophone to a younger devotee.

My co-author, John Vana, and I have at long last set up the contents of the entire Pepper Adams biography (see below). Again, our publication date is 2030, the centennial of Pepper's birth. The first half of the book is 100 pages in length, not including front matter. My last half of the book will be written in reverse chronological order. Chapter Four will cover the time when Adams was married, mostly after he left the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra. Chapter Five will cover his thirteen-year period of time playing with Thad Jones. Chapter Six will deal with Pepper's arrival in New York until late 1964.
The formation of the Thad Jones-Pepper Adams Quintet, by the way, has been scaled back eight months, from March, 1965 to September, 1964. It turns out that the Quintet played gigs in New York City not soon after both Thad and Mel left the Gerry Mulligan Concert Jazz Band. This predates by two months Thad and Pepper's contribution to Oliver Nelson's legendary recording More Blues and the Abstract Truth. This new information will be reflected in changes that I will be making to my Adams chronology, posted at pepperadams.com.
As you can see by the headings below, Part Two of the forthcoming Adams book will give John Vana a chance to chart Pepper's growth as a soloist, discuss significant recordings throughout Pepper's thirty-year career, reveal his enduring legacy, and to get deeply into his important and extensive analysis of "The Big Three: Parker, Coltrane and Adams." I think that this section will be one of the most influential aspects of the book. Think of it: No one -- historians or fans -- puts Pepper Adams in their league. Yet he rightful belongs there, as Vana will explain through the use of numerous musical examples and carefully reasoned explication of what each has done in their playing career. All music examples will be posted at pepperadams.com.
As for the site itself, numerous upgrades have been made already to pepperadams.com. Please check it out.


CONTENTS


Dedication                                                                                 v
Contents                                                                                                vii
Foreword by ________________                                                         ix
Acknowledgements
Prologue

PART ONE
The Life of Pepper Adams

Ascent (1930-1955)
                        Chapter 1: What Is It?
                                          Interlude: Detroit Drives the Nation
                                          What Is It? (Part II)
                        Chapter 2: Inanout
                                          Interlude: A Brief History of Rochester, New York
                                          Inanout (Part II)
                        Chapter 3: Binary
                                          Interlude: Detroit Jazz, 1922-1954
                                          Binary (Part II)

Dominion (1956-1986)
Chapter 4: Now in Our Lives
                        Chapter 5: Conjuration
                        Chapter 6: Urban Dreams

PART TWO
The Music of Pepper Adams

Chapter 7: The Emergence of an Original Style
Chapter 8: The Big Three: Parker, Coltrane and Adams
Chapter 9: Key Recordings
Chapter 10: Jazz Innovator

Appendix
Selected Bibliography
Index
About the Authors

Cass Tech

© Gary Carner. Copyright Protected. All rights reserved.

This post marks the return of my weekly Pepper Adams blog after one full year of forced inactivity. The lay off was due to a day job that I began on November 2, 2015 and resulting compliance issues that controlled what I did apart from work. Happily, those restrictions have been lifted. For the next year or so I will be posting mostly pieces here about the music culture of Detroit and Pepper's place within it. It's that part of the forthcoming Adams biography that I'm working on through 2017. 

Today, my interest is Cass Technical High School, the renowned Detroit institution that spawned so many great jazz musicians. Pepper Adams didn't attend Cass, nor attend any school in Detroit, for that matter, until he enrolled at Wayne (now Wayne State) University in 1948. Many of his mentors and colleagues, however, did attend Cass and the school exerted a strong influence on Detroit's musical culture that invariably shaped Adams. There's reasons why Detroit produced so many great musicians and Cass Tech is one of them.

For context, here's a list of notable jazz musicians (from before Adams' time up through his generation) that attended Cass: Gerald Wilson, J.C. Heard, Al McKibbon, Howard McGhee, Lucky Thompson, Wardell Gray, Billy Mitchell, Major Holley, Doug Watkins, Paul Chambers, Donald Byrd, Hugh Lawson and Ron Carter. Yes, that certainly leaves out a large number of great Detroit musicians--Kenny Burrell, Barry Harris, Tommy Flanagan and Yusef Lateef, to name but a few--who attended other schools, such as Miller, Northeastern, Northwestern or McKenzie High. And admittedly each of these schools had very good instrumental programs, at least up through Adams time in Detroit (1947-55). Nevertheless, Cass was different.

