WORTHY CONTENDER
ART PEPPER
Art Pepper Meets The Rhythm Section (1957)
The great Art Pepper was another troubled soul in a landscape of profoundly afflicted musicians. In his autobiography, Straight Life (1979), he wrote that he had not played his bashed-up alto sax for six months before recording this set, on January 19, 1957. In fact, he didn’t know about the session at all until the actual day, and turned up loaded to the eyeballs on a dose of smack.