Reflectory: The Life and Music of Pepper Adams

By Gary Carner

Mark Stryker: "Reflectory is a meticulously researched and insightful biography of one of the defining modern jazz musicians of his era and one of the key products of Detroit’s postwar bebop explosion. We need more books like this in jazz historiography and more authors willing to dig this deeply."

Ben Sidran: "Gary Carner’s loving tribute . . . finally delivers some justice to the man and to the whole range and span of his too short and underappreciated but brilliant career."

550 PAGES. 450 MUSIC LINKS, HALF NEVER BEFORE AVAILABLE!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Oct 4, 2021
• ISBN: 9781329491564

Gary Carner

Gary Carner, an independent jazz researcher, is the author of Jazz Performers and The Miles Davis Companion.  From 1984 until Adams' death in 1986, Carner collaborated with Pepper Adams on his memoirs. Carner's research on Adams spans four decades.

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Prologue

On September 28, 1986, our first wedding anniversary, my wife Nancy and I attended Pepper Adams’s memorial service at St. Peter’s Lutheran Church in New York City. Adams had waged a courageous battle against an aggressive form of lung cancer that was first diagnosed in March 1985 while he was on tour in Sweden. On that somber yet bright Sunday afternoon, St. Peter’s ash-paneled, multi-tiered sanctuary, tucked under 915-foot-tall Citicorp Center, was packed with friends, musicians, and admirers. Reverend John Garcia Gensel presided over the service and many jazz greats performed and paid their final respects.

Adams was a friend of mine but, sadly, I knew him only during the last two tumultuous years of his life. Still recovering from a horrible leg accident that had kept him immobilized for six months, he was separated from his wife and ultimately diagnosed with the cancer that would kill him. Although it was a miserable time for him, it was, conversely, an exciting ride for me. I was a 28-year-old grad student, a passionate jazz fan and record collector who was trying to interest a jazz musician in working with me on an oral history to satisfy my thesis requirement. Adams, I soon learned, was an ideal subject; a major soloist who, from the late 1940s onward had played with virtually everyone in jazz.

Because he was still recuperating and homebound in 1984, he had time to indulge me. We met several times in Brooklyn that summer. So gracious and prepared, so articulate and engaging when retelling the events of his life, I amassed eighteen hours of tape-recorded interview material. His recollection of his childhood and early career was so stunning in its depth and historical sweep that I had the makings of a valuable co-authored autobiography.

But seven months later his cancer was diagnosed. I visited him at St. Luke’s Hospital in Manhattan when he began his chemotherapy regimen, and I saw him perform whenever he had a gig in New York. On one occasion, at Far and Away in nearby Cliffside Park, New Jersey, I heard the suffering pour out of him during a stunning ballad performance that brought me to tears. Six weeks later, between sets at New York City’s Blue Note, I saw him bark at a pianist whom he misperceived was harassing him for a job. Though his crankiness seemed out of character, I realized that his grinding medical treatments were beginning to affect his temperament.

Because chemotherapy and international travel made our autobiographical project an impossibility, I decided that writing a full-length biography would be a more sensible approach. When Pepper was home between gigs, I watched football games with him while going through documents and dubbing copies of his cassette tapes. Although I was trying to gather as much information as I could in the little time that was left, it was improper to pry about the minutiae of his life. Despite my youthful curiosity, I had to respect the fact that his cancer therapy made him feel awful, he was fighting to stay alive, and his leisure time was sacrosanct.

The following summer I moved to Boston to further my studies and continue my Adams research. Three hours away, no longer able to see him, we stayed in touch by telephone and those charming postcards he would send me from the road. In late 1985 I somehow learned that he had an upcoming four-night stint in bitterly cold Minneapolis. Concerned about his well-being, I urged a friend to attend as a courtesy to me. Thankfully, Dan Olson caught one of his performances and, much to my delight, tape recorded both sets. During intermission he bought Adams a beer and the two had a chance to chat at the bar.

My final conversation with Pepper took place eight months later, only a few weeks before his death. In August 1986, bedridden and under the watchful eye of a home-health aide, I called to see if there was anything I could do for him. His caretaker answered and asked me to hold for a moment. While I paced anxiously for at least five minutes, Adams somehow found the energy to drag himself to the telephone. In a sentence or two he acknowledged that time was short, thanked me for calling, said a final goodbye, and hung up. That was right around the time that Dizzy Gillespie called him on Mel Lewis’s behalf to say that Thad Jones, one of Pepper’s dearest friends, had just died of cancer in Copenhagen.

A year later, once I began interviewing Adams’s colleagues for this book, I spent a memorable afternoon with pianist Tommy Flanagan, Ella Fitzgerald’s longtime music director. I was meeting him for the first time and utterly starstruck. One of the last to see Pepper alive, Flanagan wanted me to know that transcripts of my Adams interviews were stacked high on Pepper’s nightstand days before he died. Flanagan told me that at one point, while perched on the edge of his bed, Adams awoke and tried feebly to push the interview materials towards him. As if Flanagan was brushing crumbs off a tabletop with the backside of his fingertips, he accentuated his story by imitating Pepper’s debilitated attempt to move the heavy pile of papers in Tommy’s direction.

As you can imagine, I was overcome by the implications of Adams’s gesture. At first, I was astounded, something I must have communicated by my astonished gaze and stunned expression. Then my heart sagged and my eyes watered as I became increasingly aware that our months of work together had somehow comforted Pepper at the end of his life. During the next few weeks, as Flanagan’s story continued to wash over me, I noticed that my research acquired renewed vigor.

Flanagan’s interview was one of more than 250 I conducted, mostly in the late 1980s before my daughter was born. Repeatedly, my interviewees affirmed Adams as a complex individual—a hero, a genius, a model of grace, an intellectual, a virtuoso musician and stylist—yet someone also very hard to read. The contradictions they depicted equally fascinated me. Adams, they said, was an unworldly looking sophisticate, a white musician who sounded like a black one, and an exuberant, commanding saxophonist who was soft-spoken and mild-mannered off the bandstand. Many told me of his unprecedented agility on the baritone, that He played it like an alto. Before Adams, baritone sax was a cumbersome, fringe instrument. Today, because of his innovations, it is no longer viewed as a novelty.

