Art Pepper + Eleven: Modern Jazz Classics (Contemporary Records Acoustic Sounds Series) [CRAFT]

Why you'll love it

This Acoustic Sounds Series pressing is all-analog, mastered by Bernie Grundman from the original tapes and pressed on 180g vinyl at QRP. Inside, Pepper plays alto, tenor and clarinet over Marty Paich's punchy arrangements of bebop standards.

This edition

• Contemporary Records Acoustic Sounds Series
• 180g vinyl
• All-analog mastering by Bernie Grundman
• Pressed at QRP in the USA
• Stereo mix
• Pressed in the USA

About the album

Here's a neat idea for a jazz record: take the tunes every young player had learned off records by Parker, Gillespie, Monk and Rollins, and hand them to a West Coast dream team with charts by Marty Paich. Art Pepper fronts the band, Paich directs, and the whole thing swings like a well-oiled door.

Lester Koenig recorded it over three sessions at Contemporary's studio in Los Angeles in 1959, with engineers Roy DuNann and Howard Holzer. The eleven around Pepper include trumpeters Jack Sheldon and Pete Candoli, Bud Shank and Herb Geller on alto, Bill Perkins and Richie Kamuca on tenor and Vincent DeRosa on French horn. "'Round Midnight" gets a lush, smoky arrangement, "Walkin' Shoes" honours Gerry Mulligan, "Groovin' High" and "Donna Lee" fly, and Pepper picks up the clarinet for a sparkling "Anthropology." Horace Silver's "Opus De Funk" and Sonny Rollins' "Airegin" get the same crisp treatment.

Each tune runs about three minutes, so it plays like a jukebox of modern jazz in big band colours. It's also the politest way we know to sneak twelve bebop classics past a devoted big band fan.

Also at Kops: more Art Pepper on vinyl · browse Classic Jazz

Tracklist

Listen

On Contemporary / Craft (cat# CR00383), a reissue of the 1960 album.