Pepper Adams - Part 3 - Pepper Adams Saxophone Trailblazer by Gary Carner

 © Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

"On the baritone sax, he was the greatest we've ever had." 

- PHIL WOODS, alto saxophonist

"He was a rare genius on the horn." 

- PHILIP LEVINE, Poet Laureate of the United States 2011-2012

“Ya gotta be original, man.”

— Lester Young

“How many musicians out there are really different?”

— Ran Blake

“Because jazz demands that musicians find their own sound and stamp their performances with a singular individuality, those who succeed in music tend to be distinctive, singular individuals.”

—John Gennari

"Gary Garner's loving tribute to Pepper Adams finally delivers some justice to the man and to the whole range and span of his too short and underappreciated but brilliant career."                             

 - Ben Sidran, author of Talking Jazz: An Oral History

"Having known and worked with Pepper from 1955 until he left us, reading this biography makes you feel that you are there with him. His humor, wit, and devotion to music are all written about in a way that Pepper himself would have loved. Gary Garner has kept this story real."                                  — David Amram, author of Vibrations:

The Adventures and Musical Times of David Amram

This feature is intended to bring my earlier work on the career of the late baritone saxophonist Pepper Adams [1930-1986] up to date by focusing on Gary Carner’s 2023 biography - Pepper Adams Saxophone Trailblazer.

Gary’s work on Pepper has long been considered definitive by the Jazz community at large

Parts 1 and 2 in my series were begun in 2009, a year after the blog was first published, and they didn’t have the benefit of Gary’s extensive research on Pepper’s life and music.

Later revisions of the two-part feature on Pepper did have access to Gary’s Pepper Adams’ Joy Road: An Annotated Discography which was published in a paperback format in 2013. As one reader has asserted, this book was “so much more than just a discography.”

The back cover of the work concurs and further explains:

Pepper Adams' Joy Road is more than a compendium of sessions and gigs done by the greatest baritone saxophone soloist in history. It's a fascinating overview of Adams' life and times, thanks to colorful interview vignettes drawn from the author's unpublished conversations with Adams and other musicians. These candid observations from jazz greats about Adams and his colleagues' reveal previously unknown, behind-the-scenes drama around legendary recordings made by David Amram, John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie, Elvin Jones, Thad Jones, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, Duke Pearson, and many others.

All types of sound material — studio recordings, private tapes and broadcasts, film scores, audience tapes, and even jingles—are listed, and Adams' oeuvre is pushed back from 1956 to 1947, when Adams was sixteen years old, before he played baritone saxophone. Because of Garner's access to Adams' estate, just prior to its disposition in 1987, much new discographical material is included, now verified by Adams' date books and correspondence. "-

Since Adams worked in so many of the great bands of his era, Pepper Adams' Joy Road is a refreshing, sometimes irreverent walk through a large swath of jazz history. This work also functions as a nearly complete band discography of the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Orchestra, the most influential big band of its time, Adams was a founding member and stayed with the band until a year before Jones left to relocate in Denmark. Finally, Garner charts the ascent of Adams as an original, yet still underappreciated, composer, one who wrote forty-three unique works, nearly half of them after August 1977, when he left Jones-Lewis to tour the world as a soloist. Pepper Adams' Joy Road, the first book ever published about Pepper Adams, is a companion to the author's forthcoming biography on Adams.”

Ten years later, in the Introduction to Pepper Adams Saxophone Trailblazer, Gary gives a detailed explanation about how he went about his work in preparing and presenting his biography of Pepper.

“On September 28, 1986, our first wedding anniversary, my wife Nancy and I attended Pepper Adams's memorial service at St. Peter's Lutheran Church in New York City. Adams had waged a courageous battle against an aggressive form of lung cancer that was first diagnosed in March 1985 while he was on tour in Sweden. On that somber yet bright Sunday afternoon, St. Peter's ash-paneled, multi-tiered sanctuary, tucked under 915-foot-tall Citicorp Center, was packed with friends, musicians, and admirers. Reverend John Garcia Gensel presided over the service and many jazz greats performed and paid their final respects.

Adams was a friend of mine, but I knew him only during the last two years of his life. We first met in 1984, while he was recovering from an auto accident that had kept him immobilized for six months. Then afterwards, while separated from his wife, he was diagnosed with the illness that would take his life. Although a miserable time for him, it was an exciting ride for me. I was a twenty-eight-year-old grad student, a passionate jazz fan and record collector, who was trying to interest a jazz musician in working with me on an oral history to satisfy my thesis requirement at City College of New York. Adams, I soon learned, was an ideal subject: a major figure who, from the late 1940s onward had played with virtually everyone in jazz.