Throughout his career Adams told radio interviewers that the pitch of the baritone was like his speaking voice. He felt that this, to a certain extent, explained his affinity for the horn. But much more can be divined from his adoption of the instrument. For one thing, he greatly prized originality. Becoming a baritone saxophonist in the late 1940s gave him an opportunity to create a completely unique style on an infrequently heard instrument. Like Duke Ellington, whom he greatly admired, Adams could similarly stand way apart from everyone else.

Paradoxically, despite enhancing the idiom and securing his place in history, Adams’s fealty to his instrument also hurt him. The public’s inherent bias against low-pitched instruments and his resultant status as a sideman prevented him from both fronting his own band and recording far more albums as a leader, particularly any with widespread distribution. Throughout his career Adams mostly functioned as a baritone specialist. Except when he played an occasional clarinet part in a big-band setting or taught an anomalous lesson here and there, he never played other instruments nor taught the saxophone. Refusing to double on bass clarinet during the 1960s and early 1970s disqualified him from studio work that could have helped him financially when jazz gigs were sporadic. And as pianist Roland Hanna once asked, who knows what Pepper might have achieved had he played tenor saxophone.

When I began collaborating with Adams, I knew he was a superb instrumentalist but had no idea of the breadth of his contribution, how much his colleagues adored him, nor the degree to which his life intersected with some of the greatest poets, writers, painters, and musicians of his time. Because of our working relationship, the door to the international arts community burst open for me right after his death. I have had the remarkable privilege of speaking with so many of his esteemed colleagues, all of whom honored my interest in such a deserving artist.

Respectfully given a lot of space, my interviews with Adams’s confreres are the heart and soul of this book. You will read some of them speaking, at times with surprising tenderness, of their fondness and profound admiration for him. His death was a significant loss for them, and their remembrances of his last few years are filled with sentimental accounts, sometimes with them breaking into tears. Besides helping me answer many of my pressing questions and ultimately grasp the totality of Pepper’s character and his many achievements, Adams’s friends, for whom he was a sage and musical beacon, have given me a profound sense of interconnectedness with the world. Their kindness and support comforted me, particularly when writing this book seemed insurmountable.

Their thoughtful responses allowed me to fill the gaps that remained from my Adams interviews. Despite his eagerness to share certain aspects of his life, he was reluctant to discuss his personal relationships or his time in the U.S. Army. Radio appearances and magazine articles, too, were of little use. So, regarding his private life I had to start from scratch.

Much like a fine Bordeaux, bringing this book to maturity took many years. Unravelling the complexities of such an enigmatic individual, fully digesting his many thousands of hours of recordings, putting his lifetime of work into perspective, conceptualizing a narrative structure that suited his life, and transferring my personal observations and mountain of data into prose took me 37 years. Discounting some promising fits and starts, I waited until I felt I was ready to write the kind of book he deserved. That began in April 2017, after I gave a series of lectures about him, including a memorable residency at Utah State University.

I always intended to write the book thematically, not in a chronological fashion. Why? Because the cradle-to-grave storytelling convention is boring to me, and life is lived thematically. Biography need no longer be strictly chronological, like a calendar or datebook, argued Leon Edel:

Lives are rarely lived that way. An individual repeats patterns learned in childhood, and usually moves forward and backward through memory. . . . Chronological biography tends to fragment and flatten a life. A chronological recital of these facts reads like a newspaper; we jump from one item to another, and the items seem unrelated. . . . The task and duty of biographical narrative is to sort out themes and patterns, not dates and mundane calendar events which sort themselves.

Sometime after writing my first chapter, it occurred to me that Adams’s life should be rendered in two parts. I decided to name the first half Ascent to delineate his early years in Detroit and Rochester, New York while becoming a virtuoso. Dominion would then cover the remainder of his life as a full-fledged musician on the New York scene.

I further realized that divulging Adams’s final days within this prologue freed me from ending the book with his demise, yet another banality. Insofar as Ascent could mostly proceed episodically from Pepper’s youth to his relocation in New York, I decided, as a complete departure, to defy common practice by beginning Dominion with a full account of Adams’s terminal illness, then work my way back thirty years to his arrival in New York. Going backward, a device commonly found in cinema, not only struck me as a writing challenge but seemed consistent with Adams’s distaste for cliché. Emboldened by historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, who regretted not crafting her Lyndon B. Johnson biography in reverse-chronological order, I liked how inverting Dominion circled me back to 1956, setting up my conclusion (Chapter Twelve).

Before I began writing, my research allowed me to comprehend Detroit’s jazz culture and socioeconomic history. I was interested in understanding its automobile economy, profound racial problems, and illustrious jazz history. (For a closer look, see Detroit Drives the Nation and Detroit Jazz, 1922–1954) As a friend of the underdog, I wanted to exhume some of Detroit’s musicians who contributed significantly to its jazz scene but remain unknown. I was most curious about the extraordinary postwar band of brothers: that clique of world-class jazz musicians who descended on New York City in the mid-1950s and reinvigorated the music.

Regarding Rochester, New York, where Adams attended public school, I wanted to know how that city came to be, why its economy was better off than the rest of the country during the Great Depression, and what took place there during World War II when Adams was a teenager. I was curious about its jazz culture, too, and Eastman School of Music’s influence. New York City’s jazz scene in the 1950s and ’60s, of course, intrigued me. More than recounting Pepper’s gigs and living arrangements, I wanted to understand how jazz cross-pollinated with other arts and define Adams’s place within it.

