My
father and my wife have both informed me that they simply pass over the parts
of this blog that are focused on music.
That’s about half my readership so it is certainly risky or at least
self indulgent to spend time with it every day. Conversely, when my father takes the time to make a jazz
recommendation, I do tend to pay attention. He’d read an article in Harpers that looked at both Art
Pepper’s autobiography “Straight Life” and his wife Laurie Pepper’s autobiography
“Why I Stayed With a Junkie Jazz Man,” which compared the prior’s writing to
towering trees like Dickens, Joyce and Dostoyevsky. I told my old man, who likes to start getting his Christmas
shopping done shortly after Labor Day that he need look no further for me.
The Harper Article by Lili Anolik starts out with her own
nine year-old engagement with the book that immediately made me think of my
daughters and had me ready to dive in.
Not so ready though to make me immediately pull out my card and sign up
for a subscription, which is what Harpers demands after the first enticing
paragraph. I certainly can’t blame
them. http://harpers.org/archive/2014/09/the-tale-of-the-tape/
In the mean time I’ve been checking the man’s music and
online bio out. Lauded as an alto
sax, bop luminary second only to Bird, by Downbeat in the year 1952, his career
was frequently interrupted by prison stints associated with his heroin
addiction. Junk was so prolific in that scene it’s amazing anything was
recorded at all. I’d listened to
some early fifties recordings last night.
Right now is a 1960 release called "Intensity." The tune “I Cant Believe Your In Love With Me” he sounds
bright and confident. Looking, the
Wiki page mentions a movie "Art Pepper: Notes From a Jazz Survivor” which, in
this magical age I can instantaneously find on Youtube and enjoy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFyea4Y0Jvc
It’s remarkable how similar his voice sounds to my ears, with his
post-smack drawl, to Joe Albany to whom there is also a lovely, near-the-end tribute movie.
The documentary is remarkable, tragic, and calmly human. All the more so as his wife features prominently and powerfully. He mentions how close he feels to
death, as "you never know what happens when you're my age." He must be about only a few years older
than I am now, when he says that at fifty-five. He
dies in 1982 at the age of 56 in LA, not far from where he was born. There is a long segue about his
daughter Patricia whom he hadn’t seen her since she was twelve and then, when
he connected with her twenty years later when she had two kids. The daughter said she read his
autobiography and apparently called him a rapist and a racist. Hardly a 孝思不匮[1] scene. He
replied to her: “If that’s all you got out of the book, than you’re so stupid I
don’t ever want to talk to you again.” Yearning a life to reconnect, perhaps on both sides, only to such a place. That must be some marrow-level blues.
Today should be the day that I finally get my hands on my
own used sax from the closet of the school band room. I will certainly think of Art Pepper as well as how many
other people when I try to reacquaint myself with the instrument and a scale or
two. I better go pick her up if I
expect to see it, as she won’t carry out a trumpet in one hand and a sax in the
other on her way out from the band room.
Yesterday I was riding around in circles near Chang Ping
between the fifth and sixth ring road with an old cab driver who was lost. The person giving the directions
couldn’t explain things to him well.
And me in the back seat, sweating, getting increasingly frustrated, with
the ninth pull over to the side to ask pedestrians, who had no idea, where it
was we were supposed to go. I’ve
been up all night catching up on work and today and I’m not going to any
meetings in any new neighborhoods with yet another new, old driver. Rest is beckoning.
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