I Remember Pepper: Gunnar Windahl Remembers Pepper Adams

© Gary Carner. Copyright Protected. All rights reserved.

Swedish psychoanalyst Gunnar Windahl was one of Pepper's dearest friends. His recollection below gives an extraordinarily rich and detailed portrait of Pepper Adams. Windahl tape recorded his remembrances and sent me a cassette in the late 1980s. I transcribed it about 10 years later.

I was invited to come over to the U.S. I think it was in April, 1979. That was the first time I was in the U.S. Pepper and I were supposed to go within a few hours of each other from Kastrup in Copenhagen. Pepper was on a tour in Norway and he showed up rather early in the morning when I was in the bar. I saw immediately that he was very tired, to say the least. I offered him schnapps and so on. Suddenly I saw that he was heavily drunk. He was in a good mood and somehow we came onto the topic of Oscar Pettiford. He told me a good story about when he and Oscar Pettiford were out riding in Long Island or somewhere and Oscar said that they should go to his Indian friends. (He was an Indian.) So they ended up in an Indian tent drinking “firewater.” It was a long and interesting story that the bartender was caught up in; he forgot serving the other customers at the bar. It was very early: nine in the morning or something, but Pepper had no sense of the time. His timing, when it came to playing, was impeccable. When it came to drinking it could slide away a bit. 

Pepper was supposed to go a few hours before me. We went out to the gate a bit swaggering. When we came to the gate Pepper’s plane was overbooked so he couldn’t go. Pepper yelled at the hostesses and they were terrified. I heard expressions I never heard from him before or since but he couldn’t get on the plane. He had to fly to Stockholm, stay overnight at a hotel and return the next day. My plane was not overbooked so I flew ahead to Kennedy Airport, where Claudette fetched me. We went to their house at 8715 Avenue B in Brooklyn, where I got introduced to Claudette’s son, Dylan, a very nice kid. The next day we picked Pepper up at the airport. 

I stayed for five or six weeks and I had a good opportunity to study his routine. It was not always joyous. You could see he had no job for long periods of time. He went smoking around, reading and so on. When we approached the cocktail hour his frowning forehead cleared up and he went deep into the Kentucky bourbon bottle. Just two drinks before dinner: that was a very rigid rule in that house. Really, it was like two bottles of hard liquor! He could really pour a drink, I assure you. I was not accustomed to a very fast drink. I was deadly drunk when I came to the table.  

Sometimes I was very sad because he had no job and you saw that he longed for a call. But now and then he had a gig and I went with him: to Washington, up in Connecticut and, of course, in New York City, but not the main places. I think Pepper was very disappointed that he wasn’t invited to play at Fat Tuesday’s more often, at the Village Vanguard, Seventh Avenue South. We talked about that when we were a bit drunk. Otherwise, I didn’t dare take up the topic. 

Claudette had alimony from her ex-husband and I think they lived a lot upon that. I don’t think Pepper was happy about it but he never mentioned anything to me. Still, they were very happy together and we had a very good time. I really liked it there. Claudette prepared very delicious food. I think Pepper needed to have a family at that time. It meant a lot to him. A few years later it broke. That was terrible. 

It was interesting to stay at Pepper’s house. He had a very good record collection and I taped a lot of them. Every day, I think, he listened to Duke Ellington. Duke Ellington meant a lot to Pepper. I remember we were in Gothenburg. After a gig there we came into my room. I had a half a bottle of whisky and we sat talking. With my blue eyes, and as an overreacting person before such a star as Pepper Adams, I managed, “Who is the best jazz musician in the world, Pepper? Who do you consider the most interesting and underrated?” He said, “The most interesting and underrated musician in this business is Rex Stewart.” I was a bit taken aback. Then Pepper said that he seen Rex just before he died and that Rex was very disappointed that he wasn’t more recognized. I think Pepper identified with Rex’s destiny. We say in Sweden that you must have “elbows” to get into the front but Pepper didn’t have that and he knew it. He would never push himself. He expected people to phone him. I think he felt a lot of dishonesty from fellow musicians that didn’t hire him and took other musicians at a lower rate. 

I recognized, of course, that he had a very good book collection. He read a lot and was very versed in literature and art. He was a very intelligent and clever man. I learned a lot from him. In a way he was a bit too much taken aback by me being a professor. Many times I tried to tell him, “You shouldn‘t take that so seriously.” He was much more into history than I was. I told him so. I think it meant a lot for Pepper to get confirmation that he was an intellectual. He mentioned often that his parents were poor and couldn’t send him to college. I think he, all by himself, became “professional,” besides just the music. I was very much impressed by his knowledge of many things. He was a fantastic man.

