Pepper Adams in the Army, and His Rare First Recordings—Guest Post by Gary Carner, 1 of 2 (+Bonus with Flanagan)

(Paying Subscribers, as a bonus item at the bottom, you will hear the tune that was the recording debut of both Adams and Tommy Flanagan, with the legendary Charles Burrell on bass!)

[Gary Carner was my first graduate student ever. This was at Tufts University, before I moved on to a professorship at Rutgers. By 1985, Gary had already conducted lengthy interviews with baritone saxophonist Pepper Adams (1930-1986) that were published in the magazine Cadence and formed the basis of his masters thesis in English at City College of New York. At Tufts, Carner did a second masters degree with me, in music, with a thesis about Adams. Then, over the next thirty years, he researched Adams’s life and work and interviewed over 250 musicians. The results included a detailed annotated discography and an in-depth ebook biography, from which these essays are adapted. Purchasers of the biography get access to 450 recordings from 1947 to 1986, about half of which were never before available. An abridged version of the biography is available in paperback. Carner also assembled an authoritative Adams website with some rare recordings, audio interviews, and much more, and an Instagram page. He produced six CD recordings of contemporary musicians performing all of Adams’s compositions. He has also initiated a book on Adams’s music, currently under production. Here is Gary’s essay:}

Pepper Adams in the Army, Part 1

By Gary Carner

Pepper Adams was born Park Frederick Adams III on October 8, 1930 in Highland Park, Michigan—essentially greater Detroit. Both of his parents had been married before. When he was about a year old, they separated for financial reasons, and he moved with his mother, Cleo, to her birthplace, Columbia City, Indiana. Sometime in 1933, Adams began playing piano. A year later, they left for Rome, New York, his father’s birthplace, where the three of them were reunited. They moved yet again in 1935 to the Rochester area. Pepper’s father died in 1940 after a long period of decline, but he and his mother stayed in and around Rochester for about another 7 years.

Adams was educated in the public schools. In 1941, during sixth grade, he joined his school band after learning on his own how to play clarinet. Throughout the following year he took saxophone lessons (it’s not clear whether he played soprano or C-melody), and also joined his instructor’s marching band. He added tenor sax to his repertory in 1943. Soon he was gigging around Rochester. He also frequently sat in at local jam sessions, at least once with both Coleman Hawkins and Oscar Pettiford, who became early advocates of his playing.

Pepper went to see the Duke Ellington band during its engagement at Rochester’s Temple Theater, March 3 through 5, 1944. He spoke with saxophonist Skippy Williams, who was with Duke from August 1943 to May 1944. He introduced Adams to cornetist Rex Stewart, who in turn took the delighted young musician backstage to meet Harry Carney and other band members. Stewart at the time was Adams’s favorite soloist in the band because of his harmonic ingenuity, and he became a lifelong mentor. Adams also took a sax lesson with Williams during that gig.

Adams’s mother had remarried in 1943, but, sadly, her third husband died in 1945. Skippy Williams had moved to New York City, and in March 1947, Pepper and Cleo left Rochester and spent the entire month in midtown Manhattan, at the Hotel Edison, while Adams studied with Williams. Then, in April they moved to Detroit. Adams, on clarinet, with Tommy Flanagan on piano, made their first recording session together there around the end of September 1947 (included as a bonus item for Paying Subscribers, below).

In December, Pepper bought his first baritone saxophone, a Bundy model. He found that there was a demand for that instrument, and over the next few years he joined Lucky Thompson’s big band and rehearsed and gigged with many great young players including Tommy Flanagan, Elvin Jones, Donald Byrd, Barry Harris, Billy Mitchell, Paul Chambers, Kenny Burrell, and Wardell Gray, who served as an important mentor. In 1950 he traded in his Bundy for a new Selmer “Balanced Action” baritone, which he played exclusively for nearly thirty years.

In 1951, he saw his name on a roll of forthcoming draftees and decided to enlist, because that allowed him to apply to be in the band. He passed the audition and enlisted in the Army in mid-July 1951. He was stationed at Fort Leonard Wood in the Ozark Mountains of Central Missouri. At first, everybody, including musicians, “had to go through the same training,” said saxophonist Norb Grey. “Six weeks of Infantry Training and then eight of Combat Engineer.”

