Pepper Adams Biography is Finished!

 

I’m thrilled to report that the Pepper Adams biography 

is now officially done! It’s quite a moment for me, after

37 years of work and a particularly grueling stretch

the last four years. I just spent the last eight hours

today proofing the first half, adding captions to photos, 

checking music links, and wrapping it up. This after

doing the same yesterday to the second half. 

The manuscript has been sent to my trusted webmaster,

Dan Olson, who is finishing the formatting before he

submits it to Lulu for processing. I’m not sure how much

time they’ll need before they ask us to sign off on it before

publication, but I’m hopeful that it can be released before

month’s end. 

Here’s the complete Advance Praise page:

Advance Praise for Reflectory

 

 

 

 

Gary Carner’s deep and painstaking research into the life and music

of Pepper Adams, coupled with his sure feel for this underappreciated

jazzman’s complex personality, has yielded an absorbing biography

that also reveals much about the jazz life writ large. Carner’s nimble

narrative captures Adams as a man of reserve and sensitivity thrown

into the always bracing, sometimes exasperating tumult of jazz’s post-

bop Detroit-to-New York vector. Reflectory is jazz history of the first rank.

– John Gennari

Author of Blowin’ Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics

 

 

Most jazz biographies are predictable chronologies of gigs and

recordings, friendships and rivalries, kindness and cruelty. We know

how they start; we know how they end. Carner’s admiring multi-

dimensional portrait of Pepper Adams is a delightful corrective.

Irresistibly, it floats from story to story. I couldn’t wait to find out

what happens next. Even if readers know Pepper only as a bracing,

lovely sound, before we are ten pages in we are happily encountering

him as a fully-rounded person, reading Yeats, eating ribs, impatient

with cliche, searching and finding wherever he goes. It takes lung

ower to play the baritone saxophone: this biography has the breath of

life.   

– Michael Steinman

Author, Jazz Lives blog

 

 

Gary Carner has been stalking the life, music, and legacy of the brilliant

baritone saxophonist Pepper Adams (1930-86) with an Ahab-like

obsessiveness for 37 years. The great news for the rest of us is that Carner

has landed his whale. Reflectoryis a meticulously researched and insightful biography of one of the defining

modern jazz musicians of his era and one of the key products of Detroit’s post-

war bebop explosion. We need more books like this in jazz historiography and

more authors willing to dig this deeply.

– Mark Stryker

Author of Jazz from Detroit 

 

This comprehensive and insightful study of a major music master fills a yawning

gap in the writing on Detroit’s jazz scene in its heyday. Even within a constellation

of huge talents, Pepper Adams shone with his own distinctive light.

– Mark Slobin

Author of Motor City Music: A Detroiter Looks Back

 

 

 

 

Pepper Adams was a heartbreakingly great musician who never got the love from

the jazz press that he deserved, which, in a way, makes him even more important in

the history of the music because it represents an experience that happens all too

often and places Pepper firmly at the heart of the jazz life.  As Johnny Griffin once

said, “Jazz is music made by and for people who have chosen to feel good in spite

of conditions.” But to limit Pepper to the jazz life would be a mistake. He was a man

of literature and culture, a great reader and thinker, as were many of his heroes,

notably Charlie Parker, and Gary Carner’s loving tribute to him finally delivers some

justice to the man and to the whole range and span of his too short and underappreciated

but brilliant career.

– Ben Sidran

Author of Talking Jazz: An Oral History and There Was a Fire: Jews, Music and the American Dream

 

 

Gary Carner’s biography about Pepper Adams honors one of America’s great musicians.

It is a joy to read and reread, and worth waiting for all these years. Having known and

worked with Pepper from 1955 until he left us, reading this biography makes you feel

that you are there with him. His humor, wit, and devotion to music are all written about

in a way that Pepper himself would have loved. Gary Carner has kept this story real.

– David Amram

Author of Vibrations: The Adventures and Musical Times of David Amram 

 

Pepper Adams was a consummate performer on the unwieldy baritone sax. Perhaps

he was insufficiently valued by fans of the music, but never by fellow musicians.

The dedicated research of Gary Carner has uncovered a huge amount of detail about

his life, documenting his opinions and his recordings, both official and unofficial.

– Brian Priestley 

Author of Mingus: A Critical Biography and Chasin’ The Bird: The Life and Legacy

of Charlie Parker

Author Gary Carner must be commended for dedicating much of his life to

documenting the legacy of the great baritone saxophonist Pepper Adams. Adams was

a major contributor to the sub-genre of jazz known as hard bop and his many

influential recordings pulsate with excitement and originality. Reflectory: The Life

and Music of Pepper Adams represents a monumental effort to examine every aspect

of Adams’s career and the research that has gone into it was carried out in a manner

suggesting that no stone has been left unturned. This book exemplifies the best in jazz

biography.