I arranged a tour in Sweden for Pepper in the summer of ’79. It was no big deal. I fixed gigs in Malmö, Gothenburg, Stockholm and so on. Claudette and Pepper stayed in my apartment in Malmö. We had a very good time then. Of course the booze could be a problem for Pepper. Once we played at a place called Stampen in Stockholm. He was drinking schnapps during intermission and he was very drunk during the last set. I didn’t like that. It was like having your own father drunk before other people. Sometimes Pepper was like a father for me but he didn’t care. But Claudette was, of course, not very happy about it. Al Porcino told me once that Claudette accompanied Pepper during the tours in Europe and when she left for the U.S. he started drinking with Thad. Sometimes they had to change the “book” when Thad realized that Pepper was drunk, that he couldn’t play any solos. 

Pepper spoke more freely after a few glasses of liquor. He was no easy-speaking man when he was sober. It was not that easy to get in touch with him. A few sentences, then he picked up a cigarette and lit it. But after a few glasses he thawed and was very easy to speak with. He very generously presented good stories from his fantastic life. That Claudette had to behave like a policeman sometimes so he didn’t drink too much was, of course, a problem. When it came to my part, it was sometimes a bit difficult if I should present a new bottle or should refrain.

Pepper exposed me to other musicians. For example, if he had Rex Stewart as his favorite musician, another musician high up on the list was Tommy Flanagan. I can’t remember how many times he tried to remind me that Tommy Flanagan is “the best.” Of course, Pepper’s other favorite pianists were Sir Roland Hanna, Hank Jones, Jimmy Rowles. He admired them very much and we played them often in his house in Brooklyn. But sooner or later he came back to Tommy Flanagan. It was very interesting that he knew so many people. 

When he was out playing, I got the impression that other musicians liked to hear him. I remember once Sam Jones telling me how much he admired Pepper. It was more backstage talk in some sense. It was not said explicitly but they admired him. 

Sometimes Roland Hanna would be confused about Pepper, I think. Pepper was too much for Roland. I think Roland was never safe with him. Pepper was too clever for him or something. When I presented the lead sheet for “Doctor Deep” to Roland he was a bit embarrassed, I think. He didn’t want to play it on the piano. Sometimes I see that with Tommy too. Maybe they were uncertain about my relationship to Pepper, how close it was. Maybe that, I don’t know. But I think it’s something else. I think he was a bit of an enigma for them. He knew very much outside the usual areas of the jazz musician’s world: politics, literature, art and so on. I think they were a bit uneasy about it. I think no one musician was very close to him. He had no real friends among musicians, at least at the time I knew him.

Pepper was in Sweden in 1983. He was playing in Stockholm at Skeppsholmen with Monica Zetterlund. I don’t know but I think they had a relationship in some way. We met at the Korsal Hotel, together with Charlemagne and Hans Fridlund. Pepper was rather drunk and I remember I was with a friend of mine. That was the first time I saw him really drunk. 

At that time I got a letter from Claudette that upset me a lot. His blood counts were not very good and he had to stop drinking. But I couldn’t see any of that when I met him. That was the first sign of their relationship getting worse. There I was, not very optimistic about the future when it came to his marriage, but we had a good time in Stockholm. He played very well there. 

That was the last time I saw him, as far as I could see, as a “whole” person. The next time I saw him in Sweden was the disastrous time when I discovered his cancer. Before that, of course, he got his leg broken. At that time I understood that their relationship deteriorated very much. When I called him, when he sat there in his wheelchair, he was not very happy. I didn’t understand what was going on. Claudette didn’t write me. As I understood, she was not in the house. He came to Sweden afterwards, walking with a limp. He wrote me long before he was supposed to be in Stockholm in March, ’85. He wanted me to come down and see him. He was supposed to play in Mosebacke and I arranged a gig in Boden up where I live. I took a few days off. I went to his hotel, knocked on the door around noon and was taken aback when he opened the door. I saw that something was wrong with him and it couldn’t just be the leg. He greeted me as a long-lost friend and I asked him how things were in his life. He complained that he didn’t know if he had any house or belongings when he went back to the U.S.  I tried to get some clear information about this but he refused. 

I didn’t like his look. His eyes were burning. Now and then he coughed, and it was a terrible cough like one with pneumonia. So I said to Pepper, “We must look at that when you come up to Boden.” He was supposed to be there in a few days to play at the local jazz club. They were quite excited about such a star up there among the polar bears! He would come up, I’d fetch him at the airport and he would live at my apartment for a few days. I said, “I have a good friend up there, Chief of the Thorax Clinic. I’ll arrange an x-ray of your lungs and we’ll see what shape it is.” He was very, very grateful for that. He looked relieved. 

Then a friend of mine didn’t show up. I had nowhere to sleep in Stockholm so I took the other bed in his room. I woke up very early in the morning and I saw him still asleep. I saw that he slept very uneasily, very much dissimilar to his usual calm way. He hadn’t been drinking. He had slept very well the night before, as far as I could understand. But now he slept with some hectic way of breathing. I was very much alarmed about the situation. Something was wrong. 

