October Doings

 

Instead of writing the blog post last weekend, I spent

much of my time preparing documents for SUNY Press

for the forthcoming paperback edition of the Pepper

Adams biography. The publisher required a bunch of

forms, including a Marketing Questionnaire and

Photograph Spreadsheet, that took about twenty hours

to complete. Fortunately, all of them are now done,

submitted, and in their hands for processing. I've been

told to expect the book to hit Amazon.com and other

booksellers late next year.

For those of you who are adverse to buying or reading

ebooks, or those awaiting the paperback edition, let me

remind you of a few things. The paperback edition is

greatly abridged, maybe as much as half of the original

text. Moreover, all of the 450 music links are removed.

Also deleted are all of the incredible photographs. My

suggestion is to grab the ebook, if for no other reason

than to hear all of the great music. I carefully chose my

favorites, half of which have never been released! See:

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

Yesterday was Pepper Adams’s 92nd birthday. Also,

baritone saxophonist Ronnie Cuber, arguably Pepper’s

first disciple, passed away yesterday. It reminded me of

Harry Carney’s death. He too died on Pepper’s birthday.

How weird is that?

A few announcements. Several updates have been

made to https://www.pepperadams.com/. Three musician

roundtables that I hosted about Adams are now far more

visible on the site's homepage:

https://www.pepperadams.com/PanelDiscussions.html  Second, new transcriptions have been added:

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

I’m also pleased to announce that Noah Pettibon is the

new co-author, along with John Vana, of the third book

on Pepper Adams. Intended as a complement to my

biography, this will be a musicological study of Adams’s

style. Their intention is to write it in two parts, one for the

lay reader, the other for musicians. Vana and Pettibon’s

expected publication date is 2030, Adams’s centennial.

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

Pepper Adams Doings

 

It’s been a while since I posted here. I’ve been dealing with some health issues that kept me away, but now, thankfully, I’m doing better and on the rebound. Since December, I’ve conducted two Zoom roundtables regarding Pepper Adams. Each included 14 musicians and were extremely informative. Here are the links:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vK5g4CRToFA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FrWGp2EyJw 

As for Reflectory, my full-length Adams biography, the First Edition ebook has been on sale since October. It includes 450 tunes, half of which have never been heard before, plus photographs from the Adams Archive, housed (or soon housed) at William Paterson University in Wayne, New Jersey.

My Revised Edition will be available in a week or so. It corrects errors, improves readability, and includes some additional music links that were somehow overlooked.

As for https://www.pepperadams.com/index.html, many new transcriptions have been added here by John Vana:

https://www.pepperadams.com/Transcriptions/index.html At last count, there are 98 solo transcriptions to check out, and we’re in the process of adding each Adams performance so that a musician can easily hear the solo they’re attempting to read.

Here’s where you can buy Reflectory and hear all this fantastic music: https://www.pepperadams.com/Reflectory/index.html 

Romping through the Midwest

© Gary Carner. Copyright Protected. All rights reserved.

















READ BELOW!

I left for my tour of the Midwest on April 8 and returned on the 23rd. I needed a full week to catch my

breath upon my return. After two solid years of writing Pepper’s biography on top of (or in between)

work, the trip really took its toll. I drove more than 1,000 miles from St. Louis to Macomb and back, and

then from Minneapolis to Madison and back. Half the trip was a vacation in Minneapolis with my old

college buddies, and there was a lot of carousing.

Before I left, one of my loyal biography readers encouraged me, once I got some distance, to reread the

first half of my forthcoming Pepper biography. He said that my writing had improved over the last two

years and that I’d probably find some things to tweak that no longer would seem acceptable. He said,

“more work equals a better book.” He was right! A few days after my return, I started reading my

opening paragraph of Chapter 1 and immediately saw things to alter. Accordingly, for the next few weeks

or longer, I’ll be editing the first half of the biography for publication this summer as an e-book. More

details will follow, once I’m done and figure out the vendor, etc.

I still have five more interviews on cassette, a handful of radio interviews, and about fifty interviews on

microcasette to listen to before I can make my final additions to Chapter Five and possibly the rest of

the book. What I’ve found by listening to these interviews is the unexpected gems here and there that,

when stripped into the text, add meaning and context to the text I’ve already written. I discovered some

of these today in my interview with the trombonist Bill Watrous. In some cases, as with my interview the

the drummer Eddie Locke, I’ve had to write new paragraphs that I wasn’t anticipating because of the

importance of the testimony.

