Art Pepper Meets the Rhythm Section

In Cultural Amnesia, one of my favorite late-night books, Clive James calls bebop "the post-war musical development which tried to ensure that jazz would no longer be the spontaneous sound of joy."

He develops this criticism at length in the book's superb essay on Duke Ellington. James's disdain for modern jazz — by which he seems to mean the primary developments in jazz after 1950 — can be summarized in five words: You can't dance to it.

There's truth to that criticism — but not enough to save it from being facile. In the first place, it was never jazz's ambition to be the "spontaneous sound of joy." The fact that jazz managed to be the sound of joy at all, ever, is one of its miracles, given its origins. But those origins ended with World War II, when black America decided — in large part, through its art — that if black people could be called upon to die for their country, their country could be called upon to regard them as human beings.

So James is being both facile and unjust by indicting John Coltrane, for instance, for not giving us dance music midst the dogs and deputies of Selma.

Coltrane was an artist to the extent that he told the truth, and he would have been a liar, at the heigh of his powers, had he merely played joy.

Nevertheless! One must concede that jazz lost its hold on the popular imagination after 1960, and it's not unreasonable to suggest that one of the reasons for that loss was that you couldn't dance to it. Charlie Parker and John Coltrane, the two giants of post-war jazz innovation, did not, for the most part, want to be danced to. They wanted to be heard.


But there was a fellow saxophone player out in sunny California who still played from a need to swing.

Art Pepper, like many of his jazz contemporaries — including Parker and Coltrane — led a broken, desperate life (chronicled in harrowing detail in his autobiography, Straight Life). As a consequence, Pepper left behind a body of work that's tragically fragmented. Yet it's a body of work that calls out to be danced to.

Pepper didn't possess Parker's technical virtuosity (no one did) or Coltrane's artistic audacity, but he had a better gift for melody than either of them and a generosity to his playing that shouldn't be mistaken as a need to please or as dishonest or dated. Pepper's music — often underrated, I suspect, because he was white — is a treasure, and Art Pepper Meets the Rhythm Section, which gives us Pepper in studio with Miles Davis' now-legendary rhythm section (Red Garland, Paul Chambers, Philly Joe Jones), is a breathtaking moment in the history of American art.