We got around in Stockholm, though he had difficulty walking. I invited him to restaurants. He played with Rolf Ericson, among other guys there, and he played very well. I went to Boden before him and he came up after a few days. He took a nap in the day. That got me anxious too. He never would like to do that. Before the gig I served a very nice dinner for him with specialties from the Lapp area like reindeer. He very much liked that. Then he played at the local club. We went home, having a few beers, but he didn’t want to drink because of the meeting with Dr. Haugstød. 

In the morning he woke me up and we went to the Thorax Clinic. I just lived a few blocks from the hospital. I worked there. I left him there and went home. I took a cup of coffee and half an hour later Pepper showed up and said, “I have cancer in my left lung.” I’ll never forget the reaction I had. I went to the fridge, took a few export beers and drank them down and took a few other beers and drank them down. I didn’t know what to say. He looked at me in a way I had never seen before. The whole thing was terrible. I was supposed to take him to the airport. He was supposed to go to Stockholm and be in a program for the Radio there with just Hans Fridlund and then I think he went to Malmö. I don’t remember exactly what was going on. I was too drunk to get him to the airport so I put him in a taxi. That was the last time I saw Pepper Adams, my old friend. I paid the taxi in advance and ordered the driver to help him with his instrument. He sat laughing in the back seat, not very much alarmed on the surface at least. But I was alarmed. I’m not a medical specialist but I have a lot of friends who are and I knew time was short. In my drunkenness I called Fridlund in Stockholm and told him that Pepper had cancer. 

I think when he was in Malmö I talked to Pepper. I was crying on the telephone. I was still drunk. He said, “Pull yourself together, Gunnar. I’m not dead yet.” But I said, “You are my friend and this is terrible.” “You haven’t got a cold,” I told him. “This is serious.” He had the x-rays with him to show his doctors in the U.S. I got in touch with Claudette and she was stunned. I was a mess.   

He called me back a month later from the U.S. and wanted to give a report to Haugstød of what they had found in the U.S. I tried to write down all the Latin words. Once I said, “I didn’t catch what you said. I didn’t catch it, Pepper.” “Don’t catch it, for heaven’s sake, don’t catch it!” he said. He was funny. “No, no, I won’t catch it,” I promised him.

When I went to Doctor Haugstød, my friend, and told him that they found oat cell cancer, he shook his head and said, “They shouldn’t treat that. Put him on a steamer to the South Sea where he can play and enjoy some women or something.” He told me, “You can never cure that.” Of course I was very sad about hearing that. I read a lot about that kind of cancer. It’s a diffuse kind of cancer. No one recovers from it. They started the hard treatment in the U.S. We phoned each other now and then. Mostly, I phoned him: “How are you, Pepper?” He said, “Fair, fair.” He was not exaggerating. Once I called him and he was heavily drunk or sick. 

He tried to cheer me up all the time. I couldn’t conceal that I was very sad about everything. I was a very close friend. Pepper once told me that I was his closest friend, as close as Elvin Jones was. He had very tender feelings for Elvin. He mentioned him many times. But I think he was disappointed with Elvin too, that Elvin left him and never hired him for a gig. He never told me that but I could read between the lines.

Pepper wrote me a letter then that he was supposed to perform in Zurich a half a year later. I had difficulty getting free to go to Switzerland and meet him. I phoned and said, “Maybe I’ll show up, maybe not.” Pepper tried to persuade me, that this was a fantastic place to play, that they have very good food and so on. I had a lot of things to do and it was not that easy to leave patients and people behind. But of course I should have gone. I regret every day that I didn’t go there because I think he needed me. But I wasn’t strong enough to go. When he came back to the U.S. he wrote me a letter and I could see that he was disappointed with me that I didn’t show up.

One of the last calls I had with him he told a story of a man who left a scribble of paper on his end table. The man was found dead in the morning but the bit of paper said, “I didn’t wake up this morning.” He told such jokes. It was marvelous. He wrote me with a lot of stories. I think I tried to hide them because it was touching to read them and I’m not good at that. The last time I heard him on the phone was just three or four days before he passed away. Claudette answered the phone and then Pepper tried to say something brief. There was not much left and I didn’t know what to say. I just said, “I can’t do anything for you, Pepper.” “I know that. I know that, Doctor Deep. Thank you for calling.”  That was that and a fortnight later, I think, I called Claudette and she said that Pepper had passed away very quietly. I had plans to go overseas for Flanagan’s memorial concert in September ’86 but, again, there was something preventing me from doing that. I don’t know what. It was too much, I think. 