On my journey throughout the Midwest, I came to the conclusion that I’d prefer to put off doing the

hardcore listening of Pepper’s recorded work from 1956-1977 until next year. That work will be

discussed in two separate appendices, as I’ve already done with the some fifty pages of text I wrote

about Pepper’s recordings during the period 1977-1986. All of the tunes I discuss in the appendices will

include links to YouTube so that the reader can immediately listen to the music. Much of it has never

been heard before.

Putting off the listening allows me to complete the biography this year. Because I’m on a roll and only

one chapter away, it’s far more gratifying to have that (as one wag once described a hemorrhoid) behind

me.

I’m especially grateful to the wonderful hospitality that I was shown on my trip by my gracious guests. My

first visit was to Western Illinois University, to visit with my co-author, John Vana, and then speak to his

graduate class, “The Big Three: Charlie Parker, John Coltrane and Pepper Adams.” At the St. Louis

Airport the following day, my flight got delayed for nearly three hours due to the snow storm that was

moving through the Midwest. The Minneapolis Airport was closed during that time so they could clean

the runways and catch up on all the delayed flights. I was indeed lucky to land in Minneapolis at 7pm and

still have some fun there, rather than be placed in an airport hotel and fly out the next morning. I think the

flights after me were grounded.

The following Sunday night, I met the alto saxophonist Jeff Erickson for dinner, where I proceeded to

download for hours the essence of my two years of Pepper research. Thanks, Jeff, for listening, and for

allowing me to get that out of my system! The following day, I lectured to his jazz survey class at the

University of Wisconsin/La Crosse. Then I drove about a half hour up the pretty Mississippi River to

Winona, where I had dinner with the drummer, Rich MacDonald., Afterwards, I lectured about Pepper to

his class.

The following day, I drove some 200 miles to Madison, then spent the evening with the baritone

saxophonist Anders Svanoe. Svanoe did one of the first books for Scarecrow. See

https://sonnyredmusic.com/ for all his work on the Detroiter. Obviously, we had a lot to discuss. After

eating some rather average food in LaCrosse and Winona, it was great to eat Nepalese, Laotian and

Mexican food during my stay. Svanoe took me around the main campus of the University of Wisconsin,

and the following day we looked over his Red memorabilia, then drove to Beloit College, where I lectured

to his jazz class.

That night Svanoe did an impassioned set of Pepper Adams tunes with a tasty rhythm section at

Madison’s Arts and Literature Lab. It’s an intimate setting for music, and we had a small but enthusiastic

turnout on a Wednesday night. My pre-concert talk to the audience and Anders’ performance was

captured on video. It will be posted soon at pepperadams.com. Many thanks to Thomas Ferrella, for his

support of the center and his wonderful hospitality. I hope more folks support it:

https://artlitlab.org/events/the-life-and-music-of-pepper-adams-reading-and-concert   

The last lecture I gave was to Chris Merz’s class at the University of Northern Iowa. Chris studied with

Yusef Lateef and had been waiting for the right time for me to visit. Fortunately, we fit it in this time around.

I drove 200 miles to Cedar Falls, leaving Madison at 6:45am, to get to his class in time. Fatigued but

undaunted, I found his class to be among the most spirited of any class I’ve taught about Pepper. I was

excited to go there, because over the past twenty or so years Chris has built the finest program in the

state of Iowa. Sure enough, his students, especially the saxophonists in attendance, were very engaged

and it was a memorable experience -- for me up there with Eastman, Brigham Young, and only a few

others.

That night, after we had dinner in Cedar Falls, I heard Merz at a jam session. He’s a very fine tenor

player. He was worried because I told him how displeased I was with Joshua Redman’s performance in

Hopkins MN a few days before. After the gig, I told him how much I loved his playing; how much joy he

exuded, how his lines swung so logically. Like Pepper once said, try to tell a story by getting conversation

going.

Part of my vacation I stayed with my webmaster, Dan Olson. We discussed pepperadams.com at

length, coordinating the future post with Svanoe, and charting the site’s future. We spent hours sorting

through the remaining Adams interviews that still needed to be posted. Right after I returned home,

“Danno” made some significant updates to the site. Due to a discovery I made after hearing an interview

with Pat Henry, the San Francisco deejay and the producer of Mel Lewis’ very first date as a leader, the

longstanding riddle about the publisher of “A Winter’s Tale” has mostly been solved:

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

Significantly, the Adams Interviews page has been updated and nearly completed:

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

We will be changing the contact email from info@pepperadams.com to this blog so that we can drive

some more traffic and so that folks who email additions, etc, get replies in a timely manner.

Lastly, I’ve made some new additions to Pepper’s Instagram site, with some other photos forthcoming. Hopefully, I don’t repeat too many posts already on the site.

https://www.instagram.com/pepperadamsblog/

As always, I welcome your comments, and continue to be very grateful for all your support.

