Art Pepper Quartet - Begin the Beguine
September arrives with a blast of sax, on and for the occasion of the centennial of one of the most beloved Jazz cats that will ever bend a reed. I know I covered him a year ago but he bears repeating, especially on his Hundred Year anniversary.
He began in the band of Benny Carter in the early 1940s, and by the time a decade had gone by he was polling in Down Beat as second on alto only to Charlie Parker, which is a little like if he'd have had a baseball bat and been compared favorably to Babe Ruth.
Back and forth trips to prison for hard drugs then began to derail his ascent.
Come on, if you saw this guy coming you might cross the street. Please don't hit me with your saxophone, mister!
There, that's better. Much more innocent looking, right?
Every time he'd get let out of jail, he'd come back stronger and ascend to the pinnacle of the polls once again. His life could and should be a movie.
His wife, who has championed his music for the almost 45 years since his death, has been threatening for years to make one.
You can hear her tipsily hassling him between tunes on this tape I worked on for the last 72 hours.
Ah yes, this tape. Did I do a good job on it? I really don't know. Maybe the Art Pepper heads will set me ablaze for crimes against standards.
But Art Pepper ROIOs are hard to come by. Most are from 1981 and the aforementioned Laurie Pepper has ably reissued a lot of them as legit things, with her unbelievably awesome Unreleased Art series.
So when I found this complete concert, as yet unreleased, on Soulseek that purported to be a matrix of soundboard and audience flavors, I said Let's Go For It. Even though it sounded like the instruments other than the drums were recorded from a single microphone stationed in the men's restroom of the club, and not even in the stall closest to the stage.
Some of the tunes, the drums just flat out eclipsed the rest of the band to such an extent I almost needed those special, side-sealed sunglasses they have for that stuff.
Anyway I split it and hit it, using the AI stemsplitter Audacity magic plugin to break the drums apart from it all, whereupon I set about attempting to rebalance the thing and get more than mere bathroom stall tone from the sax/piano/bass triumvirate struggling to emerge.
There was also this buzz coming and going in it, which I tried to ameliorate as best as possible, but which couldn't be removed from the music without taking the high end with it. In addition, it's got a lotta audience chattering in it, owing to that it might be a desk feed on the drums and stage mics for the rest of the dudes, I dunno for sure.
At the end of the day it makes not much difference, because this is an all-star band just wailing their asses off for two full hours of performance peak. When you hear Art go off like he does, you understand why he's the galactic level of musical deity people remember him for, as he immolates the room with effortless shifts from gut-shredding Blues to the sob-inducingly lyrical to speed-blinding Bop like he's James Bond working the stick on a vintage Aston Martin.
Art Pepper
Blues Alley
Washington, D.C. USA
4.22.1981
01 Landscape
02 Art talk & band introductions
03 Good Bait
04 Yardbird Suite
05 Patricia
06 Scrapple from the Apple
07 unidentified title
08 unidentified title
09 Begin the Beguine
10 Darn That Dream
11 Now's the Time
Total time: 2:01:40
disc break goes after Track 06
Art Pepper - alto saxophone & clarinet
Gene Perla - bass
Barry Altschul - drums
Milcho Leviev - piano
soundboard/audience matrix of indeterminate origin
remuxed, rebalanced, edited, denoised, repaired & remastered by EN, August 2025
801 MB FLAC/direct link
Like I was saying, this show is not just about Art and some anonymous guys up there with him. Every dude is an all-star and there are wild moments from everybody. But Art just takes it beyond the ionosphere and into realms of ecstasy, with audients calling out for Christ -- and generally carrying on as if He has returned with an alto saxophone to entertain the masses -- in the middle of solos and so forth.
Hopefully I didn't mess it up too bad! It was hard labor, born of love and these vape pens. I'll be back with more milestone birthdays and even more iconic centennials soon, but don't let any milquetoast mayonnaise that might be on the menu distract the palate. It's the 100th birthday of a legendary Maestro, so go ahead and spice up your Labor Day BBQ with some pure and powerful Pepper.--J.
9.1.1925 - 6.5.1982
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