Track Listing

1. You'd Be So Nice To Come Home To
2. Red Pepper Blues
3. Imagination
4. Waltz Me Blues
5. Straight Life
6. Jazz Me Blues
7. Tin Tin Deo
8. Star Eyes
9. Birks Works

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6587 in Music
• Released on: 1991-07-01
• Number of discs: 1

Album Description
This CD contains two complete albums showcasing Art Pepper in a quartet setting: 1957's Meets the Rhythm Section, featuring Miles Davis’ legendary rhythm section of Red Garland, Paul Chambers and Philly Joe Jones, and 1956's Marty Paich Quartet Featuring Art Pepper. 19 tracks. Essential Jazz Classics.

Amazon.com
The rhythm section in question here belonged to Miles Davis in Los Angeles, one fine day in January 1957. Pepper had made a name for himself in Stan Kenton's band, but this was really the first time he found himself in the studio with a rhythm section such as Red Garland, Paul Chambers, and Philly Joe Jones. In his fascinating biography, Straight Life, Pepper tells the story of the date when, after not playing for six months, he was told of the session that morning. He pieced together a broken horn, went in, and blew. Not completely remembering the first tune "You'd Be So Nice to Come Home To," he voices a line that both invokes the melody and refashions it. The rest of the session shows just how high Pepper rose to the occasion. It's one of the most important recordings of his career. --Michael Monhart

Customer Reviews

art pepper at his best
I've been an Art Pepper fan for a long, long time. This is the session that I keep coming back to. Many decades have passed since the first time that I heard it, but despite all that time, it still sounds fresh. Buy this CD.

extraordinary
I came across this title in one of Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch novels and am grateful I checked it out and discovered that this was real and not fiction. Pepper's work on the sax is truly extraordinary.

Essential to the Most Basic Library of Every Saxophonist
I can understand a reaction such as the preceding reviewer's. After absorbing Sonny Stitt's logical, fluent, cohesive, structured, text-book solos delivered with as "embodied" a sound as any saxophonist could hope for, I initially experienced some disappointment upon hearing Pepper's more exploratory, fragmented melodic lines. Then I heard him go head to head with Stitt ("The Hollywood Sessions"), and he not only comes close to matching Sonny's technical proficiency but adds a hint of the unpredictable, of genuine risk-taking, that brings a dimension not present in the playing of Stitt, the music's "most perfect saxophonist."

The unmistakable emotion, even passion, that emerges in Pepper's later playing is not as evident on this more conservative 1950s recording. Still, even here Pepper manages to escape the stereotypical "cool" sound with which the West Coast scene was identified, playing with a warmer feel and less detachment and deliberativeness than his Coastal contemporary, Lee Konitz. (Anyone who believes Desmond's playing was emotionally distant, or that it emphasized wit and minimalism at the expense of heat and soul, needs to review his work with the Brubeck Quartet before "Take Five.")