Reflectory

© Gary Carner. Copyright Protected. All rights reserved.




I'm just back from a vacation in Canada. Sorry for the delay in uploading this post. On my way home I visited with trumpeter Denny Christianson, who was the only musician to ever record Pepper Adams in a big band setting with Adams as the featured soloist. That recording, Suite: Mingus, and its follow-up date, More Pepper (with a few additional cuts from the Montreal session), were released posthumously. Adams, very weak from cancer in February, 1986, made it through the recording but it was a Herculean struggle for him to get through the date. Denny told me that, for the first few takes, the rhythm section was pulling back the time to stay with Pepper because he was back-phrasing. Denny had to instruct them to keep the time in place so Pepper could express himself as he wished.

Christianson has run the esteemed Humber College jazz program in Toronto for eighteen years, building it to its current state as one of the world's finest. At age 75, he has just retired. He intends to begin writing his memoirs once all his things in his office are organized and packed.

It was a joy to reminisce about Pepper with him and his wife, Rose, and to share parts of the first half of my Pepper book with them. Later, saxophonists Pat LaBarbera, Kirk MacDonald, and Shirantha Beddage, all on the Humber faculty, came by for a barbecue. What a great experience! From Denny, Rose and Kirk I was able to record some more valuable interview material that will be helpful in the second half of the biography.

While in Canada, before returning to Toronto, I hung out with my pepperadams.com webmaster. We made considerable progress with the Dedications page, gathering performances. That page, and Big Band Arrangements, are currently being updated. New Chronology files have already been posted at the site. In some cases, these are the first updates in over a year, with much new information, including the newly researched inception of the Thad Jones-Pepper Adams Quintet.

My co-author on the Pepper biography, John Vana, and I have adopted a new working title for the Pepper Adams book. We're running with Reflectory: The Life and Music of Pepper Adams. Do you like it? John felt that the title underscored Pepper's contemplative, intellectual side. I felt that it had an air of poetry to it. The subtitle needs to be there to reflect the bifurcated nature --  Pepper's life and the musical analysis -- of our twin approach. As with my first Adams book, Pepper Adams' Joy Road, we'll use on the cover what I feel is Pepper's most iconic photograph.

I've added a surprise, very special guest to write an Afterword to the book. Still another contributor is in the works. The idea is to have at least one world renowned jazz scholar/musician validate some of John Vana's observations, to add weight and emphasis to them. For one thing, putting Adams in a class with Bird and Trane will surprise some, if not many. I feel it's important that Vana's conclusions not be perceived as the ranting of a biased fan. Having an Afterword will silence the cynics, and startle those who have been asleep about Adams.

To that aim, Vana will be teaching a graduate course at Western Illinois University in the Spring, 2019: "The Big Three: Charlie Parker, John Coltrane and Pepper Adams." I expect he'll make all sorts of discoveries that will make its way to our book.

I've been listening recently to my interviews with Tommy and Diana Flanagan. I'm nearly finished with them. The great value of this documentation is that it helps me understand the last few years of Pepper's life, especially how he dealt with his final illness.

I did listen to my interview with Bob Wilber that I conducted in 1988, between sets at the Sticky Wicket Pub in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, where he appeared as a soloist with a rhythm section. Wow, was he tremendous that Sunday afternoon!

Here are some Wilber interview excerpts about Pepper:

"He saw the possibility of taking the big sound from the baritone, from Carney, and applying it to bebop jazz -- which was a difficult thing to do because when you have a really big sound it tends to be sluggish. It tends to slow you down."

"One of the tensions that he achieved in his playing was this feeling of being slightly behind, as though he was falling behind. It added tension to his playing."

"Yeah, legato tongue, where Carney tended to be more legato without any tonguing. He had great harmonic sophistication. He explored all the possibilities of using the diminished scale, and all kinds of things. Very sophisticated harmonically."

"A gentle guy. He had that soft way of speaking."

In the next few weeks I'll begin cataloging part of Adams' collection before I drive up to New Jersey to donate it to the William Paterson University Archive. I'll be including a list of Pepper's 78s and LPs, as well as his personal 8-Track collection, as appendices in the biography. How appropriate to have the Pepper and Thad Jones collections together at the same institution!

Last month I promised to share Eddie Locke interview excerpts. That will have to wait until my next installment. I may also include some of Doc Holladay's interview excerpts next month too.
Happy Summer to all!

On the Trail . . . in August

© Gary Carner. Copyright Protected. All rights reserved.