He didn’t complain during this time. He said sometimes it was terrible. He had a hell of a headache. But he was marvelous, I think. He never complained and I felt very much ashamed when I couldn’t put myself together and was crying a bit. But he was firmer. I think he was stronger. Claudette told me that too. He was really brave.

I warned him many years ago of contracting cancer because of his smoking. He did smoke really heavily. He had no filters on his cigarettes. Pepper did have some blind spots. He didn’t like to see that he smoked too much and drank too much. He didn’t take it in. He looked very destructive to an observer. 

When it came to admiration, besides Rex Stewart he mentioned very often Joe Henderson, especially the early Joe Henderson on the Blue Note label. For example, Inan’out and Inner Urge were records Pepper liked very much. Of course, I think the musician he most admired and wanted to live up to was Thaddeus Jones. I remember once when he and Thad had left the band—I think it was in Germany—for a few gigs in Malmö and Copenhagen and Claudette had gone back to the U.S. After playing together in Malmö, Pepper and I sat there drinking whisky. Suddenly he confessed that he felt very much a small little boy compared to Thad and he elaborated upon that topic a bit. He often said that Thad was too much for him in a way. Sometimes he was a bit scared of him, I think. 

Pepper took up some pieces Thad wrote very early in the ’50s: “Quittin’ Time,” “A Bitty Ditty.” He went back to Thad’s early production, which he considered masterpieces. But there was a tension between he and Thad. Thad admired Pepper too a lot, I know. Thad told me once that he thought Pepper marvelous, very erudite. When Pepper left Thaddeus’ band, on the surface he said that the reason was that he wanted to play, to be on his own. But I think he was a bit disappointed with the band after Roland left. I got the impression that Pepper didn’t like the last two years or so. I think he considered the band degenerating a bit but he wasn’t explicit on this point. 

Of course, Elvin Jones meant a lot to Pepper. He considered Elvin a very close friend and admired him very much. He told a lot of jokes—memories from when they lived together in the Village. Pepper told me how he placed any book in Elvin’s hands and he read it without pause. “Read this, Elvin” and Elvin read it! He read everything. When I first met Pepper in the beginning of the ’70s he was a bit uneasy about Elvin’s shyness and considered him drinking too much. He told me that it was very difficult to get in touch with Elvin. He was very withdrawn.

We, of course, discussed Pepper’s records. Reflectory, I think, he thought was his best. He talked about the main title from Ephemera. Pepper once mentioned to me that he thought it was underrated, that people didn’t see that the structure was something like Coltrane’s “Giant Steps.” He was very proud of that composition. 

In 1982 I was in the U.S. and I showed up at this spot in New York City. Pepper played there with Jimmy Cobb and Albert Dailey. They were very unfriendly with Pepper. I went into the club just before the first gig was about to start with a lot of eminent psychoanalysts from New York City. It was not the regular crowd that evening! Pepper played, unexpectedly, “Doctor Deep” and I was quite taken aback. I didn’t know he had composed it. I think there’s a lot of love in that piece. There I really feel that Pepper loved me. I play it very often. It’s a beautiful thing.

About the name “Doctor Deep,” I met Jimmy Rowles many years ago. When he heard that I was a doctor in philosophy he mentioned a medical doctor in California he called “Doctor Deep” that used to cure tired musicians. I mentioned that to Pepper. I said, “Maybe I should frame myself with that name?” Pepper laughed very much. After that he named me “Doctor Deep.” Whenever he called me up he said, “Is ‘Deep’ there? How are you doing, Deep?” “Deep” was something that caught him. 

When Pepper was in the Army, Charlie Parker sent him a telegram saying that his mother had passed away so he must come home for the funeral. It was, of course, a lie. Pepper was supposed to show up and play with Charlie Parker in Saint Louis. When he came there, there was no Charlie Parker. He told me that story very often, especially when he was drunk. He was very proud of that invitation. 

It’s strange: Pepper didn’t have a lot of self-esteem. He often named important jazz musicians he had played with and so on. He had played with that one, he had talked with that one. It was almost like a fan. As a clinician I realize that, when he did that, he had no high regard of himself. Yes, he was very uncertain sometimes. He had his funky spells now and then. 

I think he never was satisfied with his own playing. We often sat up in the night talking about how to improve. That was something Pepper came back to again and again: “You must improve, you must improve and get better.”

Pepper had no regard for the avant garde. He didn’t like late Coltrane. He resented that kind of music. In a way, his heart was in the Duke Ellington Orchestra, with Harry Carney. Harry Carney meant a lot to him. He mentioned him very often. He thought Cecil Payne was a very good baritone player. He didn’t like Nick Brignola. He was very much dissatisfied with that record Baritone Madness. 