Because he was homebound that summer, we met several times in Brooklyn, discussing his career, listening to music, and once going out for lunch and running some errands. Our conversations yielded eighteen hours of documentation, captured by my trusty Sony microcassette recorder. The depth and historical sweep of his recollections were stunning. I knew right away that I had the makings of a valuable co-authored autobiography. But seven months later his cancer was diagnosed. Because cancer treatments and international travel made our autobiographical project an impossibility,

I decided that writing a full-length biography would be the more sensible approach. When Pepper was home between gigs, I watched football games with him while going through documents, eating pizza, and dubbing copies of his cassette tapes. Although I was trying to gather as much information as I could in the little time that remained, it was improper to pry about the minutiae of his life. Despite my curiosity, I had to respect the fact that he felt lousy, and his leisure time was sacrosanct.

The following summer I moved to Boston to further my studies and Adams research. No longer able to visit, we stayed in touch by telephone and postcards that he sent me from the road. Our final conversation took place eight months later, only a few weeks before his death. In August 1986, when Adams was bedridden and under the watchful eye of a home-health aide, I called to see if there was anything I could do for him. His caretaker answered and asked me to hold for a moment. While I paced anxiously for at least five minutes, Adams somehow dragged himself to the telephone. In a sentence or two he acknowledged that time was short, thanked me for calling, and hung up. That was right around the time that Dizzy Gillespie called him on Mel Lewis's behalf to say that Thad Jones, one of Pepper's dearest friends, had just died of cancer in Copenhagen.

A year later, once I began interviewing Adams's colleagues for this book, I spent a memorable afternoon with pianist Tommy Flanagan, Ella Fitzgerald's longtime music director. One of the last to see Pepper alive, he wanted me to know that transcripts of my Adams interviews were stacked on Pepper's nightstand days before he died. Flanagan told me that at one point, while he was perched on the edge of Adams's bed, Pepper awoke and tried to push those interview materials towards him. As if Flanagan was brushing crumbs off a tabletop with the backside of his fingertips, he accentuated his story by imitating Peppers feeble attempt to move the heavy pile of papers in Tommy's direction.

As you can imagine, I was overcome by the implications of Adams's gesture. At first, I was astounded, something I must have communicated via my astonished gaze and stunned expression. Then my heart sagged, and eyes watered, as I realized that our months of work together had comforted Pepper at the end of his life.

Flanagan's interview was one of more than 250 I conducted. Repeatedly, interviewees affirmed Adams as a complex individual — a hero, a genius, a model of grace, an intellectual, a virtuoso stylist — yet someone also very hard to read. The contradictions they depicted intrigued me. Adams, they said, was an unworldly looking sophisticate, a white musician who sounded

like a black one, and an exuberant saxophonist who was soft-spoken and mild-mannered off the bandstand. Many told me of his unprecedented agility on the baritone, that he played it like an alto. Before Adams, baritone sax was a cumbersome, fringe instrument. Today, because of his innovations, it is no longer viewed as a novelty.

Throughout his career, Adams told interviewers that the baritone's low pitch was like his speaking voice. He felt this, to some extent, explained his affinity for the horn. But more can be divined from his adoption of the instrument. For one thing, he greatly prized originality. Becoming a baritone saxophonist in the late 1940s gave him an opportunity to create a unique style on an infrequently heard instrument. Like Duke Ellington, whom he greatly admired, Adams believed he could similarly stand apart from everyone else.

Paradoxically, despite enhancing the idiom and securing his place in history, Adams's fealty to his instrument also hurt him. The public's disregard for low-pitched instruments and his resultant status as a sideman prevented him from both fronting his own band and recording far more albums as a leader, particularly any with widespread distribution. Moreover, refusing to double on bass clarinet disqualified him from studio work that could have helped financially when jazz gigs were sporadic.

When I began collaborating with Adams, I knew he was a superb instrumentalist but had no idea of the breadth of his contribution, how much his colleagues adored him, nor the degree to which his life intersected with some of the greatest poets, writers, painters, and musicians of his time. Thanks to our working relationship, the door to the international arts community burst open for me right after his death. As a result, I have had the remarkable privilege of speaking with so many of his esteemed colleagues, all of whom honored my interest in such a deserving artist.

Without a doubt, my interviewees are the heart and soul of this book. You will read some of them speaking, at times with surprising tenderness, of their fondness and admiration for Adams. His death was a significant loss, and their remembrances of his last few years are filled with sentimental accounts, sometimes with them breaking into tears. Besides helping me grasp the totality of Pepper's character and accomplishments, Adams's friends have given me a profound sense of interconnectedness with the jazz world. I'm grateful for their kindness and support, particularly when writing this book seemed insurmountable.

Despite Peppers eagerness to share aspects of his career with me, he was reluctant to discuss his personal relationships or his time in the US Army.

Radio appearances and magazine articles, too, were of little use regarding his private life. So, I had to start from scratch.

Unraveling the complexities of such an enigmatic individual, plus digesting his thousands of hours of recordings, conceptualizing a narrative structure that suited his life, and transferring my personal observations and mountain of data into prose, took me thirty-seven years. Discounting some promising fits and starts, I waited until I felt ready to write the kind of book he deserved. That began in April 2017, after I gave a series of lectures about him, including a memorable residency at Utah State University.

