Pepper Adams and Jimmy Knepper
Pepper-Knepper Quintet
(American Jazz Classics)

I remember well the first time that I heard the rampant baritone saxophone of Pepper Adams.

It was a Saturday in the early ’70s when I used to do an afternoon cruise up Charing Cross Road.

Collett’s London Bookshop with all its socialist tomes on one side and, right opposite, my other emporium of delight, Dobell’s jazz record shop — particularly its second-hand basement.

I recall once walking into Dobell’s and being hit by the grumbling, swinging hard bop notes of a surging baritone horn.

It sounded straight from the urban canyons of the US, a deeper, more delving pitch than the great tenorists like Coleman Hawkins and Chu Berry, with more vibrato than Harry Carney, Ellington’s pioneer baritonist who had set the instrument’s standard for me when I first heard him with the Duke at the Leeds Grand Theatre in 1964.

I looked at the sleeve displayed on Dobell’s counter and, seeing a speckled white face, I marvelled that a white man could play with such skyward fire and earthen weight.

But Pepper had come to jazz fruition in Detroit alongside black second-generation boppers like trumpeter Donald Byrd, pianists Tommy Flanagan and Barry Harris, drummer Elvin Jones and guitarist Kenny Burrell and was totally attuned to their sound.

Park “Pepper” Adams was born in Highland Park, Illinois, in 1930 and moved to Detroit when he was 16.

He took up the baritone and soon became part of Motown’s flourishing jazz scene, eventually moving to New York in 1958, cutting a host of albums and playing regularly with Byrd, Charles Mingus (1959-63), becoming a long-time member of the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Big Band (1965-78). He died in 1986.

On the Pepper-Knepper Quintet album his front-line partner is another white hornman admired by black jazz virtuosi, Mingus’s favourite trombonist Jimmy Knepper, born in Los Angeles in 1927, who as a young man gained experience in the big bands of Charlie Barnet, Woody Herman and Claude Thornhill before becoming a Mingus regular between 1957 and 1962. Like Pepper, he played with the Jones/Lewis Band, from 1968-74.

Yet the powerhouse of this 1958 quintet is the stellar rhythm section, with Elvin Jones, shortly to be the drummer of the John Coltrane Quartet, bassist Paul Chambers of Pittsburgh and the Jamaica-born pianist Wynton Kelly, who a year later was to play Freddie Freeloader on Miles Davis’s Kind Of Blue, one of the most sublime albums in jazz history.

From the outset of the fast-moving opener Minor Catastrophe, Pepper is well on the mark with a rumbling chorus. Kelly and Chambers make their signature solos and Knepper is all artistry and passion.

All Too Soon moves into Ellingtonia with a beautiful Carney-inspired performance by Pepper, his long, lingering notes filled with a serene sadness.

Kelly adds a thoughtful interlude and Knepper’s horn lifts the balladic theme towards the planets.

Kelly romps ahead in his intro to Beaubien, Knepper is note-brilliant and racked with invention and Pepper dances in with his big horn, its depth no impediment to sheer facility and speed.

Jones instigates a call and response with both horns and Chambers is not to be outdone as he breaks into a twanging solo.

Adam’s In The Apple is just that. Pepper seems more than pleased to be there and New York pounds with him. Knepper’s authority over his slides is astonishing, inspiring Pepper for a swinging stroll through the streets. 

One of them, Riverside Drive, gets a tune for itself, with Pepper full of zest and verve, exploring every metropolitan metre.

It’s back to Ellington for the lovetune I Didn’t Know About You, with Pepper in lyrical mode, Knepper in tender orbit and Kelly playing a belligerent organ.

The closer is the trombonist’s own Primrose Path led by Pepper’s jaunty solo, a coolly swinging chorus from Kelly and some marvellous slidework from the composer.

The reissue’s three concluding tracks are from a session a year earlier with the same miracle-working sounds of another Detroiter, the altoist Sonny Red, who sounds fiery on Watkins Production and levitating on the Fats Navarro tune Stop.

But Pepper is there to keep him grounded, along with Jones’s stomping drums.

The final track is the altoist’s opus, Redd’s Head, where the two horns lock in an unbridled jam, with Sonny’s ups and Pepper’s downs dancing inside of each other in joyous and uproarious notes. You’ll love it.