One of the last times Pepper was in Sweden with Thad Jones-Mel Lewis I gave him a record, Don Byas Live at the Old Montmartre. I don’t know why. It was a present. He wrote me back very soon after coming back to the U.S. and said what a fantastic record it was. That record really got him excited. It was something he found much joy in. Then I understood that Byas always was very friendly with him and reacted like he had met a long-lost friend when they met. Pepper thought that it was a two-way influence, a confluence, between Byas and himself, and I think there’s something in it. He admired Don Byas very much. We played Don in my apartment and we often talked about Byas. I taped everything I had and sent it to Pepper. I think he admired Byas because he too was never satisfied to be caught or fenced in a certain style. He always improved and developed. And then, I think, Pepper admired his enormous drinking capacity. I’ve seen Byas drink and that’s something out of the ordinary. Ben Webster he liked too, but he had a brotherhood thing with Don Byas. They build up their solos in a very similar way.

To the end Pepper sent me tapes of himself with highlights from his recordings: from Montreal, Holland, and so on, which I’m very proud of. Pepper was maybe the closest friend I ever had. We were not alike but something got us together. I’m awfully sorry that he and Claudette had a bad time those last years. I don’t think one can blame anyone. I think the relationship just broke. Of course Pepper had his “sides.” He was sometimes drinking too much and I think he could be a bit nasty. He was never with me. When we drank together we had a lot of fun. It was never base drunkenness in a bad way. We talked to each other, into the fog. I heard a lot of things then. We always kept in line with intellectual conversation but sometimes you could feel that he was very close to losing control. He was so controlled, otherwise, when he was sober. An introvert. 

He has given me many good things. I got interested in art and literature thanks to him, the kind of literature I never knew of. He introduced me to artists, painters and so on that I never knew of, so I’m very grateful to him for that too. I think he is very much underrated. I think he suffered a lot from that. He knew that he was number one on his instrument but he had no “elbows.” He wasn’t angry enough, aggressive enough to be in the “front line.”

I Remember Pepper: Per Husby Remembers Pepper Adams

© Gary Carner. Copyright Protected. All rights reserved.

Norwegian pianist Per Husby worked with Pepper Adams from 1975 until 1984 and stayed in touch with him until the end of Pepper's life in 1986. In 1988, while on vacation in Australia, Husby tape recorded his recollections of Adams and mailed me a copy. Below is a transcription I did of Husby's account. While typing it up I could hear the Pacific ebbing and flowing behind Husby's narration. As you will read, Husby has a excellent memory for detail and his observations offer a very special glimpse into Pepper Adams as a musician and person.

The first time I met Pepper was probably in 1975 when he came to Trondheim where I worked at that time. He was actually the first American soloist that I ever played with, which was a good man to start with because Pepper had an extremely friendly way of handling people. I remember he had a few pieces of penciled sheet music with him, not really the average, professional copyist way of writing things. 

When I wrote out music for him later he always played his parts in C. It’s funny: I never met another baritone player that liked to have the chords in concert, as they would be written for a piano rather than transposed for the baritone. I don’t know why he did this but it was always the case.

I think he sensed that we were pretty “green.” He was putting his baritone together, an old baritone which was almost green in places. I said, “Oh, that’s a very old baritone.” He looked at me. He hadn’t put the top end on so I said, “Oh, it’s not complete yet.” I’m not quite sure if he thought that I was even greener, that I thought the horn was supposed to be like that, with a big hole on the top! But he was very friendly.

We were playing a blues at the concert and I remember quoting “C Jam Blues.” All the time we were soloing he would go down to the first row and sit listening to us. He came up and whispered in my ear, “Yeah, ‘C Jam Blues,’ yeah,” something that I thought was very encouraging, even if I knew it was a silly quote. 

Much later he did the “Muppet’s Show” as a favorite quote. The first time he did that was in Norway at a concert where we played “I Got Rhythm.” For the out chorus he suddenly dived into the Muppet’s Show tune and did the whole tune on rhythm changes, complete with that very last low note and that curious look into his horn that he does. He had never done that before. It was just a spur of the moment thing that he did as a comedy act. It went over very well with the audience. 

Just before Trondheim he had been playing in Oslo with Sture Nordin, a bass player that I know quite well. Pepper had been invited to his home to have Lutefisk, a traditional Norwegian dish. Pepper was talking about that all the time afterwards, that he wanted to have Lutefisk again. Actually, he came to like both Sture and his wife very much. When I met Pepper later, if he didn’t meet him beforehand, he always asked, “How’s Sture?” 

While he was there, Sture had a crisis in his marriage. Sture told Pepper about the difficulties, that they planned to split up. Soon after Pepper went back to the States, Sture’s wife got a long letter from Pepper in which Pepper wrote about the way he felt by meeting the two of them; that he thought it was a shame that they should split because he certainly felt that there was something there to cherish, which actually resulted in Sture and his wife not splitting up. 

