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About Unreleased Art Pepper, Vol. 10: Toronto 1977
Product Description A Soulful, Historical Collector's Item. Downbeat Calls it BREATHTAKING. Amazon is slow asking us at Widows Taste for copies to sell. And we can't ship any to them FOR YOU until they give us a PO number. The process may take another week. Or TWO! If you want to buy now and pay for shipping, go to cdbaby dot com and enter the title in the Search Box--Unreleased Art Pepper, Vol. 10: Toronto. To download high-quality DIGITAL copies (and a PDF of the 32 page Booklet) go to Bandcamp dot com and enter the title in the search box Review Downbeat October, 2018 Historical / BY J.D. CONSIDINE Unreleased Art Pepper, Vol. 10: Bourbon Street Toronto, June 16, 1977 (Widow s Taste; 60:34/50:47/60:27 4 STARS!) Past Pepper For many jazz fans, the high point of Art Pepper s late- 70s comeback was a four-night stand at New York s Village Vanguard that was recorded for Contemporary Re-cords and released, at first, as four albums, and later as a nine-CD set. These rangy, sometimes raucous performances (with pi-anist George Cables, bassist George Mraz and drummer Elvin Jones) captured the questing, Coltrane-inflected sound of his later years, while still reflecting the lyric, bop-schooled virtuosity of his early work. But like most great moments in recorded jazz, those albums didn t just happen. Those sessions were the culmination of what was, unbelievably, Pepper s very first tour as a bandleader, and the whole thing likely nev-er would have happened had it not been for the persuasive charm of Artists House Records chief John Snyder. According to Laurie Pepper, the saxophonist s widow, it was Snyder who suggested that he play the Vanguard (also a first), convinced club owners outside of New York to book Pepper, and who after a return engagement at the Vanguard was requested pitched making a live album there (although Lester Koenig and Contemporary, who had Pepper under contract, ultimately made the recording). In that sense, Unreleased Art Pepper, Vol. 10: Bourbon Street Toronto, June 16, 1977 (Widow s Taste; 60:34/50:47/60:27 ) is a dry run for those sessions. Recorded six weeks before the Vanguard shows, it finds Pepper in front of a different rhythm section, but obtaining much the same results. The three-CD set starts, impressive-ly, with a semi-rubato introduction to Joe Gordon s A Song For Richard, during which Pepper invokes the mood of A Love Supreme-era Coltrane without actually copping licks. After almost three minutes of mood setting, the bandleader states the theme and spends another four slow-build-ing minutes working out the melodic and dramatic possibilities within the tune. It s breathtaking. Listening to how easily the band follows Pepper s lead, it s hard to believe the group hadn t played together before that gig. At one point, Pepper warmly compliments Bernie Senensky, saying, There s a certain rapport between a horn player and a piano player that, if it isn t there, nothing can hap-pen. Just as crucial, though, are the bassists, 17-year-old Dave Pilch, who was the main-stay for Pepper s Toronto gig, and 37-year-old Gene Perla, who sat in as preparation for accompanying him at the initial Vanguard show. Part of their dominance has to do with the way their basses were amplified, using a bridge pickup and a presumably powerful amp. But mostly, it s because each player moved freely between straight time-keeping and melodic, contrapuntal lines, a strategy that let Pepper move easily be-tween a hard-driving bop approach and a freer, more harmonically daring line. To make an easy comparison, when the group launches into a medium-tempo reading of All The Things You Are, Perla maintains a straightahead walking line, sticking reasonably close to the roots. As Pepper pushes the harmonic boundaries, Perla doesn t merely follow, but prods, playing extensions that propel the saxo-phonist into evermore inventive extrapo-lations. But when they launch into an up-tempo run through I ll Remember April, Perla seems to intuit