Mostly, I sought to understand my subject: his personality traits, strengths and weaknesses, how he behaved with others, what it was like to be in his presence, and the outer and inner myths he promulgated or kept guarded. I wanted to learn about his childhood, research his genealogy, get my arms around his relationship with women, and penetrate the veil of secrecy about his mother and tenure as a soldier. I strove to grasp why, despite his exceptional gifts and the universal respect he received from his colleagues, he wasn’t financially successful. Was it mainly because of his instrument, due to the way he conducted himself, or still other factors?

Undoubtably, Adams’s music has enriched me, and writing about him has satisfied my wish to contribute something tangible to the music I love. But on a deeper level, my work has morphed from a passionate hobby to a raison d’etre. After researching his life, collecting his many recordings, unearthing his 42 original compositions, and building PepperAdams.com, in 2012 I produced a five-CD box set of Adams’s entire oeuvre (PepperAdams.com/Compositions). Featuring five different bands and newly commissioned lyrics to his seven magnificent ballads, that anthology was co-branded with my first Adams book (Pepper Adams’ Joy Road: An Annotated Discography). A sixth CD, produced separately, featured big-band arrangements of ten of his tunes. Now, with this companion study I, at long last, have fulfilled my original promise to him and myself.

My aim, dear reader, is to showcase an important person who lived an extraordinary life, and to contextualize his unique contributions to Twentieth Century music. As you maneuver through these pages, please take a moment to visit the Instagram page (instagram.com/pepperadamsblog) that serves as the repository of Adams photographs and documents. More importantly, whether you are encountering him for the first time or are already hip to his career, be sure to listen to his glorious saxophone playing. To that aim, links are embedded throughout the book that grant you access to 450 recordings, nearly all the music I discuss. Half of it has never been made available to the public.

This edition corrects errors, including a few music links that were overlooked. By adding, rewriting, reordering, and deleting text, I’ve tried to improve the book’s accuracy and readability. Thanks for your interest in Pepper Adams.

Gary Carner

Salt Lake City

June 2022

Ascent (1930–1955)

Chapter One: In Love with Night

We had a beautiful scene in Detroit

– BARRY HARRIS

On a chilly Detroit evening in mid-April 1949, eighteen-year-old Pepper Adams and two Wayne University friends made their way to the Mirror Ballroom to hear alto saxophonist Charlie Parker. Eager to see jazz’s new leader with his working group, all three met at the theater, only a mile from campus. They purchased their tickets, walked upstairs to the balcony, folded their coats, and waited patiently for the show to begin.

The Mirror, above Majestic School for Dance, was well known among Detroit’s jazz community. I knew of its significance even then, said drummer Rudy Tucich, who used to ride past it every day on his way to high school. It was on the second floor. You went in – door on the right side of the building – and walked the stairway up. It was a place of wonderment to me. Along with the Grande, Beach, Graystone, Jefferson, Vanity, and Monticello, Mirror Ballroom was one of seven majestic dance palaces constructed during Detroit’s early 20th century Art Deco architectural boom. In 1941, the venue moved from its historic building on the Near West Side to 2940 Woodward Avenue, on midtown’s central artery, two blocks from the palatial Masonic Temple.

For quite some time that memorable night there was considerable doubt whether Parker would show up. With their star attraction unaccounted for, management convinced trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie – scheduled to appear later that evening at the Paradise Theatre, only six blocks away – to front Parker’s ensemble for the opening set. His surprise appearance, it was thought, would temporarily satisfy the audience while the Mirror’s staff anxiously awaited their headliner.

Eventually, Parker arrived, albeit more than an hour late. After placating the theater’s distressed crew, he exchanged words with his group, assembled his saxophone, and readied himself for the next set. The room was dark except for stage lights directed upon the bandstand. At long last it was finally time for him to count off his first number.

Parker began with one of his bristling up-tempo openers and Adams was spellbound. It was a night to remember, said Oliver Shearer, who, along with Pepper and Bob Cornfoot, watched the electrifying spectacle unfold. "Pepper was ignoring everybody in that whole room but ‘Bird.’ I’ve never seen anyone so excited in my life! He said, ‘Can’t you hear this, man?’ He knew where he was going from that night on, I think."

Adams had been playing baritone sax for a little over a year. Paying his way through college by working local gigs, he was searching for his own sound and musical conception. But Parker’s transcendent performance that evening gave Adams the paradigm he sought. He decided that his mission was to assimilate the many dazzling attributes of Parker’s style and adapt them to the baritone. Not by copying Parker’s licks and phrases, as so many others would do, but by refining a completely personal approach immersed in Parker’s lexicon. As with Parker before him, his efforts would take a full decade to flower, necessitating thousands of hours of solitary practice and performing with others in a multiplicity of settings.

Adams held Charlie Parker in the highest esteem. The greatest I ever heard was how he would assess Parker in 1984, 35 years after seeing him at the Mirror. By 1949, Parker’s revolutionary approach was a new way of playing jazz; highly virtuosic and intended for listeners as opposed to dancers.

Sometime after his epiphany, Adams and Parker attended a Detroit jam session where each learned that both were classical music aficionados. Somehow the name Arthur Honegger came up, remembered Adams about their very first conversation. I said, ‘Oh, I love Arthur Honegger,’ and immediately I was Bird’s friend because in Europe Bird had heard quite a bit of his music but he’d never before met an American who’d ever heard of Honegger. To attract Parker’s attention as a teenager also reveals Adams’s emerging confidence and musicianship. For the next few years Bird would serve as a sage and confidant, in time becoming a trusted colleague.

