Craft Recordings Reissues Iconic Art Pepper Vinyl

At the end of last month, Craft Recordings released the latest album in its Acoustic Sounds Series, launched as a 70th anniversary celebration of Contemporary Records. That label was founded by Lester Koenig in 1951 and became one of the major platforms for the West Coast jazz movement, which involved performers such as Art Pepper, Chet Baker, Shelly Manne, and André Previn. For the record (as they say), my personal collection includes albums of only the first two of those four.

Cover design for Art Pepper meets The Rhythm Section

In that setting one of my favorite CDs is Art Pepper meets The Rhythm Section. I rather like the typography on the album cover, because this is a rhythm section that definitely deserves a capitalized “The!” The members are Red Garland on piano, Paul Chambers on bass, and Philly Joe Jones on drums, all of whom date back to the Miles Davis Quintet recording sessions with Prestige that began in November of 1955. (Those with a weak sense of history deserve to be informed that the fifth member of that quintet was saxophonist John Coltrane.)

For those unfamiliar with Pepper’s biography, I shall take the liberty of extracting a paragraph from his Wikipedia page:

His career was repeatedly interrupted by several prison stints stemming from his addiction to heroin, but Pepper managed to have several productive "comebacks". Remarkably, his substance abuse and legal travails did not affect the quality of his recordings, which maintained a high level of musicianship throughout his career until his death in 1982.

This is consistent with an interview I remember hearing on the radio. I do not recall the interviewee. He was also a jazz performer; and what I do remember is that just about every one of his sentences began, “Then Art Pepper got out of jail!”

In spite of his checkered past, his Art Pepper meets The Rhythm Section album is definitely representative of that “high level of musicianship.” The Acoustic Sounds Series has chosen to honor that musicianship with a 180-gram long-playing vinyl with newly mastered audio prepared by Bernie Grundman. Amazon.com now has a Web page from which that vinyl may be purchased; but, for those of us that prefer listening to music over listening to audio, Amazon has provided hyperlinks for the CD, MP3, and unlimited streaming.

It is worth mentioning, however, that the original Contemporary vinyl consisted of nine tracks. These include original compositions by both Pepper and Garland; but the remaining tracks cover a diversity of “standards” offerings. However, when the album was released on CD, it included a tenth “bonus” track of another standard, George Gershwin’s “The Man I Love.” Since Amazon does not provide track details, I do not know if the tenth track is included on the new Craft release.