Art of Darkness

When reality overwhelms comprehension

A portrait of a junkie and criminal as a jazz musician

“When I was in jail I heard a lot of stories … about different junk they’ve had, how good it was, and about big scores they’ve made. They’d pull a robbery and instead of buying a gram or a quarter they’d buy a piece or two … and sell a little bit and lay up and just fix and not have to go out on the street. So now, what I wanted was to find somebody to help me pull an armed robbery. I wanted to go in with a gun, get the money, score, get away from the scene, and cool it.

“… What it boiled down to was that the guys were just chicken. They were just bullshitting in the joint, and they were really nothing but street hype running around stealing the easiest things they could find…

“There was a bar in East L.A. All the gangsters and the big dope peddlers hung out there … You just don’t rob a place like that because if those gangsters found out who it was, they would kill us.

“We cased it … But it wasn’t only the bread or the dope. It was the idea of having the balls and the heart to do it. Everybody would be out to kill us … and I wanted to have a gun because I wanted to be able to kill somebody so I could be the cat that was the violent one—from prison, from the movies, you know, I wanted to shoot two or three people because I thought it would prove my strength…

“We went to a gas station across the street from this bar and fixed one last time, in case we were killed, so we’d be straight...” - Art Pepper, Straight Life: The Story of Art Pepper

Would Art Pepper, if he was still alive, be asked to play at the Outlaw Music Festival (“Feel the Freedom of Music at Outlaw Music Festival 2025!”), or is that just a packaged brand that comes out of a group of country musicians who started to work outside the standard music industry regimes in the 1970s? No knock on them, but those “Outlaws” weren’t outlaws. Nor was Lou Reed when he sang “Perfect Day” or “Heroin.” Pepper, on the other hand, was not just a junkie but an actual criminal who served four separate prison sentences (and several other shorter jail terms). And he was also one of the truly great jazz musicians of the 20th century, and there’s no separating the two.

Pepper wasn’t penning odes to the drug experience, during his musical prime he was often raving on street corners at the everyday people driving by while he desperately waited for his connection to show up. He admired the “rightousness” of many of his fellow convicts against what he saw as the phoniness of most of society. Lest you sympathize with the disease of addiction, especially at a time when it was illegal to be an addict, consider that in Straight Life he admits to running around Los Angeles, peeping in windows and masturbating, and that when he was an MP stationed in England in 1944 he raped a woman.

If jazz were anything more than the figment of the cultural imagination it currently is, the mind-breaking complexity of the criminality and artistic genius of Art Pepper might help people think about the issue of the “problematic” artist. In our public voices it’s justifiable to condemn horrid, damaging treatment of others, yet there’s a hit Michael Jackson show on Broadway, and this past weekend I saw a young, post-college woman reading a Harry Potter book on the subway. I’m looking at my collection of Miles Davis recordings while knowing that I would never have wanted to know him in any personal way.

At some point we have all made this decision to accept the commodity of the product of a particular artist versus their moral and ethical agency in society. I still watch Chinatown, I still read Norman Mailer. And fuck I still listen to Art Pepper, because nobody played like Pepper. I’m writing about him here (and at Bandcamp) because his music is meaningful to me, even with his biography. This is not about redemption, music doesn’t repair damage, it’s about seeing the complexity of actual art, how it may have no other social quality than honesty (which ain’t nothing), and how you should never, ever assume that being a creative artist makes someone a good person. That has never been the case and never will be.

The commodification of creative culture in our consumerist society hides this. Distrust the use of the word “consume” when it comes to cultural experience, no matter how learned or politically sympathetic the source, because built into it is the idea that a song or a book or a movie is a discrete, finite thing that is gone (consumed) once it’s been experienced. Along with that is the idea that, like the food we eat, there is a utility to this, the shallow arts administrators’ cliché that going to a museum is good for you. Distrust also the generic usage of “content” and “art” in so much contemporary discourse. Content can be anything, regardless of quality, and the word is used to cover up that the subject is most often pornography, gaming clips, or the emptiness of “influencer” culture, which is nothing more than advertising.

Describing every bit of creative product as art flattens everything, and hides substance and purpose. It puts Michelangelo’s David and The Turner Diaries on the same plane (for a brilliant and honest look at this in the context of a fraught cultural moment, I recommend Robert Hughes’ “Art, Morals, and Politics,” one of the most influential things I’ve read).

