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Jim Pepper

Jim Pepper, the son of a Creek Indian mother and Kaw father, grew up surrounded by the songs and dances of the intertribal powwow circuit. He learned Native American Church peyote chants and other songs from his father, Gilbert Pepper, and grandfather, Ralph Pepper. Originally from Oklahoma, his family moved to Portland, Oregon, where he was born - although he spent many summers back in Oklahoma with his grandfather's family. In the mid-1960s, he left home to make a name for himself in New York - which he did by exploding onto the scene with what may very well have been the first jazz-rock fusion band, Free Spirits.

That early, innovative group - with Bob Moses on drums, Larry Coryell and Columbus Baker on guitars, and Chris Hill on vocals and bass, along with Pepper on saxophone - recorded their first album, Out of Sight and Sound, for Rudy Van Gelder at ABC/Paramount in 1967. Following that, in the late 1960s, Pepper played in the Everything is Everything band, and his composition, "Witchi Tai To" - his most well known song - soon became the band's signature piece. Those early bands gained a reputation in the rock-and-roll clubs for starting their sets with 20-minute long, unaccompanied sax solos from Pepper, something rock audiences had never heard before. "Witchi Tai To", based on a ritual chant he learned from his grandfather, was a major crossover hit on jazz and popular Top 40 lists around the world, and has been covered by countless pop and "world music" musicians.

Pepper was encouraged by Don Cherry and Ornette Coleman to dig deeper into his Native music and incorporate it into his jazz playing and composition (Cherry was well known for encouraging musicians around the world to look to their own indigenous music for inspiration). Pepper's first album under his own name, Pepper's Pow Wow, was released in 1971 on Herbie Mann's Embryo label, and includes his father, Gil Pepper. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Pepper recorded with a vast range of jazz greats, including Cherry, Bill Frissell, Charlie Haden, Paul Motian, Dewey Redman, Ed Schuller, John Scofield, Mal Waldron, and many others. On tour with Cherry, he enjoyed a particularly warm reception from African audiences who applauded his unique blend of Native American music and jazz. According to Cherry, "The response in Africa was tremendous when Jim would play one of the pow wow pieces he had written... They realized that here was something truly American."

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Liner Notes

Larry Coryell: Improvisations: Best of the Vanguard Years

Read "Larry Coryell: Improvisations: Best of the Vanguard Years" reviewed by Josef Woodard


There have been many smoother operators in the world of jazz guitar than Larry Coryell, the brainy rough rider who was a natural-born fusioneer, in the best sense. There have been cleaner technicians on the instrument, with a more lucid sense of identity and careers that have followed a logical, rolling landscape. But not many have quite attained Coryell's strange, madly eclectic state of grace: into music he came, he saw and heard things not yet articulated, he conquered on ...

366
Album Review

Jim Pepper / Amina Claudine Myers / Anthony Cox / Leopoldo Fleming: Afro Indian Blues

Read "Afro Indian Blues" reviewed by Donald Elfman


It's American roots music in flying colors as four simpatico musicians dig deeply at a 1991 Austrian jazz festival. Native American (Craw) Jim Pepper, African-Americans Amina Claudine Myers and Anthony Cox and Puerto Rican Leopoldo Fleming wowed the audience with “native music--the blues, jazz, Indian and African music that seems all about the passion and power to unite. The concert opens with--what else?--the blues. It's basically Billie Holiday's “Fine and Mellow, and is a down-home groove. Myers ...

450
Extended Analysis

Jim Pepper: Polar Bear Stomp

Read "Jim Pepper: Polar Bear Stomp" reviewed by Bill Siegel


Jim Pepper Polar Bear Stomp Universal Music (Austria) 2004

“Jim didn't want me to write about the music, since he thinks the music has the right to speak for itself. He also didn't want me to write a biography; instead, only my impressions." Enja Records co-founder and Jim Pepper producer, Horst Weber.

How fitting that Jim Pepper's friend and professional associate Horst Weber remembers that it was by impressions that Pepper wanted ...

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Extended Analysis

Jim Pepper: Afro Indian Blues

Read "Jim Pepper: Afro Indian Blues" reviewed by Bill Siegel


Amina Claudine Myers & Jim Pepper Afro Indian Blues PAO Records 2006

Why now? Why review a recording of a concert that happened fifteen years ago? For one, because it's taken this long for anyone to get around to releasing the performance on CD. But even more importantly, because this is a major event and should get all the exposure possible.

In 1991, at the time of the gig, Pepper was already sick with ...

719
Profile

There Are No Coincidences: A Tale of Synchronicity

Read "There Are No Coincidences: A Tale of Synchronicity" reviewed by Bill Siegel


Or Meditations on Jim Pepper, Chief Bey, Milford Graves, a Heron and a Flock of Geese

(excerpts from this appeared in the Winter/Spring 2005 issue of Planet Jazz magazine)

If anything is a coincidence, then everything must be; And if everything is coincidence, then surely nothing really happens by chance.

Item: One of the first times I listened to saxophonist Jim Pepper ("Comin' and Goin,'" from the album of the same name). I was driving on a crowded ...

449
Profile

Driving with Jim Pepper

Read "Driving with Jim Pepper" reviewed by Bill Siegel


It was a dark and stormy night. No really, it was dark and it was stormy. I was driving home, maybe halfway from Leicester, Massachusetts to Nashua, New Hampshire. Ordinarily, it was maybe an hour-and-a-quarter's drive, but in this rain it would take at least two hours, I guessed. It hadn't been a particularly snowy winter, but as spring approached it seemed that nearly every weekend that I made that trek it was raining. Raining hard.

There are stretches along ...

368
Live Review

Jim Pepper Tribute at the Portland Jazz Festival

Read "Jim Pepper Tribute at the Portland Jazz Festival" reviewed by Bill Siegel


The huge pipe organ on the stage at Portland, Oregon's First Unitarian Church was imposing, even awe-inspiring, but that wasn't the cause of all the buzz among the 400-plus people in the audience on Friday night, February 11. They were there to kick off the Portland Jazz Festival with a tribute concert dedicated to Native American saxophonist and Portland son, Jim Pepper. Pepper was known for taking the songs and rhythms of Native America, and integrating them with African and ...

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Music

Recordings: As Leader | As Sideperson

Afro Indian Blues

PAO Records/ SBF Records
2007

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Improvisations: Best...

Vanguard Records
2007

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Jim Pepper: Afro...

PAO Records/ SBF Records
2006

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Jim Pepper: Polar...

Universal Music (Austria)
2006

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