Roots of Rock and R&B: Dion and Allen Toussaint

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More information is at Walton Family Foundation.org.

This is Fresh Air.

I'm Terry Gross.

Today we conclude our archive series, RB, Rockabilly, and Early Rock and Roll with Alan Toussaint, who we'll hear from later, and Dion.

If you've ever dismissed Dion as a former teen idol whose talent or relevance didn't survive the oldies era, what you hear today is likely to change your mind.

He's a great singer, deeply influenced by the blues and country music.

I interviewed him in 2000.

He brought his guitar, and we're going to hear him perform some of his own songs and some of the blues and country songs that influenced him.

Dion had his first hit, I Wonder Why, in 1958, with the doo-wop group The Belmonts, named after Belmont Avenue in the Bronx neighborhood in which they lived.

Dion's other hits included A Teenager in Love, Where or When, Donna the Prima Donna, Run Around Sue, the Wanderer, and later, Abraham Martin and John.

His fan Bruce Springsteen gave the introduction when Dion was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1989.

Dion recorded a couple of Springsteen's songs on his album Deja Nu, which was released in 2000 and was the occasion for our interview.

We started with a track from that album, Dion singing Springsteen's If I Should Fall Behind.

We said we'd walk together.

Baby, come with me.

That comes with twilight.

Should we lose our way?

If as we were walking,

our hands should slip free.

I'll wait for you.

Should I fall behind?

Wait for me.

We swore that we would travel,

darling side by side.

And we help each other

to stay in stride.

but each lover step

far

so

differently.

Girl, I'll wait for you.

If I should fall behind, wait for me.

Now, everyone dreams

even of a love lasting and true.

Dion, welcome to fresh air.

Good to be here.

What's it been like for you finding new material?

I think a lot of people, when they think of your songs, they think of the songs you did when you were very young that were, some of them, very explicitly teenage songs, like Teenager in Love, or even The Wanderer.

It's a song about, it's a song of a young man

who in some ways is real hot stuff.

So,

I mean, you're not a teenager anymore, and the song that we just heard is a real adult song.

Are you,

has it been difficult for you to find songs that reach your audience that you like and that are adult songs?

I don't know.

Songs to me have always been kind of like a diary.

You know, say when I did Teenager in Love, maybe I was 16.

Those questions in that song, even though it's a very simple song, and it seems like kind of claptrap or something, but it's not.

To the unknowing ear, it would seem, you know, if you just listen to the surface of it.

But it had a lot of heart, it had a lot of soul, and it asks some relevant questions that you could ask today.

You know, and songs like I Wonder Why, it was the first hit record I had.

You know, we were, we didn't know how to write lyrics too good, but so we invented this kind of percussive

rhythmic sound.

You know, we'd make up these sounds.

We'd go down to the Apollo Theater and hear the horn players and we'd come back to the neighborhood and give

the vocal group, I'd conjure up, you know, I'd recruit guys and say, do this, do that, you know, and I'd try to get them to sound like the horn section down at the Apollo theater like a song like Ruby Baby I would you know I love a girl in the ruby yes her name I have to go ruby ruby ruby baby it was like

they were like horns you know and

all that stuff was

arranged you know I The group was a poor man's horn section on the street corners.

That's what it was.

Even when I did Run Around Sue and they would

That was a horn section that I heard at the Apollo did.

I just brought it back to the streets and gave it to the guys to sing.

Let me go back to the beginning with you when you were first

listening to music.

You wrote in your autobiography that Hank Williams really influenced you early on.

When you were a kid, growing up in the Bronx, what did you hear in Hank Williams?

Well, Hank Williams seemed

like so total to me, so committed to the lyric,

he would actually rip the ends of the words off at the, you know, the end of the sentence.

It sounded like he'd bite into the word and rip it off.

You know, he would do like,

well, I can't sing like him, but the kind of idea, like the first song I heard him do was like,

Yeah, and I live my home out on the round.

Told my pa I was going to step in out and get the honky tonk loose.

Get a honky tonk loose.

Well, Lord, I got

the honky tonk loose.

You know, he said, I'd stop into

every place in town.

And he'd

rip the word right off like I got it and there it goes you know and he was totally committed physically lyrically musically spiritually just I just I just said what's this guy talking about you know just

and see I had a guy on the streets that really helped me out a lot too there was a guy in Bronx New York City his name was Willie Green

and he was the superintendent of a tenement building in my neighborhood.

And, you know, basically what I ever, what I do is like black music filtered through an Italian neighborhood, comes out with an attitude.

Yo.

So Willie Green would be playing me all this John Lee Hooker stuff and, you know,

Sonny Boy Williamson.

And he'd be playing like...

Going down the road,

stop it, fanning me.

Tell my baby what I heard a boyfriend say.

Don't stop me talking.