Because chronological storytelling is hackneyed and outmoded, I always intended to write the book thematically. As Milton Lomask has argued, "The cradle-to-grave approach in biography is strictly a literary convention. Only in biographies and never in life do we get to know another human being in that consecutive fashion ... No human life is so tidy, so uncomplicated, that you can construct it by simply reciting the events of it in sequence."

Biographer Leon Edel expressed the same point of view: "Biography need no longer be strictly chronological, like a calendar or datebook."

Lives are rarely lived that way. An individual repeats patterns learned in childhood, and usually moves forward and backward through memory. . . . 

Chronological biography tends to fragment and flatten a life. A chronological recital of these facts reads like a newspaper; we jump from one item to another, and the items seem unrelated. . . . The task and duty of biographical narrative is to sort out themes and patterns, not dates and mundane calendar events which sort themselves.

After writing a few chapters with that in mind, it occurred to me that Adams's life would best be rendered in two parts. I decided to entitle the first half of the book "Ascent" to delineate his early years in Detroit and Rochester, New York, while becoming a virtuoso. "Dominion" could then cover the remainder of his life as a full-fledged musician based in New York City.

I further resolved that divulging Adams's death within this prologue freed me from ending the book with his demise, yet another banality. Insofar as "Ascent" could mostly proceed topically from Pepper's youth to his relocation in New York, I decided to defy common practice by beginning "Dominion" with a full account of Adams's terminal illness, then work my way back thirty years to his arrival in New York. Going backward, a device often found in cinema, not only struck me as a writing challenge, but seemed consistent with Adams's distaste for cliché. Emboldened by historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, who regretted not crafting her Lyndon Baines Johnson biography in reverse-chronological order, I liked how inverting "Dominion" circled me back to 1956, setting up my conclusion (chapter twelve).

Before I began writing, my years of research allowed me to comprehend Detroit's jazz culture and socioeconomic history. I was interested in understanding its automobile economy, profound racial problems, and illustrious jazz history. I was most curious about the extraordinary postwar "band of brothers," that clique of world-class jazz musicians who descended on New York City in the mid-1950s and reinvigorated the music.

Regarding Rochester, New York, where Adams attended public school, I wanted to know how that city came to be, why its economy was better off than the rest of the country during the Great Depression, and what took place there during World War II when Adams was a teenager. New York City's jazz scene in the 1950s and '60s, of course, intrigued me. I especially wanted to understand how jazz cross-pollinated with other arts and Adams's place within that world.

Inasmuch as biography is "a portrait in words of a man or woman in conflict with himself, or with the world around him, or with both," I sought to understand my subject's personality traits, strengths and weaknesses, how he behaved with others, and the inner myths he guarded and outer myths he promulgated. I wanted to explore his genealogy, learn about his childhood, get my arms around his relationship with women, and penetrate the veil of secrecy about his mother and tenure as a soldier. I strove to grasp why, despite his exceptional gifts and the universal respect he received from his colleagues, he wasn't financially successful. Was it because of his instrument, the way he conducted himself, or other factors?

Undoubtedly, writing about Adams satisfied my wish to contribute something tangible to the music I love. But truth be told, my work over the years morphed from a passionate hobby to a raison d'etre. After building pepperadams.com, in 2012 I produced a five-CD box set of Adams's entire oeuvre. The anthology was co-branded with Pepper Adams' Joy Road: An Annotated Discography. A sixth CD, produced separately, featured big-band arrangements of ten of his tunes. Now, with this companion study I, at long last, have fulfilled my original promise to him and myself.

Please visit the Instagram page (instagram.com/pepperadamsblog) that serves as the repository of Adams photographs and documents. More importantly, whether you are encountering him for the first time or are already hip to his career, be sure to listen to his glorious saxophone playing, some of which is posted at YouTube and pepperadams.com.”

As the back page of the paperback declares:

“Pepper Adams is more than a definitive biography of Park "Pepper" Adams (1930-1986). The culmination of thirty-seven years of research, it's a fascinating account of Adams's life and times, thanks to colorful vignettes drawn from the author's 250 unpublished conversations with Adams and other esteemed musicians. These candid observations about Adams and his colleagues reveal previously confidential aspects of Adams's complex personality, his many outstanding achievements, and little-known facts about musicians with whom he worked, such as Thad Jones, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Elvin Jones, Charles Mingus, Stan Kenton, Duke Ellington, Bobby Timmons, Wardell Gray, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, and others. Musicians, jazz fans and collectors, and readers who enjoy a hero's journey will be intrigued by Adams's extraordinary intelligence, the extent of his influence, the reverence he commanded, and his struggle to be rewarded as the unique stylist that he was throughout his career. Moreover, readers will be enlivened by the author's unique approach to biography, in which storytelling moves thematically, sometimes in reverse chronological order.”

For order information please click this link.