Before the Army, Pepper had played with Charlie Parker at a few Detroit jam sessions. Evidently, Parker remembered him and liked what he heard, because in mid-August, while still in Basic Training, Adams unexpectedly received an emergency furlough concocted by Parker. Bird had called the base, posing as the physician of Adams’s mother, so that Pepper could play a gig with him on August 24th. “He managed to get me called to a field telephone during Bivouac Week to say he was playing in Kansas City the following weekend,” said Adams. (Bivouac Week is off-base encampment training, during which soldiers learn to improvise temporary shelter.) He continued:

It’s near the end of the month and I don’t have any money left. So, he says, “If you can get there, stay with me and I’ll give you the bus fare back to Leonard Wood.” It’s about 180 miles or something. Come the weekend I hitchhike to Kansas City, arrive around seven on a Friday evening, call up the club, and say, “Is Charlie Parker there?” “No, and the son-of-a-bitch will never work here again!” Clang! [The irate club owner slammed down his telephone handset.] Here I am in Kansas City. [With] $3!

As a backup plan, Adams had brought the telephone number of a mother of one of his Army buddies. With the money he borrowed from her, Pepper got enough to eat, saw a current film, spent two nights at the YMCA, and returned to the base on Sunday. Despite his disappointment about not getting to play and hang with Parker, Adams remained forever proud of Bird’s invitation.

Two months later, once he finished Combat Engineer training, Adams joined the 6th Armored Division’s Special Service Section, the largest of Leonard Wood’s three bands. “We were both assigned as clarinet players,” said saxophonist Doc Holladay. “Neither one of us were assigned as saxophone players but we played saxophone in every other capacity.” As Adams joked later in an interview with Canadian radio host Ted O’Reilly, “I was playing clarinet largely because it’s much easier to march with than a baritone saxophone. I finally developed, on clarinet, the perfect field-clarinet sound: If I play a trill, it sounds like a telephone ringing. It’s just awful! For years after that I never even touched the clarinet.”

Customarily, the Special Service Section consisted of 68 musicians, but during the Korean War it had swelled to eighty men. Besides Adams and saxophonist Ron Kolber, a few talented jazz players were in their company. “There were other excellent guys from the main bands of the day but Pepper stood out,” said platoon member Al Gould. “What a fantastic musician! You couldn’t help but have that rub off at all times.” A few jazz big bands were also organized at Leonard Wood, but Adams was prevented from joining because some felt his playing was too loud and aggressive. That “didn’t offend Pepper, since he already knew more about the music and who he was than the entire band put together,” raved Holladay. Undaunted, Pepper either jammed at the white service club with those who appreciated his talent or sat in with more accomplished jazz players at the segregated black service club, especially when Tommy Flanagan was in attendance. Sometimes when soloing on a 12-bar blues, Adams would cycle through all twelve keys, one chorus at a time, then, on the thirteenth chorus, cycle through all twelve keys, one key per bar. “It would blow everybody’s mind,” said Holladay. “It was just phenomenal!”

“We just lived music all the time,” said Norb Grey. Adams and Holladay sometimes took the two-hour bus ride together to St. Louis to hear weekend symphonic concerts. Servicemen in uniform could attend virtually for free, only having to pay a modest amount to cover Missouri sales tax. On their first trip, they heard the St. Louis Symphony perform Brahms, and Ernst Krenek’s Elegy for Orchestra. “Pepper gave a complete discourse on the music to be played that night as well as a musicological exposition of the life and milieu of the composer Krenek, a lecture far more informed than any I had heard in my undergraduate days at Phillips [University, in Oklahoma],” wrote Holladay. “All of this information flowed from him as naturally as if he had been talking about the weather.”