Walla, tell everything I know.

I own them brave up and signify.

Walla, Jack, and some people got to go.

Jack gave his wife five-dollar gold down.

Town gets him, you know, you do stuff like that.

Or

yeah, and I woke up this morning

round for my shoes.

Some telling me, child got dudes of walking blue.

Yeah,

woke up this morning, looking round for my shoes, child.

You know that I live this morning, child.

Now it is a walking blue.

Some people tell me

that they worry blues in bed, that worst sofian I'm more ever care.

People tell me that they're worried blues ain't bad, I know

that a worse of being

ever cared, Jay, no, no, no.

And I'm walking,

walking blues, got there walking.

You know, he'd do stuff like that.

So I'd go into the studio and do the white version of that.

No, really, but it sounds like what I'm hearing from you is that you heard country music through Hank Williams.

You heard all these blues recordings.

And what you found was this kind of Bronx version of that.

Very little doo-wop.

Yeah, well, that doo-op was that for you.

This really, like for you, native version of all the music that you were loving.

Right, it kind of.

But it was authentic because it was your music.

You weren't just doing stuff in the manner of somebody else.

Well, Willie Green, again, the guy who was doing this, he told me, he said, Deion, he said, write about the people in the neighborhood, write about the things you know.

And to me, when I looked around my neighborhood, we had characters like Frankie Younk Young, Joe BBI's, Ralphie Moach.

There was a guy in my neighborhood, they called him Shakespeare.

He used to say, like, to be or not to be, which is my apartment.

I thought I'd get you at that, Terry.

But we had a lot of characters, you know, so and they seemed bigger than life, like the Wanderer.

His name was Jackie Burns.

He was a sailor who got tattoos all over him, you know.

And

every time he'd date a girl, he'd get a name tattooed on his body.

You know, this guy was like,

you know,

Flo on my left arm, Mary on my right.

Janie is a girl, I'll be with tonight.

Little girl, ask me which one I love the best.

I tear open my shirt, I show a rosie on my chest.

I'm a wanderer,

yeah, I'm the wanderer.

I roam around, around, around, around, around.

Later than every unsettled.

But

this guy would walk around with his tank top on with all these names all over you, you know.

What did you think of him?

Did you like him?

He was kind of a loner.

He would like, I didn't know him that well, but he just seemed bigger than life because he was older than me and he was in the Navy.

Right.

And he would come back and he'd have this kind of, you know, you know, and I kind of featured myself, you know, kind of.

like a

street corner poet, you know, burnt to the bone with the fire of this new rock and roll music.

So I was like, you know, over there saying, what could this guy, you know, I'm like, how could we put this guy to music?

You know.

And I don't think he ever knew the song was about him.

He took off a seat.

I don't even know if he's alive today, but The Wanderer is a sad song.

It says, I roam from town to town, I go through life without a care.

I'm as happy as a clown with my two fists of iron, but I'm going nowhere.

It's about

a real, a guy who just is stuck in a very kind of shallow lifestyle, you know?

Before you started listening to rhythm and blues and

blues music and stuff like that, I know when you were 11, you used to sing in a bar in your neighborhood, and it sounded like you were a real local attraction.

What did you sing when you were 11?

Ah, yeah.

I would do,

I knew 70 Hank Williams songs.

Would you believe that?

I would even sing his Luke the Drifter series, you know, In the world's mighty gallery of pictures,

hang the scenes that are painted from life.

I was like 13 years old.

I thought I was a philosopher.

I didn't even know what I was singing about.

I sang honky-tonk blues.

I sang jambalaya.

If you,

an Italian from the Bronx, I had no idea what jambalaya meant, but it sounded so good and felt so good coming out of my mouth, you know.

Goodbye, Joe, me, God, go, me, oh, my own.

You know,

jamba lie, crawfish, pine a feeling, gumbo.

I didn't know what gumbo was.

I knew what rigatoni was, but gumbo, I had no idea.

And,

you know, I got caught up

in this in this music.

And it, I guess it's like anybody else when you get caught up into something.

It just, it just took me away.

Why don't we pause here and listen to the first Deion on the Belmont's recording, which is I Wonder Why, with those those great harmonies.

That's a good attitude song.

Yeah.

Let's hear it.

And what year is this, Dion?

This is 57, beginning.

And you were how old?

I was 17.

Okay, let's hear it.

Don't know I love you,

don't know I care.

I just want

your love to share.

I wonder why I love you like I do.

Is it because

I think you love me too?

I wonder why I love you like I do, like I do.

I told my friends that we would never part.

They let them him saying

that you would break my heart.

I wonder why they think that we will part.

We will party.

There's a song that you wrote on the new CD that I really want to play because I think

your singing now is really similar to what it's always been.

I think some of the material has changed, but

I think your singing still has everything in it that you've been talking about.