I'm closing up some lose ends with my Pepper Adams tape and CD collection. I'm doing this because I have stuff scattered about and my co-author, John Vana, is digitizing all my Pepper material for posterity--and so he can study it for our Pepper book. Here's a rather typical Saturday-in-the-life-of-Gary-Carner.

The first mystery tape I encountered this morning is a very well-recorded quintet date for trumpet/flugelhorn, baritone and rhythm section with the following tunes itemized on the tape box:

Side 1:

Mean What You Say

In a Sentimental Mood

Witchcraft

'Tis 

Side 2: 

On the Trail

I Can't Get Started

From the bass sound, I can assess it's a post-'60s audience tape or broadcast, due to the slightly nasal pickup sound with low action. The band is really excellent and Pepper is brilliant and harmonically daring. What is this?

The drums sound like plastic heads, further supporting the 1970s or 1980s timeline. It sounds like a broadcast because it's so well recorded. The flugelhorn solo on "I Can't Get Started" is masterful. I wonder if it's Tom Harrell or Denny Christianson? Well, fortunately, it's a broadcast and Pepper stepped in to announce the first two tracks on Side 2. Then, the announcer cited in Swedish that the brass player is Jan Allan! What is this? Off to the Chronology? No, not necessary because the announcer cited the band: Pepper and Allan with Steffan Abeleen, Palle Danielsson and Alex Riel. Oh, OK, it's Pepper at Restaurant Guldhattan in Stockholm on 6 November 1972. Pepper's "On The Trail" solo is breathtaking, and, in his usually understated and amusing style, Pepper's announcement after the applause is as follows: 

"Thank you very much. We assume that you recognize the first two songs. They were 'On the Trail,' from the Grand Canyon Suite of Ferde Grofe. We're not going to play the rest of the Grand Canyon Suite this evening, however (chuckles), and that was 'I Can't Get Started.'" 

I went on to listen to the entire broadcast. Nothing else from Pepper equates to the sheer brilliance of his "On the Trail" solo. It's simply one of his greatest performances from that period. I suspect he was very happy as a newly traveling solo artist in Europe. He only started three years prior--in mid December, 1969 in Copenhagen, for a gig at Montmartre. 

Another amusing Pepper quip from the Stockholm broadcast: After playing "'Tis," (Thad Jones' tune that Pepper customarily played as a theme to end his sets), Pepper says: "So you know in the future, that means 'intermission' (chuckles)."

My second mystery tape sounds to me like the Shorty Rogers Big Band from the late 1950s. There's plenty of flugelhorn features and solos for various members of the band. This is a live thing, but possibly not from the Bobby Troup TV show from California, because it doesn't sounds like a polite TV audience. Two bari solos in it were definitely not Pepper. "Mountain Greenery" was part of his book back then and they play that. Then again, with some of the small group things, it does feel like a TV show.

Now to a few CDs that have been knocking around. From Dave Schiff I received Pepper and Roland Hanna at the Wilmington Music School. Here's the entry:

New Entry

PEPPER ADAMS

740621

21 June 1974, audience recording, Wilmington Music School, Wilmington DE: Wayne Andre, Steve Koontz tb; Dave Schiff fl, ts; Pepper Adams bs; Roland Hanna p; Don Schiff b; possibly Gary Griswold or Newman Barker dm.

a Quiet Lady

b Civilization and Its Discontents

c Straight, No Chaser

d Royal Garden Blues

On -c and -d, Andre and Koontz only. Schiff on ts.

From Thomas Hustad, the Ruby Braff historian, I received the following. Pepper is dazzling!:

New Entry:

RUBY BRAFF

19 July 1972, audience recording, Half Note, New York: Ruby Braff cornet; Pepper Adams bs; Dill Jones p; George Mraz b; Dottie Dodgion dm.

a Blues in A-Flat

This recording was discussed in Michael Steinman's blog "Jazz Lives" (http://jazzlives.wordpress.com/author/jazzlives), published on 5 August 2014: I will close with my single Pepper Adams sighting. In 1972, several friends and I followed Ruby Braff to gigs.  Although Ruby was unpredictable and unreasonably given to rage, he was always pleasant to us and allowed us to tape-record him. On July 19 of that year, my friend Stu and I came to the Half Note to record Ruby with the Welsh pianist Dill Jones, bassist George Mraz (then working with Pepper in the Thad Jones–Mel Lewis ensemble, and Dottie Dodgion on drums. About two-thirds through the evening, where the music had been very sweet, with Ruby’s characteristic leaps through the repertoire of Louis, Duke and Billie, a tall man ascended the stand with a baritone saxophone, was greeted warmly by the players, and the quintet launched into an extended blues in A-flat. I remember Dottie Dodgion being particularly enthusiastic about the unnamed musician’s playing, who packed his horn and went off into the warm Greenwich Village night. Who was that unmasked man? The subject of Carner’s book, and, yes, the tape exists, although not in my possession."