Throughout the first half of 1952 Adams stayed on base, practiced relentlessly, and performed with Special Services only when required. Although at heart he was an introvert, who practiced alone in his bunk with a near monomaniacal fervor, when called upon to do so he was also an enthusiastic team player. It’s possible that his practice routine was based on what he learned from Charlie Parker. In his teens, Bird reportedly practiced fifteen to sixteen hours a day for three to four years, learning the blues and “I Got Rhythm” in all twelve keys, playing scales in each direction, and mastering “Cherokee” at a super-fast clip. Adams “had all these tunes, just the chord changes,” said Kolber. “They were all in ‘concert’ [piano key]. He got them from Barry Harris.” Harris was about the same age, but Pepper respectfully called him “Uncle Barry.”

“Pepper used the service as a school, in a sense,” said Holladay:

He’d pick a tune and he would learn that tune to where he really had it by memory. . . . He’d start playing it in all different keys, so he had that tune in all kinds of keys and be comfortable with it. Then he’d start playing off the changes of the tune, and he’d . . . [do] that until he’d get the changes down to where he could run the changes on the tune. Then he’d start to run that in all the keys. He would digest a tune, just take it apart, make it his own, and then he would go on to the next tune. All the time he was in the service, in the band where I observed him, he was constantly doing that. A new tune every day or two. He could play for hours. The rest of the guys would go out to hang out and party, and Pepper would be in there taking a tune apart.

When Adams practiced chord changes, “he attacked them [with] what scales he could use against the changes, what arpeggios he could use, and then he would try to attack every note in that change from every angle,” said Kolber. After some time doing this, Adams told Kolber, “I don’t even think of changes anymore.” Kolber remembered Adams saying, “When a piano player plays a chord, I know what it is. I can hear all phases of it and I can fit it into what I want to do. I don’t let technique hang me up because I practice all the scales going in all different kinds of directions, going up one scale, coming down another scale, and then doing them in fourths. I’ve done this to such an extent that I can attack any change from any direction and go to any direction I want to go.” Kolber concluded, “He was just progressing until it got to a point where he would have so much under his fingers, he could do anything he wanted with it.”

On July 11th, 1952, after completing his first year in the army, Adams received a two-week furlough and went home to Detroit. Sometime between the 13th and 26th of the month he recorded eight tracks in Ann Arbor, Michigan, led by drummer Hugh Jackson. [Lew notes: According to the late jazz researcher Dr. Bob Sunenblick, these were “Recorded on Vitaphone,” a name otherwise associated with early film soundtracks.] Pepper assumed the pseudonym “U.N. Owen,” essentially a homonym of “unknown,” to retain his anonymity, because he was a member of the musician’s union and Jackson’s recording was “off the books,” that is, not authorized by the union. The other members were Frank Keys tp; Larry McCrorey ts; Otis “Bu Bu” Turner p, voc (sometimes spelled “Boo,” but he seems to have preferred “Bu”); Ron Penney b; and Jackson on drums. Jackson told the author in 1988 that McCrorey was a student at the University of Michigan, and rhe recording was made somewhere on Liberty Street, three blocks from campus.

This was Adams’s first recording in which he solos on baritone saxophone. For the most part it’s an excellent session, consisting of tunes drawn from the bebop and standard repertoires. Everyone played well except for trumpeter Frank Keys, whose flubs, tentativeness, and sloppy intonation made the recording unviable as a release. Not yet 21, Adams was already displaying some of the hallmarks of his mature style: a unique sound, long flowing lines, beautiful pacing, tremendous drive on up-tempo tunes, and an amazing wealth of ideas. If the session had been released, it would have signaled that a new voice on baritone saxophone had arrived. Unfortunately, the world had to wait another few years to hear him. But we can hear it now:

[Lew writes from here onward: Parker’s “Yardbird Suite” features a vocal by the pianist Turner, and then short solos by Adams and McCrorey:

Adams is featured with only the rhythm section on the old standard “Dancing in the Dark.” He plays with power and authority. There’s a nice piano solo by Turner too:

Thank you, Gary, for this great research and music! We’ll hear the other tracks from this session next time, and we’ll finish the story of his Army experience.

All the best,
Lewis}

P.S. Paying Subscribers, please scroll down for your bonus recording—the first ever by Adams as well as Tommy Flanagan!