Art Pepper - So In Love (1980) [DSD][OF]

×

Art Pepper - So In Love (1980) [DSD][OF]

Close

Of the new releases issued under Art Pepper's name in 1980, So In Love was overall the finest. The altoist stretches out here on a program of standards and blues, backed by alternating rhythm sections from the East and West coasts. For this Analogue Productions DSD release, we didn't mess with perfection. Gus Skinas from the Super Audio Center produced New York Album and So In Love for DSD from flat transfers from the original analog master tapes that were remixed from the multi-track tapes and transferred to 2-track analog by Rik Pekkonen and John Koenig. For The Intimate Art Pepper Skinas authored the DSD tracks from the remaster by Kevin Gray and Steve Hoffman created for the 2003 Analogue Productions SACD reissue.

Pianist Hank Jones is all one could ask for in an accompanist, and his aching solo on "Diane" sustains perfectly the restive mood of Pepper's opening choruses. This West Coast team of pianist George Cables, whose great rapport with Pepper is unmatched, along with jazz legends Charlie Haden and Billy Higgins powers the music along with great care and economy. Pepper had climbed to such a plateau of individuality that he seems often here to be drawing his unconscious influences into the light and remembering what it was he loved about them in the first place.

On a leisurely "Stardust," he daffodils his sentiments with the grace and cunning of a Lester Young. The title track, a Cole Porter waltz that agitates into a collective improvisation by its climax, offers the best illustration of the wondrous use Pepper makes of John Coltrane. It isn't in this case a matter of piling up chords or of playing more notes, as it is with so many others, but rather of drawing on extreme registers of the horn to express more conflicting emotions, to reach deeper and higher recesses of the viscera and the psyche.

It was John Snyder, then creative director of Horizon Records, A&M's jazz label, who arranged the recording sessions in Los Angeles and New York that became the source for these historic albums. Art's promise to Snyder was kept — that Art's new contract with Fantasy permitted Snyder to record one album for his brand-new startup label, Artists House.

"John then recorded way too much. Too much for just a single album. He recorded in Los Angeles and, when we visited New York again, John set up sessions there as well. And used the all-star bands he wanted. John Snyder honored Art, just as he'd hoped to do when we first met in 1977. These tracks are the sublime result," says Laurie Pepper, Art's wife. We concur.

×

Art Pepper - So In Love (1980) [DSD][OF]

Close