Laurie Pepper acted as wife, agent, co-autobiographer and manager to the affairs of her husband, saxophonist-composer Art Pepper, until his passing in 1982 at the age of 56. Since then, the bebop alto legend’s estate has been tended by Laurie, be it through the volumes of her memoirs (ART: Why I Stuck with a Junkie Jazzman, the 2014 follow-up to her co-penned reminiscence Straight Life: The Story of Art Pepper from 1979); her self-created label Widow’s Taste, in dedication to her husband’s rarest-ever live and studio recordings; and via her curatorial oversight and detective work in finding then licensing Pepper stuff to labels such as Omnivore, the company behind the new four-CD collection, Everything Happens to Me: 1959 – Live at The Cellar, from a live gig at the legendary Canadian jazz boîte.
Now Laurie Pepper is frank in her humorous recollection of her husband’s foibles with statements such as, “Art was a fucking genius with a God-given gift that just came through him — and he knew it,” as well as, “He was crazy, who other than someone crazy would throw it all away, repeatedly?” Or, “He was an artist who didn’t think that being an artist was a noble calling.”
Along with that, Pepper is generous in her crediting of those around her who picked up her late husband’s lost musical cause — Omnivore’s co-founder Cheryl Pawelski and Belgian Pepper-phile/tape trading spreadsheet enthusiast Rocco Bertels, “rabid fans obsessed with Art” — and those hungry for the torrid sounds of the saxophonist’s restless journey.
With that, she is, as my father would say, “a pistol,” a woman who knows what she wants to say and how to say it, brassily and boldly. “I had my coffee, so I’m ready to go,” she says at the start to my start: Where exactly was she in 1959, the year that “everything happens to” Art Pepper?
Way Past Jazz
“I’m 19 years old, working at the Ash Grove in Los Angeles, in the record store part of the club up front. I had a job selling records and watching over all the jewelry that Byron Menedez has there that people kept stealing. Poor Byron. That was right before I went up to college at Berkley. The Ash Grove was such a legendary space for blues and folk artists at that time. Very big. I was working there because I was saving up money to go to college, yes. But also because I was in the scene. I went to all the hootenannies. I loved the acts. I was definitely crazy about all that stuff.”
And jazz?
“I had already gotten over jazz by 1959,” says the Lady Pepper. “Way past that. Jazz was for when I was in high school, age 16, hanging out at the West Lake College of Music and listening to the stuff in the dorms. Smoking grass through pipes filled with Thunderbird wine. At that time, we were listening to East Coast jazz because these guys at the college — well, Charlie Haden was there, and he was cool — were Korean war veterans getting paid to go to school. They were a nice crowd, some were musicians, but if I ever said something about liking West Coast jazz, they thought I was an idiot. So I was past my jazz phase by then. Besides, I had always really loved gospel, blues and folk, we continuously listened to Bessie Smith records so we could figure out what she was talking about. So the Ash Grove was my scene.”
Art Pepper would never have stood a chance with the Laurie of 1959.
“Well, back when I was hanging at West Lake, I knew that Charlie Haden was working with Art. I didn’t meet this one woman who was living with Art at the time, but I knew that he didn’t love her. So that’s my first impression of him, before I ever heard or met him.”
Rather than take money away from Pepper as the vividly recounted tales in her books (see above) do a better job than I would, we jump across the chasm of written information to something nearest the early years of her Widow’s Taste label and her licensing deals.
Who Does That?
When I tell her that most of us know more about Art Pepper through her eyes and ears than we do from the saxophonist himself, she sounds pleased. Or at least just fine with that.
“What an education it’s been. When I first met Art, all of my musical taste — well, I knew what I liked. When I heard Art, though, I was immediately drawn in because of the emotion in his music. That was the major connection. And how much it all swung because that was extremely important to me. Over the years, the more I became acquainted with his older stuff, then coming up together with his whole Village Vanguard transformation [see his Thursday Night at the Village Vanguard live album from 1977 and his latter-day love affair with the music of John Coltrane] — yes, this was the greatest-ever music lesson I could ever hope for.”
Poking fun at her “amateur” expertise in defining and espousing the joys of jazz (“I’m too scattered and uncoordinated”), it is a wealth of deeply felt emotion that gives Laurie Pepper’s curations and liner notes passionate resonance. “That’s good, because, at first, I used to call Ed Michelle for help writing them,” she giggles. “Is this true? Are they playing fours here? It was great fun learning, then learning some more.”
Yes, Laurie Pepper can figure out what era Art Pepper’s vaulted recordings are just by listening to them, as they’re as second nature to her as they were to him. “The Cellar stuff? When I first heard the tracks, it was an ‘Oh my God’ moment. This was right before he made the decision to be a dope fiend in 1960 where he threw away his career, went to East LA to shoot heroin and did a robbery with two dope fiend friends to pay for his habit. Who does that? He once told me that hat burglary was his life’s greatest single accomplishment. Who says that? He was certifiable. A genius, but certifiable. He made this decision to just drop out. The Cellar 1959 was the soulful sound of this renaissance in his artistry, right before he threw it all away. So beautiful. So sweet. We heard that sound after he was in the Army, came back to play with Stan Kenton — this is a major development in his sound.”
Genius. Hubris. Boredom. God Delusions.
“The horrors of his childhood really did a number on Art. He was not comfortable being able, because being unhappy was a familiar state… He wanted to make life harder. Luckily, he brought it all together before he died — the funky, swinging thing; the “Old Art Pepper Sound” that Shelly Manne used to rave about; the Coltrane influence. The sweetness I first heard on ‘Harlem Folk Dance.’ He really consolidated all that he was before he passed.”
How did Pepper and Cheryl Pawelski come to release the Cellar stuff in the first place?
“Facebook is a really great resource,” says Laurie. “Someone posted some of Art’s Cellar tracks there, a radio broadcast. So I contacted the guy from the Cellar, a darling man named Dave Quarin, who after I called him realized he had even more tapes in his collection than he thought. It’s an incredible miracle. All these lost tapes, the people who have them, the people who track them down, are all a miracle.”
As for a favorite moment on the new Cellar package, Pepper stops for a moment and says, “Oh yes, of course.” Looking through the track list and thinking of its bopping contents, she ceases abruptly, lets out a loud laugh then exclaims, “Anything there that swings, the uptempo stuff, is the best of the Cellar stuff… Usually I go for the emotion in those ballads of Art’s — he’s the best ballad player in the world — but on this collection, it’s the funky swinging stuff that really sticks with me.” JT