The Boston Phoenix
Review from issue: August 6 - 13, 1998

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Jazz on Film

Art Pepper: Notes from a Jazz Survivor and Dexter Gordon: More Than You Know are compelling documentaries made by Don McGlynn about late, great American sax players, one white and one black, whose lives were wrecked by drug addiction and debilitating prison terms. They came back, though indelibly wounded, to play with soaring elegance and power. Jazz as survival.

Art Pepper (1925-1982) was a leather-jacketed punk, an On the Road Dean Moriarty type, into women and, even more, into junk. "If this is what the devil's got, that's what I want," is how he described the ecstasy of first shooting up. "Heroin is this thing at the end of a rainbow. It warms your stomach, like lying you down in a meadow." He ran over several wives, committed dark crimes to feed his habit, and landed in San Quentin.

He was rescued by his third wife, Laurie, who became his business manager, helped him to hold his drug habit more or less in check (he was known to supplement his methadone with cocaine in later years), and lived comfortably with his brash ego. "I'm a genius. I can't think of anyone who plays better than me," Pepper declared to the camera for this historic 1982 documentary. He proves it in some soulful alto-sax solos with his quartet, all recorded live at Pasquale's in Malibu.

In contrast Dexter Gordon was a gentle, sorrowful man weighed down by his hard breaks, with the sweetest, saddest smile. For this 1997 documentary made for Danish television, McGlynn slides through Gordon's half-century of tenor sax, from breaking in at age 17 with the Lionel Hampton band to late days (he died in 1990) living and playing in Copenhagen. There's some wonderful Gordon music in this film, from straight-ahead bebop to warm, melodic tunes, but everything feels tragic: McGlynn puts Gordon in the context of black giants of jazz -- Ben Webster, Bud Powell -- who staggered about in exile in Europe.

Does anyone recall that Gordon was nominated for an Academy Award for his autobiographical role in Bertrand Tavernier's Round Midnight (1986)? A highlight here is Gordon's audition for the film, in which he told a World War II story about punching out his captain and being dishonorably discharged from the military. "In the army we were in a Negro unit with pink officers," Gordon began, a masterful opening sentence for a novel.

-- Gerald Peary
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