ART PEPPER – So In Love (Artists House / LP-1980)

Label: Artists House – AH 9412

Format: Vinyl, LP, Album / Country: US / Released: 1980

Style: Contemporary Jazz

Tracks A1, B1: Recorded 2-23-79, New York, NY.

Tracks A2, A3, B2: Recorded 5-26-79, Burbank, CA.

Cover Art by – Alyssia Lazin

Design by – Lazin & Katalan

Art Director by – Carol Friedman

Producer by – John Snyder

A1 - Straight No Chaser ............................................... 6:26

         Composed By – Thelonious Monk

A2 - Blues For Blanche ................................................ 6:49

         Composed By – Art Pepper

A3 - So In Love ........................................................... 11:37

         Composed By – Cole Porter

B1 - Diane ................................................................... 12:22

         Composed By – Art Pepper

B2 - Stardust ............................................................... 10:34

         Composed By – Hoagy Carmichael, Mitchell Parish

Art Pepper – alto saxophone, clarinet

Hank Jones – piano (tracks: A1, B1)

George Cables – piano (tracks: A2, A3, B2)

Ron Carter – bass (tracks: A1, B1)

Charlie Haden – bass (tracks: A2, A3, B2)

Al Foster – drums, percussion (tracks: A1, B1)

Billy Higgins – drums, percussion (tracks: A2, A3, B2)

Pepper's "So in Love" continues his post prison fiery play. Critics who believe his earlier work is his best must not be hearing Pepper's final blowing. It is simultaneously lyrical and hot, as if Art knew that this was, indeed, it - his last chance to say everything he had to say. The actual cut "So in Love" is a favorite. It has an underlying tension that is subtle and yet almost unbearable. Art's early death left a huge hole, but in a way it's inevitability led to some of the best alto work ever recorded.

The altoist stretches out here on a program of standards and blues, backed by alternating rhythm sections from the East and West coasts.

Pianist Hank Jones is all one could ask for in an accompanist, and his aching solo on Diane sustains perfectly the restive mood of Pepper's opening choruses. Overall, the West Coast team pianist George Cables, whose great rapport with Pepper is unmatched, along with jazz legends Charlie Haden and Billy Higgins powers the music along with great care and economy. Pepper had climbed to such a plateau of individuality that he seems often here to be drawing his unconscious influences into the light and remembering what it was he loved about them in the first place.

On a leisurely Stardust, he daffodils his sentiments with the grace and cunning of a Lester Young. The title track, a Cole Porter waltz that agitates into a collective improvisation by its climax, offers the best illustration of the wondrous use Pepper makes of John Coltrane. It isn't in this case a matter of piling up chords or of playing more notes, as it is with so many others, but rather of drawing on extreme registers of the horn to express more conflicting emotions, to reach deeper and higher recesses of the viscera and the psyche.

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Art Pepper, more creatively prolific in his late years than at almost any other time in his troubled life, cuts as sharply as a scythe when he's taking on an edge on this 1979 set. He appears in two different quartet formations, the first with pianist Hank Jones, bassist Ron Carter, and versatile drummer Al Foster, and the second with pianist George Cables and the rhythmic duo Ornette Coleman used so effectively, bassist Charlie Haden and drummer Billy Higgins. The Jones-Carter-Foster lineup moves more measuredly than the Cables-Haden-Higgins one. Chalk it up to Coleman's speedy "harmolodic" compressions, but Haden and Higgins dance all over the melodies, pressing Pepper to spray alto lines in multiple directions almost at once. "Diane" is lovingly taken, with Pepper finding in Jones a great, romantic colleague.

And if you find yourself curious about Pepper, try reading his tell-all autobiography "Straight Life", jazz's greatest confessional.

http://straightlife.info/apautobook.html

This album, recorded on 1979, in the period Art Pepper had the support of his sentimental couple, Laurie Pepper, is a masterpiece. And it shows that, as it is affirmed everywhere, this man didn't need to practice a lot, he simply took his saxo and performed a beautiful jazz with great honesty and nobleness. Art Pepper, with all his defects and tortuous life due to drug dependency, is a well bred musician and he shows himself naked before we all. If God finally exists I guess he decided to take him to heaven, because of his honesty and the artistry he gave us all. The two different rhythm sections of this album are excellent. I have no doubt about recommending it.

If you find it, buy this album!