What Dues He Had to Pay

By Christopher Porterfield

Saxophonist Art Pepper's fight back from junkie to jazzman

Art Pepper was tense and perspiring, and he had not played a note yet. From the bandstand, he looked out at the opening-night crowd in Fat Tuesday's, a sleek Manhattan jazz club. "If you only knew the route," he said to them, "what I had to do, to get here."

They may not have known the grim details of that route: the heavy drinking at 15, the heroin addiction at 25, the two broken marriages, the ten years in hospitals, prisons and other institutions, the illness and waste and frequent despair. But they could see some of its ravages in Pepper's face, which was taut and sallow under his skullcap haircut, almost a death mask. And they could hear some of its pain in the soulful, impassioned solos that Pepper poured out when he picked up his alto sax.

At 54, Art Pepper had come back, as he had had to many times before. Last week, following his engagement at Fat Tuesday's and at clubs in such other cities as Philadelphia and Washington, he wound up a rare swing through the East with a performance for the Atlanta Jazz Alliance. He had a first-rate trio in tow: Pianist Milcho Leviev, Bassist Bob Magnusson and Drummer Carl Burnett. His repertory ranged brilliantly over a variety of moods and rhythms, from standards (What Is This Thing Called Love?) to appealing originals (Ophelia, Blues for Blanche), and from wistful ballads (Over the Rainbow) through funky Latin beats (Mambo Koyama) to awesome, high-speed pyrotechnics (Cherokee). Amazingly, after all his debilitating periods of obscurity and silence, his full, ringing tone was unimpaired, his melodic gift intact, his instinct for pace and structure still solid.

If anything, instead of deteriorating over the years, Pepper's style has expanded and deepened. He has always something, an original; but in the late 1940s and early '50s, when his recordings with Stan Kenton, Shorty Rogers and other West Coast jazzmen first brought him to prominence, his sound combined traces of Lester Young's cool obliqueness with Charlie Parker's harmonic and rhythmic complexities. Later he took on a darker, sometimes harsher quality as he came under the influence of John Coltrane's stabbing, honking outcries and modal sheets of sound. Last week's performances showed how successfully he has brought all these strains together within a distinctive, fiery lyricism.

Pepper's life has been an ordeal of "searching for something and never stopping, never being satisfied," as he put it in Straight Life, the unsparing, tape-recorded autobiography (Schirmer; 1979) that he assembled with his third wife, Laurie. His parents, a hard-bitten merchant seaman and a teen-age bride, began breaking up shortly after Art's birth in suburban Los Angeles (which his mother tried to prevent by aborting herself). Art's lonely upbringing was entrusted to an unloving grandmother. He found an outlet in the clarinet at nine and switched to the saxophone at twelve. He proved such a natural that he was soon jamming around town with musicians like Zoot Sims and Dexter Gordon. At 17 he was married and playing lead alto with Stan Kenton.

Already a user of alcohol, marijuana and various pills, he started taking heroin while on tour with Kenton. It gave him the only relief he could find from the sexual anxieties, craving for affection, anger and self-doubt that raged inside him. "If this is what it takes," he decided, "then this is what I'm going to do, whatever dues I have to pay."

Pay he did. Over the next 16 years, because of narcotics convictions (and his refusal to buy his freedom by informing on other junkies), he spent more time in prison than out, including two terms in San Quentin. His wife divorced him. He remarried, but his second wife became suicidal over losing him to drugs, then decided to join him by becoming an addict herself. Later, after their estrangement, she died of cancer. Although Pepper played sporadically with top groups and managed to cut some notable albums (Art Pepper Meets the Rhythm Section, Art Pepper Plus Eleven), he sank deeper into the junkie underworld. When he could find no work and had run out of instruments and other possessions to sell, he turned to burglary to support his habit. His days became a deadly cycle of stealing, scoring, shooting up and sleeping; sometimes he awoke to find the needle from his last fix still stuck in his arm.

In 1968 he resurfaced briefly in Buddy Rich's big band, but had to quit when he was hospitalized with a ruptured spleen (the result of a congenital blood disease). Sick, broke and mortally exhausted, he finally checked himself into the Synanon rehabilitation center in Santa Monica. When he told a doctor what his daily intake was (heroin, Numorphan, uppers, sleeping pills and a gallon of wine), the physician said: "It's a wonder you're still alive."

Pepper looks back on the Synanon program as no more than a mixed success except in one respect: it brought him together with Fellow Resident Laurie Miller, a Berkeley-educated photographer. After Pepper left the center in 1971 and enrolled in a methadone program, she joined him in a rented two-bedroom house out side Los Angeles. With Laurie serving as bolsterer, buffer, secretary and manager, he began again the long, tortuous climb toward his rightful place in jazz. There were lapses back into drugs and illness, but he kept trying. He resumed recording in 1975 and made his first appearance at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1977. He toured Japan in 1978 and 1979.

Today, says Pepper, except for gradually diminishing doses of methadone and an antidepressant, he is off all drugs, including alcohol. He is suffering from, among other things, cirrhosis of the liver and a hernia that his physical condition makes inoperable. He figures that "each performance I give could be my last." This, plus his wife's constant presence, is what convinces him that he will finally be able to stick to the straight life after so many failures. "I've had so much time taken away from me, and there's not much left," he says. "I want to do it now. I have to do it now."

--Christopher Porterfield

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