Every month

Every month I'll post a new "taste" of Art Pepper's music as a FREE DOWNLOAD. These tastes are given away because they are "unreleasable" by virtue of the recording being cut off at beginning or end or by brief audio problems that occurred in the recording process.

THEY'RE TOO STUNNING TO HIDE AWAY IN MY FILES AS YOU'LL SOON SEE.

I'll also post occasional journal entries including updates on new releases.

Monday, January 18, 2016

Darn that Dream? Wake up, it's the January Freebie!

Darn the dream of being able to play to an attentive audience.

I remember this 1981 gig in Washington, D.C. mainly because Art came down off the stage during the set and told me to stop shushing the audience—a bunch of drunken middle-aged men accompanied by what looked like hookers. Art said that if they took offense at my scolding and insulted me, he’d have to fight them all. Art was old school and couldn’t let anybody mess with his woman, no matter how obnoxious she decided to be.
(At the one-minute mark, you can actually hear someone start to WHISTLE along! The guy paid to go to a nightclub where…  Oh nevermind.)

The song, Darn that Dream, is lovely, the performances are beautiful. Even though Milcho Leviev's solo is very short, it’s one of his great ones. Gene Perla is on bass, Barry Altschul is the drummer. The tape is noisy. I’ve done the best I could to remove a nasty buzz without crippling the sound. (I think I made the original recording. Not sure, though.)