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Jim Pepper / Amina Claudine Myers / Anthony Cox / Leopoldo Fleming: Afro Indian Blues

By Donald Elfman

It's American roots music in flying colors as four simpatico musicians dig deeply at a 1991 Austrian jazz festival. Native American (Craw) Jim Pepper, African-Americans Amina Claudine Myers and Anthony Cox and Puerto Rican Leopoldo Fleming wowed the audience with “native music--the blues, jazz, Indian and African music that seems all about the passion and power to unite. The concert opens with--what else?--the blues. It's basically Billie Holiday's “Fine and Mellow, and is a down-home groove. Myers ...

Jim Pepper: Polar Bear Stomp

By Bill Siegel

Jim Pepper Polar Bear Stomp Universal Music (Austria) 2004

“Jim didn't want me to write about the music, since he thinks the music has the right to speak for itself. He also didn't want me to write a biography; instead, only my impressions." Enja Records co-founder and Jim Pepper producer, Horst Weber.

How fitting that Jim Pepper's friend and professional associate Horst Weber remembers that it was by impressions that Pepper wanted ...

Jim Pepper: Afro Indian Blues

By Bill Siegel

Amina Claudine Myers & Jim Pepper Afro Indian Blues PAO Records 2006

Why now? Why review a recording of a concert that happened fifteen years ago? For one, because it's taken this long for anyone to get around to releasing the performance on CD. But even more importantly, because this is a major event and should get all the exposure possible.

In 1991, at the time of the gig, Pepper was already sick with ...

There Are No Coincidences: A Tale of Synchronicity

By Bill Siegel

Or Meditations on Jim Pepper, Chief Bey, Milford Graves, a Heron and a Flock of Geese

(excerpts from this appeared in the Winter/Spring 2005 issue of Planet Jazz magazine)

If anything is a coincidence, then everything must be; And if everything is coincidence, then surely nothing really happens by chance.

Item: One of the first times I listened to saxophonist Jim Pepper ("Comin' and Goin,'" from the album of the same name). I was driving on a crowded ...

Driving with Jim Pepper

By Bill Siegel

It was a dark and stormy night. No really, it was dark and it was stormy. I was driving home, maybe halfway from Leicester, Massachusetts to Nashua, New Hampshire. Ordinarily, it was maybe an hour-and-a-quarter's drive, but in this rain it would take at least two hours, I guessed. It hadn't been a particularly snowy winter, but as spring approached it seemed that nearly every weekend that I made that trek it was raining. Raining hard.

There are stretches along ...

Jim Pepper Tribute at the Portland Jazz Festival

By Bill Siegel

The huge pipe organ on the stage at Portland, Oregon's First Unitarian Church was imposing, even awe-inspiring, but that wasn't the cause of all the buzz among the 400-plus people in the audience on Friday night, February 11. They were there to kick off the Portland Jazz Festival with a tribute concert dedicated to Native American saxophonist and Portland son, Jim Pepper. Pepper was known for taking the songs and rhythms of Native America, and integrating them with African and ...