Art Pepper-Intensity [1960]

Art Pepper - Intensity

1. I Can't Believe That You're in Love With Me
2. I Love You
3. Come Rain or Come Shine
4. Long Ago (And Far Away)
5. Gone With the Wind
6. I Wished on the Moon
7. Too Close for Comfort
8. Five Points

Personnel: Art Pepper (alto saxophone); Dolo Coker (piano); Jimmy Bond (bass); Frank Butler (drums).

Recorded at Contemporary Records, Los Angeles, California on November 23 & 25, 1960.


This 1960 LP is one of Pepper's best and, if I'm not mistaken, the last session he did that year before serving yet another prison sentence for drug possession. It's really a simple pick-up quartet date, featuring the underutilized pianist Dolo Coker, who demonstrates a much finer touch here than the self-taught Carl Perkins, who accompanied the altoist on THE ART OF PEPPER.

As I've noted already in that post, Art Pepper is pretty much unclassifiable. Geography aside, he isn't really part of any West Coast school. He was never "cool," stylistically speaking, nor was he particularly attracted to the harmonic abstractions of many of his fellow Kentonites.

Pepper wasn't any kind of outsider either--just a thoroughly alive, inventive mainstream musician who played at his peak everytime he picked up his axe. Ironic considering his lifelong drug habit - there's none of that detachment, of being in the "zone," which characterized many heroin-using jazz musicians of the 50s.