Even with his encouragement, it took a leap of faith for Adams to think that one day he could become a virtuoso jazz soloist on an instrument that, as Stanley Crouch wrote, had the stand-off qualities and the resistant fury of a stallion that dares you to break him. In the late forties, most baritone saxophonists still had trouble with the bulky instrument, notably playing in time with the rest of the band. To complicate matters, with the advent of Parker’s audacious new music, far more harmonic sophistication and instrumental proficiency were expected from jazz soloists. Undaunted and resolute, however, Pepper was convinced that not only was the baritone an instrument he could master, but that no style would be too demanding. Moreover, he was certain that the horn was the ideal vehicle to forge a unique identity and make an enduring contribution to the art form. I saw it as a wide-open field, said Adams many years later when recounting his early days as a musician and assessing the big horn’s appeal. No one was playing jazz in the way that I felt jazz could be played on the baritone. I thought I had a chance to do something entirely different.

Charlie Parker and Kenny Dorham, Mirror Ballroom, mid-April 1949.

Parker’s quintet included Al Haig, Tommy Potter, and Max Roach.

Vocalist Arthur Junior Daniels sat in with the band.

* * *

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Mirror Ballroom, Detroit, c. 1980.

* * *

In April 1947, two years before his watershed moment at the Mirror Ballroom, Adams had moved back to Detroit. He had been away almost his entire life. When he and his parents left in the Fall of 1931, America was coping with an unprecedented economic meltdown. Sixteen years later, though, the United States, with its allies, had won a world war. After two decades of deprivation and geopolitical instability she sits bestride the world like a Colossus, wrote historian Robert Payne about America’s postwar dominance. No other power at any time in the world’s history has possessed so varied or so great an influence on other nations. . . . Half the wealth of the world, more than half of the productivity, nearly two-thirds of the world’s machines are concentrated in American hands.

No U.S. city was more emblematic of the country’s mid-century financial and industrial might than Detroit. Its position as the country’s economic powerhouse, begun forty years earlier with the inception of the auto industry, had remained intact after the war. Although Detroit’s foundries had been converted into munitions plants during World War II, they had reverted to producing cars and trucks for American consumers soon after Japan’s surrender, and jobs were being created in a wide range of allied industries. For that reason, Detroit attracted the attention of many throughout the country who were seeking employment.

Adams’s mother was no exception. Her return to the city of her son’s birth was primarily due to her new job in suburban Roseville’s school system. As a third-grade elementary school teacher and reading specialist, her salary was appreciably better than what she had been earning in Rochester, New York as an educator or department store clerk. Not only was the opportunity for a better life too enticing to pass up, but the move allowed her to reunite with old friends she had not seen since she left.

Other circumstances, too, played a part in her decision. In 1943, three years after the death of her first husband, Park Adams, after a lengthy period of decline, Cleopatra Coyle Adams married Harold Hopkins, an employee of Langie Coal Company. They were married only two years before his death in 1945. Burying two spouses within five years, plus the strain of living during the Depression and war years, certainly made a complete change of scenery desirable.

One thing that she could not have anticipated was that Detroit’s extraordinary music culture would in time embrace her only child as one of their own, functioning as a creative laboratory that would catapult him to greatness. In light of this, returning to Detroit was the best thing that could have happened to him. As Adams recalled in 1984,

Going to Detroit at that time turned out to be a very positive thing as far as I was concerned, as far as developing as a player. I already had some background and could play pretty well. There was certainly a lot of room for improvement. And by moving to Detroit right at that time, I found myself almost immediately within a milieu of fine young players, people pretty much my own age, who were all very eager to play, and get together, and teach one another, and then just hang out together. It was a terrific atmosphere in which to learn music.

In 1947, Detroit was America’s 4th largest city, with a sizable black population and a well-established entertainment industry that included one of the country’s most dynamic jazz scenes. Musicians who had already played in big bands [and] small bands settled in Detroit because Detroit was a beautiful city, said saxophonist Bennie Maupin. They raised their families in Detroit, and it was a hub for all the bands that traveled back and forth across the country. Conversely, with a tiny African American population and less jazz activity, Rochester was a medium-sized city that lacked Detroit’s location, jazz pedigree, and allure.

No longer one of only a few musicians his age who were passionate about jazz, Adams suddenly became part of a group of more than fifty young instrumentalists who, just like him, were striving to master the music’s vocabulary in hopes of becoming well-rounded, accomplished performers. As he had done previously, Adams continued to be mentored by older musicians, repeating the time-tested oral tradition of learning from those who had done so before him. But unlike Rochester, Pepper’s Detroit elders were illustrious jazz artists, such as vibraphonist Milt Jackson and saxophonists Wardell Gray, Sonny Stitt, and Lucky Thompson, who were recording with Charlie Parker and would leave Detroit to tour with Count Basie, Billy Eckstine, Benny Goodman, or Dizzy Gillespie and then return home. Thanks to their tutelage, in about ten years Adams and a select group of Detroit musicians—Elvin Jones, Paul Chambers, Donald Byrd, Doug Watkins, Frank Foster, Louis Hayes, Kenny Burrell, Roland Hanna, Barry Harris, Joe Henderson, Curtis Fuller, and Tommy Flanagan—would emerge as some of the finest musicians of their generation.

* * *

Before relocating to Detroit, Pepper and his mother stayed for the entire month of March 1947 at Hotel Edison, on West 47th Street in New York City’s theater district. Sixteen-year-old Adams had an extraordinary time soaking up the exciting 52nd Street jazz scene, visiting with Bob Wilber, and meeting Wilber’s mentor, Sidney Bechet, at the elder’s Quincy Street house in Brooklyn. On at least one occasion all three of them played soprano saxophone together, exchanging ideas and discussing music. It speaks well of Pepper’s mother that, even in a time of transition, she would offer her son the opportunity to have such a diverse set of experiences. She was by then aware of his passion for jazz and did all she could to help him move ahead as a musician.

The principal reason for going first to New York City was to give her son a chance to study with tenor saxophonist Skippy Williams. Four years earlier, in June 1943, Williams had taken Ben Webster’s exalted place in Duke Ellington’s orchestra. Pepper first met Williams in Rochester in March 1944, after attending an Ellington performance.

