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