Reflectory: The Life and Music of Pepper Adams by Gary Carner

© Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“Looking back, my journey has been an extraordinary blessing. On one level, Pepper Adams’ music has immeasurably enriched me. Moreover, writing about him has satisfied my inveterate wish to contribute something tangible to Jazz, the music that I love more than anything. But on a deeper level, my work has morphed from a passionate hobby to a raison d’etre. Along the way I’ve gotten to know so many Pepper Adams admirers, for whom he was a sage and musical beacon. Their friendship and support have given me a profound sense of interconnectedness with the world for which I am truly grateful.” 

- Gary Carner

Visitors to these pages may be familiar with author and discographer Gary Carner’s earlier efforts on behalf of the late, stellar baritone saxophonist in the form of his Pepper Adams’ Joy Road: An Annotated Discography.

Now comes notification of his full-length biography on Pepper - Reflectory - which ideally will be available for download on his website by Christmas or early 2020 at a price of $9.99 for Chapters 1-3, and a year later, $9.99 for Chapters 4-10. As you read, both halves will include links to all the music examples. 

Gary commented that “Interested buyers can purchase the book at pepperadams.com for sure. I haven't selected the publisher yet, so I don't know where else it may be available. Amazon is a possibility.”

Gary has very kindly allowed the editorial staff at JazzProfiles to share the following introductory chapter on these pages.

Prologue 

“On September 28, 1986, our first wedding anniversary, my wife Nancy and I attended Pepper Adams’ memorial service at St. Peter’s Lutheran Church in New York City. Adams had waged a courageous battle against an aggressive form of lung cancer that was first diagnosed in March, 1985 while he was on tour in Sweden. On that somber yet bright Sunday afternoon St. Peter’s ash-paneled, multi-tiered sanctuary, tucked under the 915-foot-tall Citicorp Center, was packed with friends, musicians and admirers. The Reverend John Garcia Gensel presided over the service and many jazz greats performed and paid their final respects. 

Pepper Adams was a friend of mine but, sadly, I knew him only during the last two tumultuous years of his life. At that time, still recovering from a horrible leg accident that kept him immobilized for six months, Adams was separated from his wife and diagnosed with the cancer that would kill him. Although it was an undeniably miserable time for him it was, conversely, quite a fascinating ride for me. I was a 28-year-old grad student; a passionate jazz fan and record collector who was trying to find a jazz musician interested enough to participate with me on an oral history to satisfy my thesis requirement. 

Fortunately, because Adams was still recuperating at home, he had time to indulge me. What an ideal subject! Here was a major soloist who played with virtually everyone in jazz from the late 1940s onward yet hadn’t received the acclaim that he deserved. At our first interview in June, 1984 he was so gracious and prepared, so articulate and engaging, when retelling the events of his life. 

We met several times at his home in Brooklyn that summer. Eventually I amassed eighteen hours of tape-recorded interview material. Because Pepper’s recollection of his childhood and early career was so stunning in its depth and historical sweep I strongly felt that I had the makings of a valuable co-authored autobiography. 

Then, seven months later, Adams’ cancer was diagnosed. I visited him at St. Luke’s Hospital in Manhattan, when he began his chemotherapy regimen, and I saw him perform whenever he had a gig in New York. On one occasion, between sets at the Blue Note, I saw him bark at a pianist whom he misperceived was harassing him for a job. At Far and Away, a club in nearby Cliffside Park, New Jersey, I heard the suffering pour out of him during a stunning ballad performance that brought me to tears. 

Because his medical treatments and international travel schedule made our autobiographical project an impossibility, I decided that writing a full-length Pepper Adams biography would be the more appropriate undertaking. When Adams was home, either convalescing or in between gigs, I watched football games with him while going through documents and dubbing copies of his tapes. Although I was trying to gather as much information as I could in the little time that was left, it was improper for me to pry about the minutiae of his life. Despite my youthful curiosity I had to respect the fact that his cancer treatments made him feel awful and he was fighting to stay alive. 

In the summer of 1985 I moved three hours away to Boston. No longer able to visit with him nor catch any of his gigs we stayed in touch by telephone. Late that year I somehow learned that he had an upcoming four-night stint in bitterly cold Minneapolis. Concerned about his well-being, I urged a friend to attend as a courtesy to me. Thankfully, Dan Olson caught one of the performances and also taped both sets. During intermission he said hello for me, bought him a beer, and the two had a chance to chat at the bar. 

My final conversation with Pepper took place in August, 1986, only a few weeks before his death. Bedridden at home and under the watchful eye of a home-health aide, I called to see if there was anything I could do for him. His hospice caretaker answered and asked me to hold on for a moment. While I paced anxiously for at least five minutes, Adams somehow found the energy to drag himself to the telephone. In a sentence or two he acknowledged that time was short, thanked me for calling, said a final goodbye, and hung up. That was right around the time that Dizzy Gillespie called Adams on Mel Lewis’ behalf to say that one of Pepper’s dearest friends, the trumpeter Thad Jones, had just died of cancer in Copenhagen. 

