Art Pepper - Straight Life (1980 Japanese Galaxy Vinyl LP)

Vinyl: EX
Sleeve: EX
Obi: None

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Art Pepper - Straight Life | Vinyl LP - 1980 Japanese Galaxy Records (VIJ-6322, Victor Musical Industries)

The rhythm section on this date is three musicians who played with everyone and knew exactly how much to give and when to pull back. Tommy Flanagan (the pianist on Coltrane's Giant Steps) plays with an economy that makes every chord sound deliberate. Red Mitchell, who had been living in Stockholm for over a decade and was playing in Europe more than the US by this point, brings a dark, resonant bass tone that sits underneath the group like a foundation. Billy Higgins's drumming is light and almost conversational, never louder than the music requires. Against this, Pepper plays with the raw emotional directness that defined his late recordings. "Surf Ride" opens side A at a clip, one of Pepper's own pieces from the early 1950s reworked for a rhythm section that swings harder than the original arrangement. "Nature Boy" is nearly 10 minutes of Pepper treating Eden Ahbez's melody like something fragile, his tone airy and exposed in a way that would have felt different from the West Coast cool he was known for in the 1950s. The title track runs just over four minutes and is the most compact piece here, a contrafact of "After You've Gone" that Pepper first recorded for Art Pepper Meets the Rhythm Section in 1957, revisited now with two decades of hard living behind it.

Side B opens with "September Song," the longest track at 11 minutes. Kurt Weill's melody suits Pepper's late-period tone perfectly: worn, direct, with a vulnerability the younger player wouldn't have risked. "Make A List" closes the album with Kenneth Nash adding reco-reco and cowbell to the quartet, a looser, percussion-driven piece that ends the session in motion. Pepper recorded prolifically for Galaxy (a Fantasy subsidiary) between 1979 and his death in June 1982, and Straight Life stands at the start of that run. This is the 1980 Japanese pressing on Galaxy VIJ-6322, manufactured by Victor Musical Industries.