Showing posts with label Sonny Rollins. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sonny Rollins. Show all posts

Monday, June 3, 2019

Biography Update









© Gary Carner. Copyright Protected. All rights reserved.













READ BELOW!












It’s been a busy month. Updating the entire Pepper Adams Interviews section of

pepperadams.com took a ton of time, mostly because I needed to listen to all of

them again in their entirety. I wanted to be sure that I didn’t overlook any important

facts that Pepper mentioned which might be a valuable addition to my Adams

biography. Also, it was necessary to add some mouse-over text for the user and fix

some previous errors. As of now, all fourteen interviews have been posted. All that

remains is seeing if we can improve the digital skips in the John Reid interview.


For several weeks, on and off, I’ve continued to wrestle with the opening section of

Chapter One of the Pepper bio. I just wasn’t entirely happy with it. I think now I’ve got it

where I want it.



I’m happy too with the rest of Chapter 1, and 4, and I’ve been editing Chapters 2 and 3.

Moreover, I’ve rewritten the Prologue and that’s done.



I did finish going through a stack of notes and quotations from various interviews that I

did with Johnny Griffin, Bill Watrous, Bill Perkins and others. Now that the pile of info is

sorted out, I’ve turned to my 46 microcassettes (as much as 92 hours of interview) that I

need to hear before I feel comfortable that I’ve gotten everything that I need from them.

Once finished, probably by early September, I can edit Chapter 5 and move on to Chapter

6, my final chapter.



Regarding Chapter 6, I already have 60 pages of notes and an outline. I’m hoping I can

breeze through it, then make some valuable concluding comments.



As for the publishing the first half of the bio soon, I think that this will be pushed ahead to

early next year. I just have too much work to do before I get to that point. Before it’s done,

I’ll be establishing a mailing list, very long overdue, at pepperdams.com



Below are some recent interview excerpts I hope you enjoy that I’ve added to my notes:


Pepper Adams to Ben Sidran:


“If you play everything legato, and don’t use the tongue -- and don’t outline where the
note is going to hit -- everything tends to run together because it is lower pitched. It has
no rhythmic impact, or impulse, behind it. I’ve tried to use a legato tongue so that there
is differentiation between the notes. I’ve tried to do a lot with articulation because that
has a lot to do with what the time feeling is going to be. And, if you fail to articulate on
baritone, or particularly on lower pitched instrument, it is going to be one constant rumble
after a while.”

Bill Watrous to Gary Carner:
“Every time he played, it was an adventure,” said Bill Watrous. “His ideas, and his
conception of the stuff that he was trying to play, was totally original. I would say, more
so than anybody else [who] ever played that instrument.”

“Pepper had an angularity about his playing, like a jagged sort of approach, that was very
much like the way Sonny Rollins approaches the instrument. Sonny goes at the instrument
from all angles -- from the left, from the right, and under, and goes that way. Pepper,
basically, did the same thing. Pepper had incredible technique. Pepper didn’t just run the
changes. Pepper played all over the changes. I think they sort of approached their music
from a similar direction.”

“The sense of humor was amazing! Pepper would play: I found myself laughing to myself a
lot when Pepper would play some of the things he would play.”

Bill Perkins to Gary Carner:
“He’s one of the true giants of jazz. He stood out in that rare group of jazz soloists, the great giants
of all time, people like Bird and Prez. And John Coltrane has become that. I think that Pepper was
that on his instrument. And Diz. They’re in an area where very few have done the creative work that
they’ve done.”

Johnny Griffin to Gary Carner:
“He was never a pushy person. Maybe that’s what kept him from being more of a giant, as
far as the public is concerned, because he was never aggressive.”

Ron Kolber to Gary Carner:
“He would send me a tune, an old tune,” said Ron Kolber. “Every time we’d see each other, he’d
say, ‘You know this one?’ We used to try to stump each other with old tunes. One his favorite tunes
was a tune by the name of ‘Says My Heart.’ It’s an old tune. Always digging for old tunes; that was a
little hobby with him. He said that some of the early tunes were really great. . . . He had great interest
in the old-timers. Any of the old-timers. He would listen to all of the old records. He said, ‘That’s where
we’re from.’ He said, ‘If we listen to that, we’re gonna get to where we are, and maybe beyond, but
you can’t start in the middle and go. You gotta go all the way back.’”

Finally, here’s three clips of tunes that Anders Svanoe performed at his recent concert dedicated to
Pepper, and a video of Pepper conducting an after-concert interview:




Sunday, March 4, 2018

Pepper Adams Biography News











© Gary Carner. Copyright Protected. All rights reserved.






A belated happy New Year to everybody! My apologies to those who have been awaiting a post from me. Yes, I've been away from the blog for some time. My life has been a little chaotic job-wise, though things have sorted themselves out recently.
I'm very pleased to announce that the first half of my Pepper Adams biography is now finished. I completed it a few days ago. It's about 100 pages. I began writing around the middle of April, 2017, upon my return from lecturing at four colleges in Utah. Looking back, I'm still amazed how I got all this done in eleven months. It sure helps to have 34 years of notes! During the next four weeks I'll be editing the manuscript, and going over my Pepper Adams interview transcript and listening to about 25 interviews, just to be sure I don't leave any important things out.