–  Noal Cohen

Co-author of Rat Race Blues: The Musical Life of Gigi Gryce

Reflectory: The Life and Music of Pepper Adams is het overtuigende portret van een

ernstig onderschatte jazzgrootheid. Gary Carner’s indrukwekkende levenswerk

(decennialange research, inclusief 250 interviews) heeft geresulteerd in een uitgebreide

biografie die fascinerende lectuur vormt.Reflectory: The Life and Music of Pepper Adams is the persuasive portrait of a seriously underrated jazz giant. Gary Carner’s impressive

work of a lifetime (decades of research, including 250 interviews) has resulted in an

extensive biography that makes for fascinating reading. 

– Bert Vuijsje

Co-author of Rita Reys: Lady Jazz and Ado Broodboom Trompet

Før læsningen havde jeg, ligesom mange andre, kun et sporadisk kendskab til Pepper

Adams. Dette skyldes måske at hans hovedinstrument var baryton-saxen, der som dybt-

klingende ofte har stået i skyggen af de andre saxofoner. Efter nu at have lyttet mere

indgående til hans musik, er jeg blevet overbevist om den status han i bogen bliver givet:

en jazz improvisator i den øverste liga; en person, der i lighed med musikere som Bud

Powell, Wardell Gray, Fats Navarro og  J. J. Johnson formåede at få Charlie Parkers

musikalske sprog til at blomstre på deres eget instrument uden uden at fremstå som epigoner.

Before reading, like many others I had only a sporadic knowledge of Pepper Adams. This

is perhaps due to his main instrument being a baritone sax, which, as deep-sounding, often has

been overshadowed by the other saxophones. Having now listened more in depth to his music,

I have become convinced of the status he is given in the book: a jazz musician and improviser

in the top league; a man who, like musicians such as Bud Powell, Wardell Gray, Fats Navarro,

and J. J. Johnson, managed to get Charlie Parker’s musical language to blossom on their own instrument without being epigones.

– Leif Bo Petersen

Co-author of The Music and Life of Theodore “Fats” Navarro: Infatuation

Additions to Pepper's Biography

 

In terms of moving ahead with Adams’s biography, May was quite a productive month and June has started with a bang. The three most important things that occurred were author Mark Stryker reviewing and improving Chapter Four, the discovery of Marc Vasey’s 1985 interview with Adams, and the emergence of Pepper’s cousin, Sandra Adams. Stryker was for years the jazz and arts writer for the Detroit Free Press, who in the last few years of his gig also covered for the newspaper local Detroit politics. Stryker is a wonderful writer who has many years of experience with Detroit’s jazz scene. Last year he published Jazz from Detroit, his account of Detroit’s jazz history. The book includes a number of vignettes about legendary Detroit musicians, though he told me he chose not to cover Pepper in a separate chapter because of restrictions on the length of the book and because of my work on him. Stryker had much to say about my chapter about Pepper and Detroit from 1953 through 1955, and his observations led to some significant corrections. Many thanks to him for improving the manuscript.

For sixty years trumpeter Marc Vasey was involved with jazz, most notably in the Edmonton, Alberta area. During that time, he became very friendly with Pepper, producing many concerts of his there beginning in 1972. In 1985 he sat down with Adams and conducted a far-ranging interview with him, intended for broadcast. I’m only a third of the way through the conversation but it’s already sent me back to the manuscript to add new info and alter some of my text. More, I’m sure, will be added in the next few weeks.

Lastly, thanks to pepperadams.com webmaster Dan Olson, only in the last few days I’ve been put in touch with Sandra Adams, Pepper’s cousin. Sandy is the grandchild of Harry Albert Adams, Pepper’s uncle. She has done considerable genealogical research about her family, and, like Vasey, her recollections sent me back to the manuscript to add color to the text. In the weeks to come, we do hope to post the Adams genealogy that Dan and I have been assembling for some time.

Notes from the first 25 minutes of Marc Vasey’s interview with Pepper Adams, November, 1985. Quotes are from Adams:

Little John and His Merrymen: Essentially, the house band at Club Valley was John Wilson’s band. Wilson was a good lead player who played with Lunceford, though not much of a soloist. 7 pieces: tp, as; ts; bs; plus three rhythm (p; b; dm). Alto was mostly Cleveland Willie Smith, a disciple of Tadd Dameron, who wrote most of the arrangements. Adams wrote a few and Frank Foster wrote some, once he joined the band. Tenor at first was Warren Hickey, who was in one of Gillespie’s first big bands. Yusef Lateef replaced him, then Foster. James Glover was their bassist, who had played with Dinah Washington.

1950s Detroit club scene: “It was then in the process of changing, in that the money was fleeing downtown for the suburbs, and once it got to the suburbs it stayed there.”

On moving back to Detroit after discharge from the army: “It seemed like a good time to accumulate a little money, not a great deal, but enough to get a start going in New York.” Clarinet: “I actually continued playing clarinet much longer than I really wanted to because Thad wrote a few things in my book calling for clarinet. And I hated it. As much as I loved to play clarinet, when you have a baritone book there with about five or six pieces calling for clarinet, no matter how well you warm up at the beginning of the evening, the first piece isn’t going to be called until about three hours later, and the reed has now become corrugated, and the instrument is cold and out of tune. And so that’s no fun at all. Fortunately, clarinets are pretty small and are easy to steal. By the time about the third one got stolen, I convinced Thaddeus it just wasn’t worth it. So since that event, I have happily subsisted with only the one instrument to worry about.”