Williams lived on the top floor of a hotel on 48th Street, between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, a five-minute walk from the Edison. The people in there were all from show business, said Williams. At the time, Williams was rehearsing Joan Lee’s group, an 18-piece, all-female band, and Pepper and his mother would stop by every day.

He was a hell of a nice kid! asserted Williams.

You know how you meet some people and you don’t want to know them? He was the kind of guy, you met him and you were always glad to see him. He was very quiet. . . . He acted like he was a very wise sixteen-year-old. . . . I never saw him anguished about anything. He was very likable. I never heard him raise his voice or say anything bad about anybody. He always had a book with him. He liked math. That opened his mind up. Music is math. I haven’t studied much of Schillinger but I’ve used some of those methods. We were talking about that when I met him.

During his four weeks in New York, Adams learned about phrasing, how to listen to and blend with other musicians, and how to use dynamics to increase drama. He also learned how to build a set by playing some tunes softer or louder and how to vary tunes from night to night on a gig. These pointers had a lifelong impact on Adams’s approach to playing jazz. I’d play something, and he would listen to it, and he’d get it, said Williams.

The next time, when I’d hear him play, he’d play some stuff that I liked better than what I was playing. He was something else! He was very bright. . . . He had rhythm, that’s one thing. Sometimes you can learn A-B-Cs and you can’t spell a word, but he got to spell it real fast! I used to tell him, Learn to read. I’d get that into him, we’d run down some things, and he could read. I said, That’s the most important thing. Then I taught him about chords and transpositions. You see, I would get in a band. If they didn’t have a tenor part, I’d play an alto part on tenor.

That kind of versatility, Williams told him, is an important skill, one that makes you more adaptable as a musician.

The guys that taught me were Chu Berry, Ben Webster, said Williams.

We learned to read four or five bars ahead of time. The next time you read it, you read sixteen bars ahead. Then you have it. I showed [Pepper] that . . . and how to get the big sound. . . . The main thing I told him was [to] learn every melody and learn how to play a melody. Even if you’re taking a solo, let the melody be in there. Just a little melody once in a while.

Much later in life, Adams was highly regarded for his encyclopedic knowledge of all sorts of melodies, ranging from Broadway show tunes and the classical literature to the most arcane university fight songs.

Williams’s basic formula was straightforward: First learn the melody and the chords, then analyze the chords and learn to play everything at the proper tempo.

I spent hours with him. He’d ask me why I did something, and I’d sing a lick. He liked Duke’s band. I told him, When you get on that bandstand and don’t feel like playing, you relax your mind until you can relax. . . . Wear that sax, don’t let the sax wear you. . . . Just like you see and you breathe, every move you make, you know what’s going to happen. . . . Do the same thing with your horn. You wear it. You don’t fly an airplane; you wear an airplane. . . . You just take over. Let yourself know that you know how to play the horn. That’s what I used to tell him, and he got it!

Two of the many valuable lessons that Williams imparted were to be completely at one with your instrument and utterly confident in your ability. He told Pepper: "Don’t be so afraid if somebody is sounding better than you. Do the best you can at all times. If another guy sounds a certain way and you think he sounds better than you, learn what he’s doing.’" Furthermore, to improve as a soloist, Williams advised Adams to hum something and play a melody on his instrument at the same time, as if two musicians were jamming.

Williams urged his young protégé to evoke different moods on the saxophone, the way, for example, that alto saxophonist Johnny Hodges can play something so beautiful that it can make you cry. Williams told Adams that some musicians play with different tone qualities in the upper and lower registers, and to aim instead for consistency: You want to make the tip of the bell ring at all times, Williams said. Some guys take a solo and they play everything loud, and they don’t know when to slow down or make it softer or louder. When you start a solo, you start it and get people’s attention. Sometimes you have to play soft to get people to listen to you and then you bring it up.

Williams encouraged Pepper to play as if he were mad at his horn: When you’re a soloist, all your frustrations, your love and your hate, it all comes out in your solo. To get the feeling, to really feel music, you have to feel it in your belly.

Williams told Pepper to always play with fire and to always command the stage. To drive the point home, Williams recalled his days with Count Basie: "If you didn’t play in that band, they’d fire you. Everybody’s up on your ass and they’d say, ‘What’s the matter with you? Play your ass off. Don’t fuck around like that!’’’

Overall, Williams’s approach to playing jazz encompassed both musicianship and self-awareness. Those things make you a better musician and a better person, Williams said. If you’re a better person you’re going to play better.

Although Adams was too young to enter certain New York City establishments, Williams took him around town to introduce him to other musicians. He also tried to have Pepper meet the women in the band he was rehearsing.  I tried to get him up to the house sometimes because it had all them girls, Williams said. He was too bashful to mess with them. . . . There was a bunch of them up there that liked him. His mother was around him so much when he was in New York that he didn’t get a chance to be around the broads. I tried to sneak him away a couple of times but I didn’t want to get his mind all messed up.

With years of accumulated wisdom and indisputable credibility as a musician, Williams gave Adams a master class on the basics of playing jazz while also instilling in him a sense of proportion about other important things in life. Serving a pivotal role as a male mentor at a time when Adams was fatherless, Williams recognized that this special young man was a bit adrift and needed a helping hand. Pepper was a lonesome person, said Williams. There was something he wanted in life and he lived for that horn.

His close relationship with Adams had lasting implications for both men. Like I had a feeling with Chu Berry and Ben Webster, I had with him, said Williams about Pepper. "I was very fond of him. After being with him in New York City, I didn’t see him for years. I went to Chicago and then I started hearing about him making all these records. I think I saw him a couple of times jamming. I could never get to him because he was so busy working every night on the road and I was traveling so much." Over the years they stayed in touch by telephone. Whenever they met, usually by complete surprise at New York’s J.F.K. Airport when Adams was heading overseas, they were thrilled to see one another again, rekindling their shared affection and trying to make up for so much lost time.

