Art Pepper, one of my favorite jazz artists. My favorite alto sax player after Bird. Bird is of course in a class of his own to begin with. Art Pepper's style is very lyrical I think. He has a special sound and tone that I really like and he plays with a lot of feeling. He has recorded some very nice stuff. Some of his albums though, are recorded, I believe, on not that great equipment. Or maybe it is also the recording engineers fault, or maybe the inferior vinyl that some labels used for their records. I'm talking about the Intro, Jazz:West, Discovery and Tampa labels. Those recordings, those pressings seems to be of lesser quality in a lot of ways compared to, for example Blue Note, Prestige, Riverside or Contemporary.
Anyone who has the same thoughts , or different for that matter, about this topic?
Anyway, this record is very rare in any condition. My copy is nice, but the cover has some stains and is a bit worn. The tunes are good with my favorites being the ballad "Bewitched", the two alto sax/double bass pieces "Blues In" and "Blues Out" and "What Is This Thing Called Love". The musicians backing up Pepper on this are Russ Freeman on piano, Chuck Flores on drums and Ben Tucker on double bass. Russ Freeman I know very well, he's awesome, but the other two cats I haven't heard that much apart from on this record. They are very competent, and I'd like to explore their other work as well.
This is Art Pepper at his best. If you dig Art Pepper, then this LP is a must. An original is quite hard to get, but as always, I recommend trying to find one. In any condition. I have some other original Pepper LP's which I'm going to post here, and I intend to get all the nice stuff he has recorded.
I hope you enjoy the post and the images, and stay tuned for more jazz rarities.