                                         

Cass has a long pedigree as an experimental secondary school. It first began in 1860 on the third floor of the Cass Union School. It was named for General Lewis Cass, who donated the land where the building was erected. Cass served as Territorial Governor of Michigan, Secretary of War under Andrew Jackson, U.S. Minister to France and also made an unsuccessful run for President in 1848. In 1908, Cass' Principal, Benjamin Comfort, expressed concern that only 35% of Detroit high schoolers were graduating and 10% were attending college. He felt that graduation rates would increase if students were given vocational training so they could acquire jobs in Detroit's quickly expanding industrial base. Acting on that impulse, Detroit School Superintendent Wales Martindale visited Europe to study its technical schools. Impressed with what he saw, upon his return he decided to establish Cass as Detroit's first technical school. Enrollment soon increased to such an extent that a new school was built in 1912 on the site of the old Cass Union School. It was renamed Cass Technical High School. Enrollment continued to swell, commensurate with Detroit's population explosion that was expanding to service the consolidating American auto industry based in the city. In response to the growing need for more classroom space, a brand new eight-story, 831,000 square-foot Cass Tech was dedicated in 1922, with 50 classrooms serving almost 4,400 students. The structure was incredibly ambitious, one of the largest high schools in the U.S. at the time. With its brick and limestone exterior, and marble-lined hallways with "light courts" to flood natural light inside it, the school boasted a gymnasium with an indoor running track, several swimming pools, a teacher's lounge with fireplace, and a magnificent auditorium with superb acoustics. The school had it all: a pharmacy, a foundry, machine shops, chemistry and physics labs, mechanical drawing rooms and a cafeteria able to feed 1,000 students at one sitting.

                                        (c) Sean Doerr. Cass Tech in 2005.

                            (c) Sean Doerr. Cass Tech's acoustically brilliant auditorium.

As Dan Austin wrote in his book Lost Detroit (p. 33), "From its humble beginnings with classes in pattern-making and drafting, Cass would grow to offer everything from bacteriology to chemical biology to metallurgy to nuclear physics. As technology changed, so did the school's curricula. When airplanes seemed the limit, Cass added aeronautics." Cass became "an institution virtually unparalleled in American secondary education, wrote the Detroit News in 1962. As one Cass graduate, Marshall Weingarden put it, "Cass Tech has a history of being an engine that drove this city. It stand for the highest level of achievement." Weingarden was involved in the effort save Cass' magnificent 1922 building from demolition. Unfortunately, the school was razed in 2011, six years after a brand new Cass Tech was built directly across the street. 

                              (c) Sean Doerr. Cass Tech classrooms before demolition.

Cass was a magnet school, quite unique for its time. "In its early years," as described in an unattributed piece at detroit1701.org, "Cass Tech trained students for skilled industrial jobs. But in the years after World War II, it was the premier high school for the city and its graduates increasingly went to colleges for advance training." According to pianist Clarence Beasley, "You had to have excellent grades to get into Cass." Moreover, you had to pass difficult entrance exams. As a magnet school, it drew many of the best and brightest students from metropolitan Detroit, some who traveled as much as 90 minutes by bus to get there. 

As bassist Al McKibbon told me in 1988, "Cass was downtown, in the heart of town. It really wasn't where I lived. I had to go all the way cross-town to go there. I used to go back Saturdays for the all-city orchestra. I also belonged to a select group from that orchestra that all the teachers played in." McKibbon chose to go from junior high to Cass, "a school," said McKibbon to Anthony Brown in 1993, "that teaches 'finished courses' in Music or Business or whatever you choose--Arts and Crafts." McKibbon began at Cass at age 15, in 1934. "I was taking String Bass and Piano, and Music History and Geometry and English," he said. "As long as you were in the school, until you graduated you had to play piano. You had to have your own instrument--your major--and a minor had to be another instrument from another instrumental group. . . . They always stressed classical music," said McKibbon. "The horn player from the school played with the Symphony, Mr. Hellstein." In fact, many if not all of the first chair players from the Detroit Symphony were teaching at Cass, at least in the 1930s. J.C. Heard, Wardell Gray and Gerald Wilson were in McKibbon's class. Another schoolmate was Flourney Hocker, who was studying bass since he was eight. He showed McKibbon that the instrument was more than just for rhythm. He was tremendously adept before Jimmy Blanton emerged on the scene with Ellington, but committed suicide as a young adult. McKibbon said Hocker would have been a sensation in New York. At that time, too, there were no black musicians in the symphony orchestra to emulate. 

"At Cass Technical High School," McKibbon told me in 1988, "you could take a music course, but that meant that you also had to take academics along with music. The guy that headed the Music Department, Mr. Byrne, taught brass so well that people passing through town would go to him for counseling. His son, Bobby, left high school and went to play with Jimmy Dorsey. He played trombone, harp and cello. You had to take your own instrument and you should take an instrument from each of the choirs. I played bass, so I played tuba. You had to have piano and you had to have Harmony and Music History, along with Math. I had Geometry I and II. It was that kind of school. The only way I could afford that school, they furnished instruments. My people couldn't afford to buy an instrument for me in the Depression. It was a godsend to me." 

As bassist Paul Chambers told Valerie Wilmer in 1961 (see Before Motown, p. 150): "The curriculum took up a whole day of music. That's why it took a few more years to graduate. For example, we'd have the first period Chamber Music; second period Full Orchestra, third either Harmony or Counterpoint and Rudiments; then came Piano and the academic classes." While a student at Cass, Chambers used to play during rest periods with Donald Byrd, Hugh Lawson or his cousin, Doug Watkins, and was gigging at night with Yusef Lateef and Kenny Burrell. Chambers' high school experience was the kind of total immersion in music that others have described in postwar Detroit of the 1940s and '50s. More next week . . .