About a year later, once I began interviewing Adams’ colleagues for this book, I spent a very memorable afternoon with the pianist Tommy Flanagan, Ella Fitzgerald’s longtime music director. I was meeting him for the first time and was completely star-struck. One of the last people to see Pepper alive, Flanagan especially wanted me to know that the transcripts of my Adams interviews were stacked high on Pepper’s nightstand just days before he died. At one point, while sitting next to Adams on the edge of his bed, Flanagan told me, Pepper awoke and tried feebly to push my interview materials towards him. As if he was brushing crumbs off a tabletop with the backside of his fingertips, Flanagan intensified his story by imitating Pepper’s debilitated attempt to move the heavy pile of papers in Flanagan’s direction. 

As you can imagine I was completely stunned by the many implications of Adams’ gesture. At first I was astounded, something that I must have readily expressed to Flanagan by my astonished gaze and frozen expression. Then my heart sagged and my eyes watered as I became increasingly aware that our months of work together somehow comforted Pepper at the very end of his life. 

During the next few weeks, as Flanagan’s story continued to wash over me, I noticed that I was taking my role as Pepper’s biographer a lot more seriously. As the proud guardian of Adams’ legacy, acutely aware of how important it was to Adams that his work carry on after him, my research acquired renewed vigor. Surely my resolve to do this book and all the other Pepper Adams projects that have preceded it was strengthened. But truth be told I’ve wanted to tell his story since that memorable Saturday afternoon when I conducted my first interview with him that completely changed my life for the better. 

Flanagan’s interview was one of more than 250 that I conducted, mostly in the late 1980s before my daughter was born. Over and over again my interviewees affirmed Adams as a complex individual — a hero, a genius, a model of grace, an intellectual, a virtuoso musician and stylist — yet someone also very hard to calibrate. The contradictions that they depicted equally fascinated me. Adams, they said, was an unworldly looking sophisticate, a white musician who sounded like a black one, and a dynamic, commanding saxophonist who was soft-spoken and mild-mannered off the bandstand. 

Many told me of his unprecedented agility on the baritone, how he “played it like an alto.” Before Adams the baritone sax was a cumbersome, fringe instrument rarely played outside of a big band. Today, because of his innovations, the baritone with a rhythm section is commonplace and no longer viewed as a novelty. 

Throughout his career Adams told radio interviewers that the pitch of the baritone was similar to his speaking voice. He felt that this to a certain extent explained his affinity for the instrument. But much more about him can be divined from his adoption of the baritone sax. For one thing, he greatly prized originality. Becoming a baritone saxophonist in the late 1940s gave him an opportunity to create a completely unique style on an infrequently heard instrument. Like Duke Ellington, whom he greatly admired, Adams could similarly stand way apart from everyone else. 

Paradoxically, despite enhancing the idiom and securing his place in history Adams’ fealty to his instrument also hurt him. The public’s inherent bias against low-pitched instruments and his status as a sideman stood in the way of him fronting a band or recording far more albums as a leader, particularly any with widespread distribution. As the pianist Roland Hanna once asked, Who knows what Pepper might have achieved had he instead chosen the tenor saxophone? 

Throughout his career Adams was exclusively a baritone saxophonist for hire. Refusing to double on the bass clarinet disqualified him from studio work that could have helped him immeasurably during the 1960s, when jazz gigs were sporadic. He never experimented with other instruments nor taught the saxophone (except an anomalous lesson here and there, or master classes sponsored by educational institutions). Always the fierce individualist, Adams’ lack of pragmatism interfered with other aspects of his life. 

When I began collaborating with Pepper Adams I knew that he was a superb instrumentalist but I had little idea of the breadth of his contribution, how much his colleagues adored him, or the degree to which his life intersected with so many of the greatest poets, writers, painters and musicians of his time. Much to my delight, because of our working relationship, the door to the international arts community burst open for me right after his death. I have had the remarkable privilege of speaking with so many of his esteemed colleagues, all of whom honored my interest in such a deserving artist. 

Undoubtedly, excerpts from my 250 taped interviews with Adams’ associates are the heart and soul of this book. You will read some of them speaking, at times with surprising tenderness, of their fondness and profound admiration for Pepper Adams. His death was a significant loss for them, and their remembrances of his last few years in particular are filled with sentimental accounts, sometimes with them breaking into tears. 

It was my interviewees who helped me answer so many of my pressing questions and, ultimately, grasp the totality of Adams’ character and many achievements. Their thoughtful responses — respectfully given quite a bit of space throughout Part One — allowed me to fill in many of the gaps left over from my interviews with Pepper. Despite his eagerness to share many aspects of his life he was reluctant to discuss his personal relationships, his time in the U.S. Army, or his heartfelt feelings about himself or others. Though Adams’ radio appearances and the magazines articles about him were of some help about his career, they too were of little use about his private life. For the most part I had to start from scratch. 

