Art Pepper: Smack Up

There are certain players and recordings that make an indelible first impression. The circumstances usually involve a degree of ignorance: Who is that? What is he (or she) doing? How did this recording escape notice when so many others did not?

A very personal reaction to Art Pepper. Urgency. Intensity. Listen to me. Before the name, there was the sound and the piercing tone that can only come out of some dark emotional depth. A listener did not have to know much about Pepper's checkered history—anything really—it all came out in his playing. If someone came late to Pepper, the question was inevitably why only now?

Happenstance, age, taste, geography. Pleasant bourgeois sensibilities, perhaps. When the autobiography Straight Life (1979, with Laurie Pepper) made its appearance, even its title had to be construed: clean (as in drug free); unvarnished (as in "this is the way it was"); and no chaser. Nothing to ease the pain before a certain numbness set in. Hearing a musician enjoining an accomplice to "kill that mayate" in a robbery attempt or describing a sex partner's anatomy and response is about as straight as it gets. Empathy may have been hard to come by, but a kind of nausea straight out of Sartre was understandable. Hate the sin, love the sinner. With luck.

"Smack Up" is an uncomfortable title for a journey into darkness, especially if it hits a listener expecting something different. Someone may shake their head at the allusion to a heroin fix, but, that said, listen with fascination anyway. It is Pepper at his probing, stabbing best, trading with trumpet Jack Sheldon and driving with a killer rhythm section. "Las Cuevas de Mario" is interesting, shifting from 5 to 4 and back. And, to make the point, Frank Butler playing an insistent figure of 5 to close. "A Bit of Basie" is straight-ahead blues, no fooling around.

The impression is that Pepper's experiences—all of them—come out in his playing: race, drugs, the road, sexuality, and that this accounts for the near frantic abandon that one sometimes hears. The result is not inevitably dark. "Tears Inside" is, aside from Ornette Coleman's original, a favorite, with Jack Sheldon's varied articulations and a sort of teasing swagger adding plenty to the mix. Pepper too, as Leonard Feather's liner notes highlight, seems to come upon an intriguing figure toward the close, with many rhythmic and harmonic variations. This is as an original, swinging, and witty a version as you will hear.

As an aside, earlier releases of Smack Up contained alternates takes of "Solid Citizens" that do not figure here. The Craft production values are, as usual, very high. Smack Up is part of the Contemporary Records Acoustic Sounds Series (180g vinyl LP) along with Art Pepper Meets The Rhythm Section (Contemporary, 1957), an essential recording from the first half of Pepper's career. Some things are indeed not be missed, and this is one of them.

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