We were playing this gig somewhere in Norway. We had done the last number and I think Pepper wanted to go to bed. He actually started packing his horn. I think the bass player started playing a riff because people were crying out for an encore. Pepper looked a bit cross at that because, when he was packing his horn, that was it. But Pepper had to unpack his horn and I saw that he didn’t really like this. The bass player was stupid enough to say, “Maybe we should play a blues in a different key?” Pepper said, “OK, D-flat,” and went into a horrendous tempo. He could cut it but none of us could. He didn’t do it for long, just for a couple of choruses, then, bang!, ended. The audience didn’t notice that we just played nonsense but the lesson came off. It wasn’t the thing to do for the rhythm section to start setting up an encore when he was very actively signaling that he didn’t want to play.     

After that we did a tour in Norway with myself, Bjorn Alterhaug on bass and Espen Rud on drums. I think we did eight or ten gigs around the country. We never recorded anything for radio. As for money, Pepper wasn’t really an expensive guy to hire. He used to say, “If I can go home with a $1,000 per week in my pocket, I’m happy.” The Finnish piano player Esko Linnavalli once said to me when we talked about Pepper, “You know, Pepper doesn’t know anything about money. He’s one of the few people that we can still hire.” What he meant was that Pepper wasn’t trying to pull more money from people than he needed, that he was one of the few who were still in it for the music.

The tour started in Stavanger. Pepper came in, jet lag and all, and was not in a very good mood. We said, “OK, let’s just have a short rehearsal of tunes that we know and then tomorrow we’ll have a rehearsal for the tour.” That’s what we did. I don’t know if he even picked up his horn. He said, “Do you know this tune, do you know this tune?” and so on. He said, “Do you know ‘Embraceable You?’” I hadn’t played that for a while but I thought the bass player had, so I said, “Oh, Yes” and the bass player said, “Oh, Yes.” We didn’t think more about it. We all went out for dinner, slept a little after that and we went right to the gig. For the second tune Pepper called “Embraceable You.” It turned out that the bass player had thought that I knew the tune, and I had thought the bass player knew the tune, so we didn’t know it well enough to play it. Pepper was very angry about that. He said, “You said that you knew it!” He was mumbling and swearing to himself. He hated any kind of conceit; people that tried to lay on him something that they weren’t or couldn’t. I think he was very much after honesty, people that were straight. 

The thing he never forgot was that I promised him this salary of maybe $1,200 a week. I said, “I don’t think it’s very much but we haven’t got everything set just now, so, if there is any extra money when we do the books at the end I’ll send you some after you come home.” That actually happened. I sent him about $1,000 about a month after the tour had ended. I don’t think Pepper ever forgot that because apparently he had heard this from so many people—people saying that maybe we can get you some more and it never materialized—and suddenly he got $1,000 out of the blue from Norway. I think that’s one of the reasons he liked playing with us. The other reason: I think he stated in that Down Beat interview that we were nice to travel with. We didn’t get drunk on stage and we didn’t apply the American superego or anything like that. We just wanted to make a good job out of it. 

I know he sort of took a liking to us. This must have been in ’77 or ’78 because I remember visiting him in the States in ’78 after that tour. I came over to his house in Brooklyn and Claudette and Pepper served dinner. A curious thing about Pepper: he would talk to you for a while and then suddenly fall silent. He would look straight-ahead and you wouldn’t quite know what to say to him. I didn’t know if he was just thinking or if he thought I was boring or whatever. He suddenly seemed to drop off in thought. 

We did quite a bit of sightseeing on the next tour with Arild Andersen on bass, Espen Rud on drums and Kenny Wheeler on trumpet for some of the gigs. I asked Pepper, “How do you like Kenny Wheeler?” Pepper said, “I really like his playing.” I said, “Have you ever played together?” Pepper said, “No, but I’d like to.” I said, “It sounds to me that it would be an interesting combination.” Then I asked Kenny and he said the same thing about Pepper so I got the gig together. 

Pepper was very strong musically in all respects but I think he needed to be within the confines of the type of jazz that he was brought up with. Kenny Wheeler brought out some ballads and things that he had written that are based on quite different chord progressions from what would be your normal bebop chord progressions and, to be honest about it, Pepper played some awful choruses—really wrong notes—on some of these things. The funny thing is that he played them with vigor and there was no hesitation or anything. It was just wrong. I was very surprised that Pepper couldn’t handle some of Kenny’s ballads. He really didn’t find out how to play them.

He had a new horn at the time. I don’t know what happened to his old one. Particularly in the upper register he would play as vigorously and strong as ever but incredibly out of tune. We never quite figured out the mechanics behind this because he was very wary of things like that under other circumstances. He would repeatedly play these high notes, and they would be so awfully out of tune but he didn’t seem to mind. Maybe he was trying out his new horn and wasn’t used to it but it wasn’t natural for him to do the easy solution or play soft just to try it out. He just went for it. He did it full blast and ugly rather than hesitating. I don’t think Pepper would ever hesitate about anything musically. I think this goes together with his opinionated way of thinking about other musicians and other types of music. Very much black and white.             