Adams was forever grateful for Williams’s mentorship. Although in interviews throughout his life Pepper fostered the conceit that he was a self-taught musician, he was fully aware that the adage is a myth, and in no way should his comments be misconstrued as impertinent. I consider myself self-taught, he told his audience at Rochester’s Eastman Theatre in 1978, but anyone who is self-taught has had an awful lot of help from a bunch of people. What Adams was really saying about being self-taught is that, as a rugged survivor of the Depression, he was proud of what he was able to accomplish, considering his many constraints, and that he did so mostly on his own terms.

As for his mom, she was a good mother, said Williams. She was very dedicated to Pepper. . . . She wanted everything for him. The best. She’d come by and watch me teach him, show him some little things. She would listen to what I said, and she’d go back to the Edison Hotel and she’d get on him, Williams chuckled.

His mom wanted him to be the greatest and he was. He was. He was great. But he wanted to be better, and he worked and worked. Then I didn’t see him for a few years. Then I did start hearing him and I could tell that he accomplished it.

A recent widow, Cleo Adams was a very lovely person, said Williams. I never heard her curse. Once or twice she would drink. I had some champagne at the house. If her time in New York City was marked by a fling with Williams, it was initiated several years earlier in Rochester. She told me personally that she really went with him for a while, said Oliver Shearer. A dalliance with Williams in New York City continued a pattern of maternal over-involvement that was just beginning to cast a shadow over Adams’s life as he moved into manhood.

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In April 1947, soon after his arrival in Detroit, Adams contacted trumpeter Willie Wells. Wells was a friend of bassist Oscar Pettiford, who Pepper befriended while still living in Rochester. Within a week or so Adams was playing duets out of the Arban cornet book with Wells and trumpeter Fats Navarro. When Pepper arrived in town, he was playing soprano and he sounded exactly like Bechet, remembered his friend Jack Duquette. He did that for a short time. It wasn’t one of the instruments being played in town. Detroit had gone bop and they couldn’t handle the Bechet sound.

The city’s young white players who played at Chatterbox, such as trumpeter Johnny DiVita and tenor saxophonist Leo Osebold, were highly critical of Adams’s playing. Whenever I would take him around to sessions, I would get yelled at because I brought the creep in who was playing Dixieland, said pianist Bess Bonnier. When he began to step out musically, [however,] nobody was yelling at him in the black community!

Ultimately, most of the Detroit musicians that Adams befriended were African American and virtually all of them became lifelong colleagues. Why did Pepper gravitate more to black musicians? It’s a way of life more than an avocation, explained saxophonist Bob Pierson. He was naturally bent that way because he was going to be a purist. There’s no [other] place to go. There were some great white players around Detroit at that time that played beautifully: Leo Osebold, the tenor player, was phenomenal; Parky Groat, the trombone player. But, by and by, the best feeling and the hottest music came out of the black section.

Adams gravitated to those who were equally committed to jazz, regardless of race or ethnicity. Unfortunately, the society he lived in wasn’t nearly as accommodating. Detroit was a city rife with social tension, wrote Thomas Sugrue. By the outbreak of World War II, the geography of Detroit had come to be defined in terms of black and white. This racial division of the metropolis came in the wake of the dissolution of ethnic communities. . . . Class and race became more important than ethnicity as a guide to the city’s geography. Residents of Detroit’s white neighborhoods abandoned their ethnic affiliations and found a new identity in their whiteness.

Despite the prevailing racial climate, made apparent by the city’s race riot of 1943, African Americans continued to migrate from the south to Detroit in search of high paying factory jobs. The city’s magnetic appeal was too great and their plight as sharecroppers far too dire. Nonetheless, assimilation could be fraught with resistance. White neighborhoods, continued Sugrue, especially enclaves of working-class homeowners, interpreted the influx of blacks as a threat and began to defend themselves against the newcomers, first by refusing to sell to blacks, then by using force and threats of violence against those who attempted to escape the black sections of the city, and finally by establishing restrictive covenants to assure the homogeneity of neighborhoods.

Although Detroit’s auto industry offered these newcomers the prospect of economic salvation, the way the city’s racial imbalance was enforced was hardly utopic. We used to get harassed by the police all the time, said white painter Gary Carson.

We were always being stopped and shook down. I was beaten up by the Vice Squad once on the street waiting for [black drummer] Elvin [Jones]. One guy imitating a drunk had come down the street. He got right next to me and then he leaped on me. A big DeSoto drove up with about six hillbillies in it and they all came charging out. They took me for a ride and questioned me. They told me they were going to kill me, actually, and they were going to leave me in a vacant lot somewhere. They didn’t like whites being in colored neighborhoods. When I told them I was waiting for Elvin they went berserk! I eventually ended up in a police station, then they let me go. They couldn’t charge me with anything.

Black saxophonist Frank Foster recalled another time, in 1950, when he, another black friend, white vocalist Sheila Jordan, and her white friend Jenny DeBrise were stopped by the police for fraternizing. The Detroit police would stop you if they just didn’t like the way you looked, so with two interracial couples in a car they had to stop us, said Foster. According to Jordan, We were going out to Belle Isle for a little picnic. They took us down to the police station and it was terrible. Degrading.

Oliver Shearer remembered another incident when he, Tommy Flanagan, and Hindal Butts, all of them black, ended up at Beaubien Street’s police station. We spent the night in jail there . . . We were taking Charlotte [Zwerin, a white woman,] home, said Shearer. At the time, Charlotte was dating Flanagan. The police saw Charlotte in the car and stopped us, and took us to the station and kept us all night. Zwerin was taken to a separate area where she was forced to submit to a cavity search. "The shit was ugly as can be!" said Shearer. They didn’t have any grounds to hold us. I tried to get [law student] Mike Levin to come down. Mike finally got down there and got us out. . . . We didn’t even get a chance to make a call until the next morning. During the ordeal, one of the officers warned Shearer: Every time [you do] anything with a white woman, I’m gonna pick you up. I don’t care what the reason is.