Leo Parker: “. . . Leo Parker, who I heard live a couple of times. I think he played better than the records tend to indicate.”

Tate Houston: “. . . Tate Houston in Detroit, who was a fine baritone player, a fine soloist. . . .Tate was not very much into harmonic exploration, but just playing the simple changes and playing with good time, which, in itself, was extraordinary on the baritone.”

About his NYC union-card transfer: “For six months you were not supposed to take more than two jobs a week and you’re not supposed to travel at all.” Because he joined Stan Kenton’s band before the six-month period was over, he gave the union Elvin Jones’s address of 202 Thompson Street and asked him to cover for him if and when the union’s representative came around to verify Adams’s whereabouts. On one day, Elvin signed for Pepper when an out-of-shape, exasperated union rep looking for Adams trudged too many times on the same day up to Jones’s apartment on the top floor of a five-floor walk-up.

First NYC gigs: Some were small-group things with Oscar Pettiford.

Charles Mingus: “I would go and work with him for a week or two if he had some extra payroll and could squeeze another horn into a gig and make it a sextet rather than a quintet. I would often get the call because I knew at least some of the music and could figure out enough so I wouldn’t be totally out of place. . . . Some of the bands were fun and some of the music was good, but some of the 45-minute speeches from the bandstand were rather embarrassing. . . . He could be a difficult man to deal with at times.”

Byrd-Adams recordings: “Some of them are not up to the standard that the band played night after night. . . . Blue Note seemed to want to add another horn, so of course it’s not the band that’s working all the time. So we had to write new arrangements and change everything. Blue Note always wanted some things a shuffle, no matter what, on every album, which we were able to avoid on the live album [from the Half Note] . . . to make it commercial. They were very interested in trying to get something that was saleable.”

Duke Pearson Big Band: “Duke Pearson had a really nice band. . . how ill-served that band was by Blue Note. The band only made two albums and neither one really showed how really musical that band is. Each one did have its boogaloo attempt in it, and one of them is really poorly recorded. . . Although each album does have some terrific things in it, neither one shows what a good band that band was.

Forthcoming Books on Detroit Music

Soon after my entry was posted last Sunday, I got a reply from Thomas Glusac. HIs father, Rodney Glusac, had been interviewed by Mark Slobin for a book Slobin was writing about the music culture of Detroit. Slobin, a retired professor at Wesleyan University, is an acclaimed ethnomusicologist who grew up in Detroit, attended Cass, and was educated at the University of Michigan. Glusac included in his reply this link, totally new to me:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuxJWqEPt70. It's a lecture Slobin gave in 2016 at the Library of Congress. Entitled "Improvising a Musical Metropolis: Detroit, 1940s-1960s," it gives a sense of his interests and the nature of his research. 

As Slobin points out in his lecture, "There is no book that is the life of any American city's music in any period of time." What intrigues me especially, of course, is Slobin's timeframe. Adams returned to Detroit in 1947 and left in early 1956. Slobin's work corresponds to Pepper's experience in his hometown.

Intrigued, I emailed Slobin after watching his lecture, wanting to know more about his research and when the book might be published. Fortunately, it's finished and has been submitted for publication. I suspect we'll see it sometime in 2017. 

Mark told me that he's giving a talk in Ann Arbor for the University on March 15: "They asked me to come up with something on Detroit in 1943, which happens to be my birth year, and the talk is on my birthday." If you're in the area, stop in to hear his talk on the Detroit Riot of 1943 and its many implications. Wish him a happy birthday for me, while you're at it.

                                       (Mark Slobin)

A second important book about Detroit's musical culture that we can expect in 2017 is Made in Detroit: Jazz from the Motor City. It's a collection of jazz profiles by Mark Stryker, former Detroit Free Press Arts Reporter and Critic. Stryker took a buy-out from the newspaper in December, 2016 after twenty-one years on the job. Stryker had been making progress on his book but the day job (as I well know) got in the way. Now, Stryker can finish it up. (He's currently at work on the Milt Jackson chapter.) Judging from his superb piece on Thad Jones, the book should be an excellent contribution to jazz history:

http://www.freep.com/story/entertainment/2016/02/07/thad-jones-mel-lewis-jazz/79845538/

                                                          (Thad Jones)

Stryker's book, as I understand it, will be comprised of pieces about a handful of important Detroit jazz musicians. Some (a la Gary Giddins, Whitney Balliett and others) will be reworked pieces that he wrote earlier. That's a good thing because few of us have had the good fortune to read them. Will he be writing about Pepper Adams? No, he told me. That's my gig. Gee, isn't there anyone else out there who wants to write about Pepper?

                                          (Mark Stryker)