These words taken together outline the bourgeois idea of purchase/possession/ownership, culture as product, the phoniness that Pepper hated. What was real to him, and what made him feel like a whole person (instead of the emptiness that plagued him), was playing jazz and shooting smack. The two are intertwined in his recorded history.

Junkie Discography

Art Pepper Meets the Rhythm Section: Pepper hadn’t been out of prison long and was shooting heroin and fighting with his then girlfriend Diane in a co-dependent relationship that the word “toxic” can’t even begin to describe—in order to stay with Art, Diane decided to join him in heroin addiction, and he later married her so that she would stop trying to kill herself—and he hadn’t played the alto in six months. Diane and his producer woke him up on the morning of January 19, 1957 to tell him he had a record date with Red Garland, Paul Chambers, and Philly Joe Jones. No one told Art ahead of time because they knew that if he could see that upcoming date, he would be intimidated by it and would never show up.

His horn was not in good shape, he had left the mouthpiece on it last time he played and when he pulled it off all the cork came with it. And he was of course fucked up, and ran into what he described as a typical problem for him, which was blanking on tunes when asked what he wanted to play. And then he made one of the great jazz albums of the decade, the ideas flowing out of him with clarity and beauty:

Smack Up: One of the several albums with titles that describe Art’s life (Straight Life, Intensity, Living Legend), this is one of the few quintet records he made. He’s joined here by the fine West Coast trumpeter Jack Sheldon (who was also a good singer, an actor, and something of a comedian). The session was recorded October 24-25, 1960. At the time, Art says he was “running around East L.A. pulling burglaries and boosting and trying to get hold of a gun…” Even more than Meets the Rhythm Section, his playing, and the sound and ideas of a junkie who also happens to be a musician, is hard to believe:

He only mentions making the album because it was part of a chain of events that led to another prison term (he was never caught for the attempted armed robbery quoted above). He used his advance money to buy “a half a piece of stuff,” but the cops were staking out his dealer’s house, and Diane (who was arrested as a consequence of overdosing on a giant bottle of phenobarbital that Art had previously stolen from a doctor’s office) had informed on him.

Intensity: This was recorded a month later (though not released until 1963) and the way Art describes it, it was set up by his producer Les Koenig so that the advance money could be used to pay Art’s bail bond from his bust.

There’s no way to measure talent, but the thing about Pepper was the ease of his playing. Of course he had to practice to build up his fantastic technique, but when he put the horn to his lips it seemed like he was in his natural state, that whatever was inside him was meant to be made into music, and making music made him whole. This was the last recording Art made before he was convicted and sentenced to San Quentin.

Half-Life of an Afterlife

He was out of prison, playing in San Francisco (and using again and figuring out ways to beat the government’s drug monitoring program) when he made this fascinating appearance on KQED’s Jazz Casual series in May, 1964. It’s notable for how he’s working on incorporating John Coltrane’s direction, which enthralled him. Again, this is a junkie musician playing and talking to Ralph Gleason, with insight into jazz and freedom, and, yeah, creativity and art:

Art was finished with prison, finally, in 1965, and then he escaped the scary and dangerous cult of Synanon (which is a whole other story), and played at a near maniacal clip the brief rest of his life. And he found some stability and fulfillment with his wife Laurie.

Here’s a remarkable clip of Art joining the great blues singer Jimmy Witherspoon at the Lighthouse, a place where when he was younger Art not only played but made a lot of connections to both music and drugs. Art’s late Renaissance is dense with music making like this, raw and abrading, sounding like he’s attacking the notes themselves to try and get them out, and using them to attack his own soul. Art plays like a man who knows he’s wasted too much time, and the rest is running out:

Fiction writers are liars, that’s what they do, invent and manipulate characters and spin out stories to please you and, at their best, get at some concepts of truth. There’s no distance at all between that and seeing actual human beings as non-human figures and manipulating or disregarding them.

Improvising musicians are different. On the spot and in the moment, they have to reach inside themselves and express something that’s part of their being, their thoughts and feelings and experiences. I’ve heard improvisers play dishonestly, meaning that they pander to what they think the audience wants to hear, they’re not lying so much as communicating with the musical equivalent of ad copy. A sincere improviser has neither façade nor fiction. When Art played “Here’s That Rainy Day” in August, 1975, for his post-prison comeback album, what you hear is who he was, and it’s just as real and honest as everything in Straight Life.

Good listening to all.