Thus, much like a fine Bordeaux, bringing this book to maturity took many years. To unravel the complexities of such a very private, enigmatic individual, put into perspective a lifetime of work, conceptualize a narrative structure that suited his life, and then transfer my mountain of data and personal observations about him into prose took me 36 years. I intentionally waited until I was finally ready to write the kind of book that I felt he deserved. That began in April, 2017 after I gave a series of lectures about him in Utah. 

Before I began writing, many years of research allowed me to finally comprehend Detroit’s jazz culture and socio-economic history. I was especially interested in understanding the growth of its automobile economy, its profound racial problems, and its illustrious jazz history dating back to the 1920s. As a friend of the underdog, I wanted to exhume some of the Detroit musicians who contributed significantly to its jazz scene but remain completely unknown. I was most curious about what it was that produced the extraordinary, postwar “band of brothers”: that clique of world-class jazz musicians who descended on New York City in the mid-1950s and so thoroughly reinvigorated the music. 

Regarding Rochester, New York, where Adams grew up, I wanted to know how the city came to be, how its economy was much better off than the rest of the country during the Great Depression, and what took place there during World War II when Adams was a teenager. I was equally curious about its jazz culture and the influence of the Eastman School of Music. The New York City jazz scene of the 1950s of course intrigued me too. More than just recounting Adams’ gigs and living arrangements, I wanted to understand how jazz cross-pollinated with the other arts, and define Pepper’s place within it. 

Mostly, however, I wanted to understand my subject: his personality traits, his strengths and weaknesses, how he filled a room, how he behaved with others, and what myths he created or believed about himself. I wanted to penetrate the veil of secrecy about his mother and his time in the army. I wanted to learn about his childhood, research his genealogy, and get my arms around his relationship with women. I wanted to grasp why, despite his exceptional musical gifts and the universal respect that he received from his colleagues, he wasn’t financially successful. Was it mainly because of the instrument that he played or was it due to the way he conducted himself or other factors? 

Looking back, my journey has been an extraordinary blessing. On one level, Adams’ music has immeasurably enriched me. Moreover, writing about him has satisfied my inveterate wish to contribute something tangible to the music that I love more than anything. But on a deeper level, my work has morphed from a passionate hobby to a raison d’etre. Along the way I’ve gotten to know so many Pepper Adams admirers, for whom he was a sage and musical beacon. Their friendship and support have given me a profound sense of interconnectedness with the world for which I am truly grateful. 

Knowing Adams personally and working on this demanding project has brought me as close to genius as I’m likely to experience in my lifetime. 

After researching his life, collecting his recordings, overseeing pepperadams.com, and unearthing his wonderful compositions for six recording sessions, in 2012 I produced a five-CD box set of Adams’ entire oeuvre. Featuring newly commissioned lyrics to his seven magnificent ballads, it was co-branded with my book Pepper Adams’ Joy Road: An Annotated Discography. Now, with this companion volume I at long last fulfill my promise to him and myself. 

Half biography and half musical study, this book is the culmination of more than 45 years of work. I’m extremely fortunate that John Vana, an alto saxophonist and ardent Pepper Adams fan, agreed to co-author Part Two. We first met in late 2013 at Western Illinois University, where he invited me to speak. Soon after my visit I asked him to write a major piece on Pepper’s early style for a proposed anthology. Not long afterwards John started requesting that I send him, bit by bit, every Pepper Adams LP, cassette and videotape in my collection. Clearly, listening only to Adams’ early recordings wasn’t enough. He wanted to examine Pepper’s entire output. Eventually, on a long drive from Atlanta to Orlando it occurred to me that John’s piece would likely cover some of the same terrain that I’d be exploring. Considering the demands of my day job, wouldn’t it be better for me to focus exclusively on the biography and have John (with my input and editorial oversight) write the second half? The anthology might not even happen, I pointed out, so what better place for his study? 

Our twofold aim, dear reader, is to showcase an important person who lived an extraordinary life and to contextualize his many unique contributions to Twentieth Century music. As you work your way through the book we urge you to listen to Pepper’s glorious saxophone playing. For the most part Chapters Five, Seven and Eight discuss what I consider to be Adams’ greatest recorded achievements. Additionally, a few of his early pre-1956 recordings are covered in Chapter Three. Eventually you will likely discover that some of my favorites diverge from those covered in Part Two that John Vana felt best illustrated important aspects of Pepper’s style. This independent approach was designed to extend the breadth of our study and give both of us a chance to more thoroughly express our points of view. Whether you are encountering Pepper Adams for the first time or are already hip to his career, be sure to enable the music links that are embedded throughout the text. Many of these extraordinary performances have never before been made available to the public. As always, thanks so much for your interest in Pepper Adams.” 

Gary Carner 

Braselton, Georgia 2020

Pepper Adams' Joy Road: An Annotated Discography - Gary Carner

© -Steven Cerra. Copyright protected; all rights reserved.

