Unreleased Art Volume 1: The Complete

Despite his precarious health, wrecked by decades of doping, Art Pepper was performing and recording at a furious pace during his last seven years, trying to make up for lost time. There is a tremendous amount of material already issued from those years -- and since this initial release from Laurie Pepper's label Widow's Taste is designated Vol. 1, there must be much more on the shelf. Hopefully the rest of the booty is as good as this one, a souvenir of Pepper's last tour of Japan, where he had become the country's number one jazz alto sax star even before he returned to performing. If there is any trace of Pepper's health problems, it can only be heard in his mumbling introductions, for his alto sax playing is completely unimpaired seven months before his death. Backed by one of his favorite quartets -- with George Cables on piano, David Williams on bass, and Carl Burnett on drums -- Pepper is extraordinary throughout, whether sending up rockets into the outside, running the bop line, playing lyrically, or getting down to basic soul-jazz. According to the discography in Pepper's autobiography, the heat-seeking rendition of "Straight Life" had apparently been released before on the cheapo LaserLight label, but the rest of the material on the two CDs is officially out for the first time. The funky-butt marathon "Red Car" might come as a surprise since jazz chroniclers never give Pepper his due as a soul-jazzer, but he gets it completely, swinging madly at all times. His lyrical gifts were rarely put forth more passionately than on Gordon Jenkins' "Goodbye," and he justifiably pats himself on the back verbally after his performance of "Body and Soul." This is a rather informal album, probably never intended for release and definitely intended to end-run the bootleggers. The sound is amazingly decent for a concert recorded off the soundboard onto a cassette. There are some serious glitches: "For Freddie" fades out after only 41 seconds, only to reemerge when the performance had moved on to a rather different musical context (Laurie Pepper says this was because they had to turn the cassette over!), and "Landscape" begins with a fade-in to a piano solo in progress. But these are forgivable, given the value of what the young anonymous Japanese sound engineer had been able to preserve. ~ Richard S. Ginell