Analog Production APR 3013 Mastering Engineer Stan Ricker

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.

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. Overall, the West Coast team 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. Remixed by Rik Pekkonen and John Koenig; remastering by Kevin Gray and Steve Hoffman. Original Artist House 9412.

Track Listings

1. Straight No Chaser
2. Blues For Blanche
3. So In Love
4. Diane
5. Stardust