"On the baritone sax, he was the greatest we've ever had." 

- Phil Woods, alto saxophonist

''He was a rare genius on the horn." 

- Philip Levine, Poet Laureate of the United States 2011-2012

“Throughout jazz's illustrious history, live and studio performances have been frozen in time on recordings, preserving for listeners the musical traditions passed down from generation to generation by jazz's great improvisers. Because of recordings' pivotal role in conveying jazz's oral tradition, it can be argued that recordings are jazz's most basic and enduring artifact. If that's indeed the case, then discography — books that list these recordings — is jazz's most fundamental reference work.”

- Gary Carner, Pepper Adams’ Joy Road: An Annotated Discography

I have had my copy of Gary Carner’s Pepper Adams’ Joy Road: An Annotated Discography for some time now, but I wanted to “test drive it” before writing about it.

This is not a narrative biography of the life of baritone saxophonist, composer and arranger, Pepper Adams.

What it is can be found in the following explanation:

Pepper Adams’ Joy Road: An Annotated Discography is more than a compendium of sessions and gigs done by the greatest baritone saxophone soloist in history. It's a fascinating overview of Adams' life and times, thanks to colorful interview vignettes drawn from the authors unpublished conversations with Adams and other musicians. These candid observations from jazz greats about Adams and his colleagues reveal previously unknown, behind-the-scenes drama around legendary recordings made by David Amram, John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie, Elvin Jones, Thad Jones, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, Duke Pearson, and many others.

All types of sound material  —  studio recordings, private tapes and broadcasts, film scores, audience tapes, arid even jingles — are listed, and Adams' oeuvre is pushed back from 1956 to 1947, when Adams was sixteen years old, before he played baritone saxophone. Because of Carner's access to Adams' estate, just prior to its disposition in 1987, much new discographical material is included, now verified by Adams' date books and correspondence.

Since Adams worked in so many of the great bands of his era, Pepper Adams 'Joy Road: An Annotated Discography is a refreshing, sometimes irreverent walk through a large swath of jazz history. This work also functions as a nearly complete band discography of the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Orchestra, the most influential big band of its time: Adams was a founding member and stayed with the band until a year before Jones left to relocate in Denmark. Finally, Carner charts the ascent of Adams as an original, yet still underappreciated, composer, one who wrote forty-three unique works, nearly half of them after August 1977, when he left Jones-Lewis to tour the world as a soloist. Pepper Adams' Joy Road the first book ever published about Pepper Adams, is a companion to the authors forthcoming biography on Adams.”

For those of you who may not be familiar with him, Gary Carner is an independent jazz researcher, is the author of Jazz Performers and The Miles Davis Companion. From 1984 until Adams' death in 1986, Carner collaborated with Pepper Adams on his memoirs. Carner's research on Adams' career, collected at pepperadams.com, spans four decades. Carner has also produced all forty-three of Adams' compositions for Motema Music. For more about Gary, Pepper and the Motema Music project, I urge you to visit Gary’s Pepper Adams website.

I am by no means a Pepper Adams “Completist,” although I do have many of Pepper’s recordings including most of those that he made with the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Orchestra.

It was a sheer delight to play Pepper’s music while reading Gary’s annotations about what led up to the sessions and what was involved in making the music of a particular recording [including, in some cases, some very revealing personal anecdotes]. Because there are not very many listeners’ guides to the music, it’s hard to remember a time when I had a more satisfying experience listening to recorded Jazz of a particular musician [although Gary’s annotated discography on Pepper brought to mind my posting on Noal Cohen and Michael Fitzgerald fine biography/annotated discography - Rat Race Blues: The Musical Life of Gigi Gryce].

Not only was my listening pleasure enhanced by Gary’s attention to detail and his insights into Pepper’s music, but I also gained a fuller appreciation of what goes into the artistic life of a Jazz musician. Gary helps the reader understand Pepper Adams the person; a person who artistically expresses himself through the medium of Jazz.

Dan Morgenstern, the distinguished Jazz historian and now retired Director of The Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University further amplifies the focus of Gary’s study on Pepper in his Foreword to the book:

“While correct, "Annotated Discography" by no means says all about this fascinating record of a great musician's career and life. For decades, Gary Garner has devoted himself to tracing every musical step by Pepper Adams, from the very first teenaged endeavor, captured by a recording device, professional or amateur, issued or not. And he has enhanced the carefully gathered discographical details with additional information, musical, technical and personal, about the performance circumstances, more often than not obtained from participants and observers, as well as from interviews, published and personal, with the man himself.

Quite a man, too — not only one of the outstanding practitioners of the baritone saxophone, but a brilliant, complicated guy, whom I had the distinct pleasure of knowing. If there is a subtext here, it would be the fact that Pepper was the only white musician in the "Detroit Invasion" that descended upon the New York jazz scene in the late 1950s, accepted as a "primus inter pares" by his black colleagues—and friends. Early on, you will find an amusing anecdote about Alfred Lion's first reaction to Pepper's music: the founder of Blue Note Records refused to believe that the player on the demo tape the young baritonist had submitted was not black, going so far as to calling him a liar. Pepper would of course go on to participate in many a Blue Note session — if Lion ever apologized, we'll never know.

