Straight Life

As Art Pepper readied himself to die--or further pushed himself toward the brink of death--he seemed determined to say everything possible, quickly and forthrightly. In doing so, he created an explosive ream of albums for the Galaxy Records label, most of them featuring Pepper with only the slender backing of a piano-bass-drums setup. He was all over the sessions, picking ripe old tunes and letting fly on them, spinning his silken lines into adventurous nuggets that curbed and then redirected his playing. On Straight Life and on several of the Galaxy sessions (collected in their blessed entirety on the 16-CD The Complete Galaxy Recordings), he has the rhythmic backing of Billy Higgins on drums. Like Pepper, Higgins can whisper his parts and then shout them out with clapping power. These are all tunes Pepper fans will know but they're tremendously fresh, as is their interpreter--who would die less than three years later. --Andrew Bartlett