RABBIT HOLES

Art Pepper Lives! Or, Long Live the CD!

- THOMAS CONRAD

That title must have gotten your attention. Not the part about Art Pepper but the part about the CD. Nobody has anything good to say about the compact disc anymore.¹ CD sales suck. Streaming and downloads rule the world. Vinyl (an album format that warps, scratches, and has to be flipped every 22 minutes) now outsells CDs.

But the CD still deserves a place in your heart. One reason: box sets. Many of them are worthy of coveting. For example, there is an amazing new project on the Omnivore label, Art Pepper's The Complete Maiden Voyage Recordings. It contains eight hours and 20 minutes of music on seven CDs. Collections that large do not lend themselves to LPs.

Art Pepper was one of the most notorious junkies in the history of jazz. When he was young, he was an alto saxophone virtuoso. In 1951, he finished 16 votes behind Charlie Parker in the Downbeat Readers Poll. In his early 30s, he made classic albums like Art Pepper Meets the Rhythm Section (1957) and Art Pepper + Eleven (1959). But by 1960, heroin had laid him waste. He was incarcerated for much of the next 15 years. He even made the prison big time: San Quentin.

Two events kept him from falling off the face of the earth. First, he entered Synanon, a drug rehabilitation program in Santa Monica, California. Second, he met Laurie Miller.