Now, a real mystery, or so it seemed at the time. I acquired a CD that said "Pepper Adams in San Remo, 1981." Pepper wrote the opening tune on the CD, Conjuration, in 1979 but the second tune, Dobbin', was written in 1983. Already, the recording date on the CD is suspect. Fortunately, Pepper announced pianist Ricardo Zegna and bassist Dodo Goya. That pins it down some. But before a search, first the other tunes. Doctor Deep was written in 1982. No real help there. The drumming is very pronounced and aggressive in an American kind of brash way. I'm starting to suspect drummer Ronnie Burrage. And, sure enough, it's listed in my Joy Road thusly, just poorly marked on my CD:

PEPPER ADAMS

851015

c15 October 1985, RAI TV broadcast, Salon delle Feste, San Remo Jazz Festival, San Remo, Italy: Pepper Adams bs*; Ricardo Zegna p; Dodo Goya b; Ronnie Burrage dm.

a Conjuration*

b Dobbin'*

c unknown waltz

d unknown blues

e Doctor Deep*

One last thing I recorded in my Pepper book but didn't identify very well is a Thad-Mel thing from Scandinavia in August, 1977. All the tempos are faster than usual, particularly "Low Down." This was the first tour for Richard Perry and Dick Oatts (who plays tenor). Jerry Dodgion and Ed Xiques were still in the band in the alto chairs. Dodgion's chart on "Oregon Grinder" gets a great workout.

                                                                 (Jan Allan)

Pepperadams.com Improvements

© Gary Carner. Copyright Protected. All rights reserved.

Dan Olson, my trusty webmaster since pepperadams.com's inception, has been visiting this week. Apart from four rounds of golf in wonderfully balmy Georgia weather, we've spent time making refinements to the website. The main issue is pepperadams.com's compatibility with iPads and laptops or desktop computers. Over the last year we've found that newer versions of popular browsers don't support some of the older features of Quicktime that we used to build out the site. Because of that, our links, mouse-overs and other "cool" features aren't working as originally intended. Over the last few days we've fixed typos and repaired captions. Text has been rewritten, dead links have been removed and other tasks are ongoing. You can expect more improvements in the coming weeks. 

A long discussion ensued yesterday about what to do about Pepper's compositions. For quite some time I've been eager to correct the total number of Adams compositions from 43 to 42 but Dan has resisted. Without belaboring the point, from a technical point of view it's very involved to change the Composition List without having to update scads of other pages linked to it. A seemingly simple task, as it turns out, isn't simple at all. Moreover, all sorts of philosophical issues regarding the nature of research are involved. Is it best to retain a record of what was once thought to be correct or is it better to reveal newly discovered information and expunge the old information entirely? For us, a New Yorker article (see "Discards" by Nicholson Baker, 4 April 1994; http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1994/04/04/discards) describing the wholesale destruction of card catalogs about 20 years ago was a chilling reminder of how important it is to show the progression of knowledge. Much like the Nazis burning books, the New Yorker piece described how card catalogs were destroyed when libraries transitioned to the digital age. But the rush to embrace the new technology was done without care to preserve all the research contained in those card records and much information, such as handwritten notations, was lost in the process. It reminds me of America's urban renewal movement in the 1960s and the ensuing loss of many great public buildings.

Ultimately, we decided to keep the Compositions page as is but append it with a new mouse-over explaining how 43 Adams compositions became 42. For those not aware of the need for the revision, see "Like . . . What Is This." It's written by Kiane Zawadi (formerly Bernard McKinney), not Pepper. Nevertheless, where appropriate, we've also decided to change "43" to "42" throughout the site.

Another thing Dan and I discussed was how to reconstitute Solos of the Month. No longer should we update the page every month, we agreed, or scramble to catch up because it wasn't updated in time. We've decided instead to post all of the samples, rename the page "Rare Performances" and add new things as we go. Stay tuned for that update.

"Audio from 2012 Tour" is a work in progress. It will take some time before that's repaired. "Dedications" will also receive a make-over soon. We have music samples and lead sheets to add. 

"Pepper Adams and John Coltrane" is due for a major overhaul. That will wait until Osian Roberts and John Vana share their insights in this blog. Also, an old thread about "Mary's Blues" will be appended. So much to do!

                    (Kiane Zawadi and Howard Johnson,1966)

                             (Kiane Zawadi/Bernard McKinney)