According to Zwerin, the cops just didn’t like white and black people mixing together.

I think I was in the car with Freddie [Barnett]. We were trying to park the car near Klein’s Show Bar. Some cop came up and said, ‘What do you want to do in that nigger joint?’ They were just hostile. The whole city was like that. . . . There were places like Baker’s Keyboard Lounge that didn’t allow blacks. In fact, the first time I went to Baker’s I went with Pepper. They were just starting to have an integrated policy. But their idea of integration was that all the blacks would sit on one side of the room and all the whites would sit on the other side. This would have been ’54. That gradually broke down and [it] became an integrated club. Blacks were barred from restaurants. You couldn’t call up a black friend and say, Let’s have lunch, we’ll meet at so-and-so. You could only go to places that served blacks. . . . Kenny [Burrell] and Tommy [Flanagan] played a club – I think it was out in Jefferson – where blacks were not allowed to come into the club. This was later than Baker’s, maybe ’55.

In addition to Detroit’s overt police tactics, a secret departmental unit, the Detroit Red Squad, ran a surreptitious campaign to spy on subversives. From 1937–1974, it collected data at social gatherings, such as union meetings, art openings, or theater parties. According to Dorian Paster, Red Squad’s files included an estimated 1.5 million names of individuals suspected of being political dissenters, social activists, civil rights workers, or simply citizens who had their license-plate numbers recorded at a concert or art show. Whether an Adams dossier exists has never been determined. Although its files were made available to family members in 1991 for a short period of time, Pepper’s widow refused to grant access to it.

Throughout the 1950s, racism wasn’t only propagated by Detroit police, business owners, or anxious white homeowners. It was far more systemic. As Adams’s friend Mike Nader remembered,

Pepper and a minor black musician named Jimmy Smith—no relation to any other Jimmy Smith you may have ever heard—and I were taking a bus down Woodward once and some blacks would bump into Jimmy and some whites would bump into Pepper and me as a way of showing their dislike of our association with a black. I know this happened to Jimmy. Pep noticed me noticing it and he said, This happens all the time, Mike, and I didn’t know that. I remember Pepper and a couple of black guys and I were going to eat at a restaurant in downtown Detroit called Wassum’s. It was a German restaurant next to the Broadway Capitol Theater, right next to Al’s Record Mart. In those days in Detroit, if you walked into a restaurant in downtown Detroit that had any class at all, there would be reservation signs on every table. In case blacks came in, the patrons could say, Oh, this table’s reserved. It was a scam. Pepper enlightened me. He told me about those things.

Instead, interracial groups preferred to meet at black-owned establishments where they were treated with respect. We used to go to a primarily black restaurant on John R called Pelican Number 2, said Mike Nader. Located six blocks from Wayne, in the basement of a private home and across the street from Frolic Show Bar, they served soul food there before that term was bandied about, before anyone knew what it meant, said Nader. It was just down-home cooking. The food there was affordable. You could get a side of ‘sweets,’ [typically candied yams,] for, like, thirteen cents, said Jack Duquette. Hamburgers were about eighteen cents. They used to serve brains and eggs down there. That was a popular dish.

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During his first few weeks in Detroit Adams pursued employment and attended as many jam sessions as possible. The previous year he had quit high school halfway through eleventh grade so he could work full-time as a musician. Once in Detroit, he had no interest in returning to school. In 1947, Adams’s first job was at a Dodge automobile plant, followed by a gig assembling auto bodies at Briggs Manufacturing. If Briggs was anything like what Walter Reuther experienced there twenty years earlier, it was back-breaking work, with long shifts and a thirty-minute lunch break. Historically, those desperate for work took a job at Briggs, staying until they could find anything else.

Sometime in September, Adams was invited to participate in his first recording session. Singer and vibraphonist Oliver Shearer assembled a group at United Sound Studios, including Willie Wells and Tommy Flanagan, to make a private recording that Shearer could use as a demo. Three tunes were recorded, and on "Shearer Madness Adams played a clarinet solo. That Adams had an understanding of clarinet and soprano-sax styles actually enlarged his artistic scope, said historian Andrew Homzy. His encounters with earlier jazz idioms . . . is in vast contrast with many ‘moderns’ who came into prominence in the 1960s."

Adams left Briggs in mid-November for a six-week stint at Grinnell’s, Detroit’s largest music store. After years of listening to classical music recordings and concert broadcasts on the radio, by age seventeen he was so knowledgeable about the repertoire that he was able to function in their record store department as Grinnell’s classical guy. While employed throughout the 1947 holiday season, Pepper worked next to the instrumental repair department. As a saxophonist keenly interested in what was going on there, he became friendly with one of its instrumental repairmen. Over lunch one day, Adams’s coworker told him about a Bundy baritone saxophone, essentially a student-model American-made Selmer, that had come in on trade. It really plays well, he told Pepper. You should take it home and try it. Curious about the instrument, and eager to find a way to become more employable as an underaged musician in a city with competition aplenty, Adams loved the horn. By December he accumulated $125, enough money to buy it, thanks to his employee discount. Just as he hoped, he started getting hired for baritone gigs right away.

Adams counterbalanced his various musical activities with a day job on the assembly line at Plymouth’s body plant. It may have been here that Adams participated in a labor strike. Saxophonist Ron Kolber said that Pepper showed him a big scar on the palm of one of his hands, the result of a wound he incurred when he was on a picket line, participating in a strike at one of Detroit’s factories, where he was assaulted by a chain-wielding counterdemonstrator.

By early 1948, Adams had been very much aware of the Reuther Brothers and the social unionist struggle for worker’s rights since childhood. In 1945 he observed his mother participate in a protracted and hotly contested teachers strike in New York State when Thomas E. Dewey was governor. As a confirmed socialist who ardently believed that America was intrinsically unjust, Pepper revered the Reuthers’s work to bring about economic justice. One indication of his admiration was Adams’s attendance, on November 17, 1964 in New York, at Waldorf-Astoria Hotel’s black-tie Equal Opportunity Day Dinner honoring Walter Reuther’s lifetime of achievement.