Here's an overview (finding aid) of Part I, what I call "Ascent":

Ch. 1:
Charlie Parker at the Mirror Ballroom
Move to Detroit, Rochester NY vs. Detroit
Skippy Williams
Arrival in Detroit, race relations
Detroit in the 1950s
History of Detroit, 1700-1900
History of Detroit, 1900-1950
Grinnell's
Lionel Hampton
Wayne University
The Music Box, Little John and His Merrymen
Getting the Berg Larsen and Selmer, Detroit's baritone history, Beans Bowles

Ch. 2:
Pepper's father in Detroit
Paternal genealogy
Family's musical roots
History of Rochester
Early life in Indiana, move to Rochester
Age 4-9, father's death
War years
Rochester musicians during World War II
Age 10-12, Everett Gates
Duke Ellington at the Temple Theatre, Rex Stewart, trip to Seattle
Ellington, Skippy Williams, classical music
Importance of elders (especially Rex Stewart), Duke Ellington
Raymond Murphy, Bob Wilber
John Huggler
Isolation
The Elite
John Albert

Ch. 3:
Service in the U.S. Army, Korean War
The Blue Bird Inn
The World Stage
The West End Hotel, Klein's Show Bar
Detroit's jazz history
Thad Jones, Wardell Gray, baritone players on the scene
Obscure Detroit jazz musicians
Pepper's personality, Detroit pianists
Maternal genealogy
Detroit musical education
Detroit's outlier jazz generation, Malcolm Gladwell outlier concepts related to Pepper
Pepper demo played for Prestige and Blue Note, Pepper sits in with Miles and Rollins
Stan Getz story, Pepper moves to New York City

I met with my trusted webmaster, Dan Olson, last week. We're planning important upgrades this year to pepperadams.com. New context will be added to "Radio Interviews" and "Big Band Performances." A link to a new WikiTree genealogy of Pepper Adams is planned.
I had to wipe clean the hard drive on my iPad a few months ago. By doing so, I lost my trusty app for Blogspot. If anyone has a recommendation for an app I can use that DOES NOT ask for my Google password, please let me know. It will help me format future posts.
I did submit my first section from Ch. 3 about Pepper's experience in the U.S. Army for publication in 2019. I'll let you know if it's approved. I'm

Saturday, November 29, 2014

Body and Soul, Sonny Rollins and Pepper Adams

© Gary Carner. Copyright Protected. All rights reserved.

We know that the 1939 Coleman Hawkins recording of Body and Soul is an iconic masterpiece of the jazz canon but don't we lose sight of how it influenced a generation of musicians? I recently read a piece by Marc Myers and was struck by how Sonny Rollins' experience as a young musician paralleled Pepper Adams'. Here's what Sonny Rollins recently told Marc Myers in the Wall Street Journal about Coleman Hawkins' recording:

"It's hard today to fully appreciate how different Coleman Hawkins' Body and Soul sounded when it hit Harlem jukeboxes in late 1939. On that three-minute record, Coleman took a popular torch song and, with his tenor saxophone, turned it into a personal statement without ever losing track of the original melody. Wow, that was completely new and it really changed me.

I first heard Body and Soul when I was 10 years old. I was standing outside the Big Apple Bar on the corner of 135th Street and Seventh Avenue, across from Small's Paradise, and heard it on the jukebox through an open window. Back then, I was playing alto saxophone and idolized Louis Jordan — and still do. But when I heard Coleman's Body and Soul, a light went off in my head. If he could personalize a popular song like that without lyrics, any song was possible if you had that intellectual capacity.

People in Harlem know their music, and I remember marveling at how many of them were touched by his record. Coleman went beyond what musicians were doing then by creating new harmonic inventions. Right after hearing the record, I bought a tenor reed and began using it on my alto mouthpiece to get that big Coleman Hawkins sound. Some years later, after much pleading on my part, my mother bought me a tenor sax and I was on my way."

For Pepper Adams, Hawkins' recording also propelled him to get a tenor saxophone and emulate Hawkins' big sound and more aggressive style. Up until that time Adams was playing clarinet, imitating the melismatic and lighter New Orleans playing of Jimmy Noone and Johnny Dodds. Here's a touching excerpt from my book, Pepper's Adams' Joy Road, as told to me by the noted Eastman School educator Everett Gates. I interviewed Gates about Pepper and Pepper's March, 1978 performance at Eastman:

"Adams dedicated Body and Soul to Everett Gates, a professor at Eastman and an early mentor to Adams who was in the audience. Regarding Adams’ performance of Body and Soul, Gates said, “That completely floored me!” In 1942, when Pepper Adams was eleven years old, Adams started visiting Gates on a regular basis at Gates’ home in Rochester, New York. They used to listen to music and discuss jazz and music theory. “He came to the house,” Gates continued, “and one day he said,

“Do you know Body and Soul?” I said, “Sure.” “Well,” he said, “could you write it out for me?” I said, “Sure.” At that time he was going to get a saxophone. So I wrote it out in D-flat, which of course was the key we always used, rather than any other when we’re playing. When we were improvising, it was always D-flat. And, so I wrote it out with the chords. He said, “There’s a record by Coleman Hawkins.” I said, “Yes, he made that a couple of years ago.” He said, “Well, he’s all over the place.” I said, “Yes, it’s very complicated and he gets up even to the high harmonics on the saxophone, like high G, so you have to be pretty advanced to control those.” So he said, “I wonder: Could you write me out a little improvisation that’s simple? Something simple I can play?” I said, “Sure. You can play this either on tenor, or you can play it on a clarinet.” So he got so he could play that, [and] this is what [he began his solo with] when he played at the Eastman Theater with the Eastman Jazz Ensemble. (He played this just with a rhythm section, and the other things he had played with a big band.) And, unbelievably, he played that, and then, of course, he went into his own [thing]. Well, of course, I was just overcome with what he had done there!"

Portrait of Everett Gates that hangs in a gallery at the Eastman School: http://instagram.com/p/t20Ku4pnv3/?modal=true