Reel to Real to Release Historical Pepper Adams

courtesy of Lydia Liebman Promotions

One week from today Reel to Real Recordings will release a two-CD album of baritone saxophonist Pepper Adams performing with The Tommy Banks Trio, led by Banks on piano with Bobby Cairns on electric bass and Tom Doran on drums. This is a concert recording made in 1972 at the University of Alberta, which has not been previously released. Reel to Real specializes in such historical releases, and this will be their eighth offering. As expected, Amazon.com has created a Web page for processing pre-orders.

Adams was probably busiest during the Sixties. He had been co-leading a quintet with Donald Byrd; and, after that broke up, he formed another quintet with Thad Jones. That, in turn, led to his role as a founding member of the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra, which maintained a Monday-night residency at the Village Vanguard for five decades.

This new release is likely to appeal to those that like prolonged improvisations by all of the participating performers. With the exception of the 90-second “’Tis,” which was Adams’ “sign-off” tune, the remaining six tracks are all longer than twelve minutes, and five of them exceed seventeen minutes. The Adams originals include “Civilization and Its Discontents” and “Patrice.” Any influence of Sigmund Freud on the first of these is left as an exercise for the listener. The same can be said of whether “Patrice” refers to Patrice Lumumba, the first Prime Minister of the Republic of the Congo, who was assassinated on September 5, 1960! “Three and One” is a Jones composition, which is complemented by Sonny Rollins’ “Oleo.” The two standards in the collection are “Time on My Hands” and “Stella by Starlight.”

Since my own taste runs to those prolonged improvisations, I find that this entire package makes for a rich listening experience. Indeed, the experience is so rich that I shall probably spend more time listening to individual tracks, rather than taking in the whole “club experience.” (All too often, I find myself leaving a richly-endowed jazz session worrying about how I shall negotiate everything I have just experienced for the sake of writing something coherent!)