Pepper had a way of being uncompromising about things. Things were either good or bad. Some players couldn’t play. I talked to him about Serge Chaloff and Pepper just turned around to me and said, “Are we talking about baritone saxophonists or are we not?” I asked him about it and he said, “Did you ever hear Serge Chaloff swing?” He posed the question in such a way that it was impossible to say, “Yes.” In his mind Serge Chaloff didn’t swing and nobody with any sense of jazz could think differently. That’s the way he put it. To him it was basically Harry Carney. I don’t think he was too fond of Mulligan either.

Sometimes Pepper was very cocksure about things. For the tour with Kenny Wheeler, which we did some years later, I had written out some charts. Some were tunes from a couple of Pepper’s earliest albums and there were a couple of others. I had written out a Mingus thing, “Orange Was the Color of Her Dress, Then Blue Silk.” I remember I gave him and Kenny these parts. Pepper just had a glance at them and sort of discarded them one by one. About the Mingus tune he said, “We’d spend two days rehearsing this.” I don’t think we would have; we’d probably spend ten minutes and have it down but he obviously didn’t like to play it. As for the others, he said, “We’ll never get a job with—” and then he mentioned the name of some copyist agency in New York, meaning that my music was not really legible, that my writing wasn’t pretty. I don’t think it has ever been pretty but it hasn’t been illegible either. Probably he didn’t want to play them but he didn’t want to say that. He didn’t say this in an unfriendly way. Sometimes he would say these things in a gruff, not-really-unfriendly way but very much decided on.

Pepper always brought his camera along. On the tour with Kenny we did about thirty one-nighters all around Norway. We had beautiful weather. We were passing through some of Norway’s most beautiful parts, some of the most beautiful parts of the world. Pepper would take his camera out and he would never take one single picture of the scenery. He would always take a picture of details, like a part of a boat’s hull or maybe a window in an old building. Arild, Espun and I were amused at this. Watching Pepper taking his camera out became a game. We sat there and would always say, “He has to take a picture of the scenery.” Then he would go over and take a picture of something incomprehensible: a flower or maybe the corner of a bridge. 

We were in Svolvaer in northern Norway. It was not Midnight Sun but it was a very red sunset, with these incredible peaks and stuff all around us. We had seen it all before but we came out of one of these small planes and said, “Wow!” Pepper came after us and he stood there on the runway looking around. He said, “Yeah!” took out his camera, and we said, “Finally he’ll take a scenery shot.” He didn’t. He went over and took a picture of a fire hydrant. We never asked him about this.

I didn’t talk too much to Pepper about music. We spoke a little bit about various other forms of music and life in general. I remember one musical discussion I had with him was whether melody or rhythm was the basic part of jazz. I said, “Melody” and Pepper just gave up on me. He said, “You can play a bad melody with great rhythm and it sounds great but a good melody with bad rhythm is always horrible.” I think he sung Ellington’s “Johnny Come Lately” to me, snapping his fingers, demonstrating how the tune itself was ridiculous without the rhythm. I still don’t know if I agree with him but, again, he was just cutting me off. Rhythm was the most important part, then melody. There was no question about it.  

Many times on the tour when Espen and I would go out for a nightcap somewhere, or to a party, Arild and Pepper would get together in somebody’s room over a bottle of Aquavit and sit discussing Ellington, music, whatever. I think they got along very well. Pepper loved Aquavit and got awfully drunk on it. 

Arild came in instead of Bjorn Alterhaug, who had done the first tour. Bjorn is a very accomplished “straight” bass player. Ben Webster used to love playing with him and I know Pepper loved to play with him too. Arild is slightly more modern so it took Arild a little while to get used to playing more bebop stuff. Pepper came over to me after the first gig and said, ”I think I would have preferred Bjorn but he’ll come along.” I could see that he sort of took Arild under his wing, tried to get to know him, tried to be personal and nice to him, which made Arild feel very good. After some gigs, Arild was right there with it. 

It was also on one of these gigs that Pepper told me his philosophy about encores. I think he got this from Thad Jones. He said, “Never, ever play a fast encore. You should always play an encore that’s sort of medium tempo so that after you finish they will never want to hear another one.” He always played “Three And One” or something like that.

He also did this thing, I think in Voss, that he said he also had picked up from Thad. Pepper came over to us, just after the first set one night, looking very stern and said, “Men, I’ll have to see you. There’s a meeting in my room in five minutes.” Then he just disappeared. We were all a bit scared. We hurried up to his room and there he was, with a big smile, sitting with a whole bottle of bourbon and glasses for the whole band. “Sit down, have a drink,” he said. 