Good discographies are certainly very useful tools, but it is highly uncommon for a discography, even an annotated one, to also qualify as a good read. But Pepper Adams' Joy Road most definitely is. It brings the man as well as his music to life. Read—and listen—well!

—Dan Morgenstern”

Gary provides his own thoughts about his endeavor on behalf of Pepper and his music in these excerpts from the Preface to his book:

“Throughout jazz's illustrious history, live and studio performances have been frozen in time on recordings, preserving for listeners the musical traditions passed down from generation to generation by jazz's great improvisers. Because of recordings' pivotal role in conveying jazz's oral tradition, it can be argued that recordings are jazz's most basic and enduring artifact. If that's indeed the case, then discography — books that list these recordings — is jazz's most fundamental reference work.

A jazz musician's discography is a musical story. It shows the people he played with, the venues he played, the progression of his art over time, the maturation of his repertoire, the compositions he wrote. It functions as a life chronology and a buying guide.

What you have in your hands is Pepper Adams' story, as told by his recordings. [Emphasis, mine] It's the culmination of three decades of research on Adams' recorded work—from the LP and cassette era to VHS, CDs, DVDs, and now YouTube — that began in 1984, when I worked with Adams on his memoirs during the last two years of his life.

After much of our work was done, in 1985 I moved from New York to Boston to study jazz musicology with Lewis Porter. I was already well along on the biographical aspects of Adams' life, but I needed to learn from an expert about discographical research, and to round out my knowledge of jazz history, especially the 1920 and '30s. Apart from all that Lewis Porter taught me (and it was considerable), during that time I adopted an overarching strategy to my Adams research: I would, at the very least, try to interview everyone still alive who recorded with Adams, with the aim of verifying published and anecdotal discographical information. The end result was vastly improved data, plus two things I hadn't anticipated: The first was the discovery of many unknown recordings. The other was learning fascinating new details of well-known sessions, sometimes in glorious detail, that cast entirely new light on the creative process and on the business of jazz.

While busy making sense of this, in 1987 Evrard Deckers, an independent researcher working in Belgium, asked me to review the discography he was compiling on Pepper Adams. After a few years of correspondence, and a trip to Belgium, in 1992 Deckers and I decided to collaborate on a co-authored work. It was a wonderful division of labor, since I'd focus on my archival materials and North American research while Deckers could mine the many resources available in Europe. This was before the internet and Google era, so geography mattered far more than it does now. Evrard Deckers contributed much new information, especially regarding reissues, European radio broadcasts, and audience recordings, before he died in his sleep at home in 1997.

In the fifteen years since his death, however, this book has become an entirely different entity. The biggest change is the addition of transcribed interview material that took me two years to complete. It occurred to me that some of my interview material only pertained to Adams' discography, and was too nuanced to be used in an Adams biography. If not used here, it would never be published.

Also new to the manuscript, I've identified Adams' solos, so that listeners can focus on these recordings, as opposed to those he did as a sideman or studio player. Moreover, much new recorded material, and a new generation of reissues, has been released since 1997, necessitating a great deal of additional research.

The format of the discography, too, has been completely overhauled to better conform to current standards and make it more legible. Annotations and footnotes, for example, have been redesigned, LP titles have been added, and subtle changes have been instituted, such as adding the country of origin and identifying 78s, 45s, LPs, CDs, VHS, and DVDs.

Joy Road is so named not just to riff on one of Adams' great compositions. I chose it to also capture the essence of Adams' life on the road, playing jazz with a cast of thousands, some of whom are quoted in this book. It's also my tribute to Adams' great recorded oeuvre, his 43 magnificent compositions, and the joy he derived from playing the baritone saxophone.

Much about Adams' personality is woven throughout the annotations, especially among younger musicians that witnessed Adams' final illness. In a sense, I've tried, like documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, to infuse my work with a kind of "emotional archeology." Those who are interested in getting a still deeper understanding of Adams' life might enjoy my companion volume, a full-length biography of Adams, tentatively entitled In Love with Night. I'm planning to finish it well before 2030, the centennial of Pepper Adams' birth. In the meantime, please consult www.pepperadams.com, the website I maintain as the historical record of his life and work.

Gary Carner

Braselton, Georgia

Far too few, significant Jazz musicians have discographical guides to their recorded work. Thanks to Gary Carner’s dedication and his abilities at compilation and annotation, Pepper Adams fortunately is not one of them as is attested to in Pepper Adams 'Joy Road: An Annotated Discography.

Pepper is featured on the following video as a member of pianist Don Friedman’s quintet performing Sonny Rollins' Audubon with Jimmy Knepper [tb], Pepper Adams [bs], George Mraz [b] and Bill Hart [d].