Although Adams for the most part wasn’t politically active, as a socialist and egalitarian, he didn’t like the system in this country, said Kolber.

He thought it was unfair. I used to call him the great socialist. He said, There’s too many people that don’t have things that they should have in this country, and they can’t get them because of what they are. He was very adamant about that. . . . I think that deep down in his heart he was a rabid socialist. With those kind of wry witticisms that he had, he always sort of made fun of the system here. He’d always make some kind of remark like, Oh, yeah, it’s ‘the land of the free and the home of the brave’ if you happen to be free and brave.

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In late March 1948, as a novelty warm-up act for Lionel Hampton’s orchestra, Adams was invited to participate in a talent show at Detroit’s Paradise Theatre. In Hampton’s band was trumpeter Fats Navarro, Detroit pianist Milt Buckner, and bassist Charles Mingus, who conceived the idea of showcasing some of Detroit’s best young talent. Billed as The Junior Beboppers, Pepper performed in a sextet that included Barry Harris, Bob Pierson, bassist Ernie Farrow, and trumpeter Claire Rocquemore.

Navarro was so impressed with thirteen-year-old Rocquemore, he joined the teen group to trade solos with him. Oliver Shearer, who attended the show, felt that Adams and Rocquemore were the two most impressive soloists in the teen band. That gives some indication of how much Pepper’s playing had advanced in nine months since his arrival in Detroit. I do remember the reaction of the band when Pepper was playing, said Shearer. "It wasn’t, ‘Look! He’s white’ kind of shit either. It was, ‘This little guy is playing!’ Mingus was smiling and looking around at the band, and Hamp was happy."

According to pianist Clarence Beasley, who played in one of the Junior Bebopper shows that week, We talked and hung out backstage with Lionel Hampton. We were exposed to these giants of jazz. There was talk of him taking the band on the road with him but none of that ever materialized. Although Hampton had the youngsters measured for uniforms, Hampton’s wife, Gladys, who ran his organization, vetoed the idea.

The aborted tour notwithstanding, Paradise Theatre’s talent show had long-lasting implications for Adams. It was the first time that he and Mingus met, beginning a fruitful musical partnership that included the iconic 1959 recording Blues and Roots and lasted well into the 1970s. Similarly, the gig initiated an important relationship with Hampton. He would hire Adams in the early 1960s to tour with his band at a time when jazz work was scarce, and again in the late 1970s when he assembled an all-star orchestra to commemorate his fiftieth anniversary in the music business.

Because Hampton discovered young Adams at the Paradise and learned that he was fatherless, he treated Pepper as a kind of a son, extending favors that he wouldn’t grant others. Despite Hampton’s tendency not to give solo features in fear that he’d have to increase that musician’s paltry salary, for example, he made an exception for Adams. Hampton introduced him by name to the audience and gave him ballad showcases on tunes such as Duke Ellington’s Sophisticated Lady. A touching moment indicative of their long-standing father-son bond can be seen at the conclusion of a 1978 Hampton concert that took place in Nice, France, when Adams was 47 years old. After Hampton took his final bows, he began walking offstage in front of his seated orchestra. Just before exiting he placed his hand securely on Adams’s left shoulder. Reciprocating, Pepper reached up with his right hand to clasp the back of Hampton’s hand, still on his shoulder, in a warm embrace.

Now fully established in Detroit as a baritone saxophonist, Adams soon afterwards joined Lucky Thompson’s nonet.  In the summer of 1948, Thompson had returned from New York and for a few months was rehearsing a large group that included Tommy Flanagan and guitarist Kenny Burrell. It was a hell of a band because Lucky had written a very interesting book for it, said Adams. That kind of music was a little too sophisticated, observed Burrell. It would have been nice had he done that in New York and got a record date. All in all, the ensemble played only a few concerts and dances in Detroit and nearby Inkster, in part because the band included several underage musicians.

Also, that summer Adams first met tenor saxophonist Wardell Gray, initiating an important mentorship that lasted until Gray’s death in 1955. By 1948, Gray had already recorded with Charlie Parker and possessed an international reputation as a jazz player of the first rank. His lyrical melodic lines, magnificent tone, sophisticated use of time, and strong sense of swing had a profound effect on Adams’s emerging style. Wardell and Pepper became very close friends off the bandstand, too, watching television shows together, such as Omnibus on Sunday afternoons, and sharing books that they were reading. Other than Sonny Stitt, Adams credited Gray as the finest baritone saxophone soloist he ever heard. Alas, Gray was never recorded playing the instrument, but he and Pepper frequently enjoyed trading horns when they gigged together in Detroit.

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Grinnell’s, 1515 Woodward Avenue, Detroit, c. 1950s.

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Though Adams was beginning to attract the attention of established musicians, he was very dissatisfied with his menial factory jobs and felt it was time to pursue a college degree to train himself for a career outside of music. Preferring to test out of high school requirements, he passed Wayne University’s entrance exam and was admitted as an English Literature major that September. Tuition was unbelievably cheap, remembered Rudy Tucich, who attended Wayne (renamed Wayne State in 1956) from 1961–1966. Three classes might have cost between $100–200. Twelve years earlier, Adams may have paid even less per semester, and his room-and-board fees were also quite nominal.

Apart from attending class, practicing his instrument, attending jam sessions, and working gigs at night, Adams also had a part-time job at Randle’s Record Shop. Randle’s was a pretty good place to hang out and listen to records, said Jack Duquette.

Pepper worked there with Bob [Cornfoot] off and on. It wasn’t that big a shop. It was down in the basement of an old home [on Second Avenue, beneath a music school], just off the campus there. They had the records that I wanted. They did things like little Sunday night soirees where they would talk about the musicians. Randle used to be kind of a