When Pepper wanted to have a drink with the band—to be nice to the band or celebrate—he would call a “band conference.” That was the whole point of it. Apparently this was code that Thad and he had used for many years. Everybody in the band would know, and it was just an excuse for having a drink and saying, “This is good.” We didn’t know that so we were a bit scared the first time he did it.

We played “Bye Bye Blackbird” in Vadsö, far north, just by the Russian border. I know Red Garland’s piano introduction from the Miles version so I did that. Pepper played his solo and, when we got to my solo, I sort of did my Red Garland impersonation, Espen started playing the rim shot on every fourth beat and Arild took out his bow and did a bowed chorus à la Paul Chambers. We all had a gas. Pepper came over to us afterward and said, “Guys, that was great. Don’t do that again.” He was probably right. It was good there and then, as an on-the-spur-of-the-moment thing, but nothing else.                     

After that I didn’t see Pepper for a while. I wrote him a card or letter every now and then. We had a little bit of correspondence going, mostly postcards from all over the world. Pepper would always write these postcards. At the end he always wrote the Norwegian word “Skol!” 

I asked him to be a guest soloist on one or two tunes on an album that I eventually did some years ago. I remember he was very vague about what he would charge. I think he knew that I didn’t have too much money, and he wanted to help out and not charge too much, but it never materialized.

I think the last time I saw him must have been in ’84. We did six or seven gigs. This was after he was run over by his own car. He had this old Volvo that, when I saw it, had been driven about 500,000 kilometers. He said, “This car is good. Why should I change it?” He had parked the car up on the driveway and he had gone down to the cellar to open the garage door. His car came after him because he hadn’t done the hand-braking properly. He got pinned against the garage door and the bumper broke both his legs. He was stuck there for so long because the only guy who came by couldn’t help him because he didn’t know how to drive a stick shift.

So when he came to Norway he was not really looking too good. Physically he was about the same. He was never your Johnny Weissmuller type. He stayed at my house. Once, when we were playing in Trondheim, I saw him at 11am standing there looking drowsy in slightly-oversized white underpants with not too many muscles in his body. I thought, “This is really bizarre. This guy is one of the most powerful baritone players in the world.” It didn’t really rhyme with the figure standing there. 

I remember playing Sonny Rollins’ latest album for him. I asked him, “How do you like that?” He said, “I don’t like Sonny Rollins ‘Superstar.’” He never approved of Rollins’ way of coming back and, in his mind, playing to a wider audience. Pepper would never dream of doing that. 

I don’t think Pepper was very happy about things in general. I didn’t speak to him too much about it but I could feel that he was thin-skinned. I remember we played one place where the sound was all right but I couldn’t hear the piano too well and the baritone was a little too high in the monitors. I asked the sound engineer, “Could you please turn the piano a bit up and the baritone a little down?” which he did. Unfortunately, I didn’t tell Pepper about this. When we started playing the second half, he played about twelve bars of the first tune and then started swearing into the mike, “Where’s the fucking engineer? Hell, everything sounded great. The fucking engineer. . .” He was really going on about it. I couldn’t understand why he reacted so vehemently. He was really blowing his top. There was nothing that happened before that night that should have inaugurated that sort of thing.  

I don’t think he knew that he was ill at the time. Physically he was quite shattered from the breaking of the two legs. This was in winter, so he was sliding about with these old-time galoshes on. Again, he looked very far from being your hip baritone player; rather like some office clerk around sixty, looking older than he was, staggering around on ice and snow. He was still playing very well, though this thing about playing out of tune on ballads was still there. I can’t remember having heard that on albums. 

He was in great pain and didn’t sleep at night because of his legs. I have a friend in Oslo who works with acupuncture and she tried to help him. She did acupuncture on him and he said it helped. He told me that he had asked Frida, who he got very fond of, to write everything down in “acupuncture language,” as he called it, so he could take it home to New York and see somebody there to follow up with the same thing. Acupuncture was a revelation to Pepper because I don’t think he believed in that sort of stuff, if it was acupuncture or Taro cards or whatever. 

He knew about all these things. He was probably one of the most informed people I’ve ever met—on any topic. I remember we once were in a very desolate train station in Norway waiting for a connecting train. We were bored, sitting reading the paper. There was just a waiting room with nothing that we could find to do. But Pepper was going around, having a great time. He was trying to identify four or five very bad reproductions on the walls that had been there for thirty years. Pepper came over and said, “Come on over and dig that beautiful, bleached-out half Velazquez.”

The last Norwegian guy I know that was in contact with him was Sture. That was after he was in for treatment of cancer. Sture was in New York and Pepper was very sick. He didn’t want Sture to come out to his house but he said he’d drive him to the airport when he left. But then Pepper contacted Sture and said he wasn’t feeling too good, that he didn’t want to see anybody at all.