All those influences, the urgency that you've been talking about.

So

let me play a song from the new CD, but before I do, I want you to introduce it for us.

And this is called Every Day That I'm With You.

Tell us about writing this.

What inspired it?

Well, this is a story, but I'm going to tell it.

The C D is called Dejan Nu, and the song that you're about to play,

in fact, the whole C D, the whole, all the songs in it, are a movie soundtrack.

for a movie called The Wanderer that Chas Palmentieri wrote a screenplay for.

And I was writing these songs for different scenes in the movie.

And

the movie got bogged down this year, so I just released the CD.

But anyway, every song on the CD is written for a certain, you know,

piece of the movie.

This song was written for a montage scene in the middle of it.

I traveled with Buddy Holly and Richie Valance on that tour.

We were co-headlining a tour.

And we were on this little yellow school bus,

not one of these luxury line

custom-made coaches today.

It was just a yellow school bus.

We were riding through the Midwest in 1959, February of 1959.

And it was cold.

It was like 30 below zero.

We were freezing.

But

we really kind of bonded on this tour, Richie, Buddy, and myself, because we had the first Fender guitars that were issued, these new Stratocasters, and we were in a kind of a competition to see who would make them ring the longest.

And

two weeks into the tour, Buddy got kind of fed up with the bus breaking down.

And

he was trying to recruit people.

He chartered a plane.

And he said,

because the more people you get aboard, the less it would cost.

So he said, you know,

it'll be $36, he tells me.

And he hit the magic number for me.

I grew up with my parents screaming and yelling at each other for the rent in Bronx, New York City at the time, was $36.

So my mind hadn't stretched out to that place where I could spend the whole month's rent on a 45-minute plane flight to Fargo, North Dakota.

So I said, no.

So he gives me his guitar.

He says, here, he says, you know, take care of my guitar.

He says, you better take care of it.

So he took his laundry.

That's what he wanted to do.

He wanted to get a haircut.

He wanted to do his laundry.

gives me the guitar to take care of.

So now I'm wondering, I wonder how his guitar sounds compared to mine.

So I go in the dressing room and I take the guitar, I'll plug it in, and I'm singing.

I was telling Chaz Palminteri as he's writing this story around this book, The Wanderer, that I wrote.

And the movie was called The Wanderer.

So he said, You know, we could do a buddy Holly song here in the movie, like it doesn't matter anymore.

I said, Let me write something

to go through me sitting in the dressing room playing his guitar and

singing with it.

And

while this scene takes place of them leaving, us driving to Fargo, arriving the next morning.

So this song was written for that scene because I thought I could capture this thing, because in my heart, I've always wanted to express this relationship that, you know, that I pondered at times or reflected on at times that I had with Buddy Holly.

And it came out in this song.

And I just want to say for our listeners who don't know the end of the story, that Buddy Holly took this plane that you decided not to take.

The plane crashed, killing Buddy Holly, Richie Vallins, and the Big Bopper.

Right.

So, and the other thing is, so Chas Pomateri's movie is your biography?

That's what he's trying to do?

Yeah, he wrote a screenplay around this, around

your biography, autobiography, The Wanderer.

All right.

So that's what this whole album is.

It's actually a soundtrack.

In fact,

I don't think it would have came out as good if I tried to write songs and put out an album.

I kind of did it inadvertently.

I kind of backed into it.

You know, and

it's interesting the way it came out, you know.

So let's hear every day that I'm with you the song that's, I guess, inspired by Buddy Holly and about that

chapter of your life.

This is a song written and performed by Dion from his new CD, Deja Nu.

Every day I stare down trouble.

Heaven knows it's what I do.

Every day I raise my fist for the struggle.

Every day that I'm new.

Every day I wake up hungry.

Yeah, and I try to get my fill.

Anyway, it's a great big country.

My interview with Dion was recorded in 2000.

He turned 86 in July.

Last year, he released the album Girlfriends, featuring duets with female singers.

This year, he released the single New York Minute and had a new book called The Rock and Roll Philosopher, a collection of conversations with a friend.

After a break, we'll conclude our archive series, R ⁇ B, Rockabilly, and Early Rock and Roll with Alan Toussaint, the great New Orleans pianist, singer, songwriter, and producer.

And jazz astar in Kevin Whitehead will remember alto saxophonist Art Pepper, who was born 100 years ago today.

I'm Terry Gross, and this is Fresh Air.

Support for NPR and the following message come from the Walton Family Foundation, working to create access to opportunity for people and communities by tackling tough social and environmental problems.

More information is at WaltonFamilyFoundation.org.

To conclude our archive series RB Rockabilly and Early Rock and Roll, we have the interview I recorded with Alan Toussaint, who is in our studio at the piano and sang some of the early hit songs he wrote.

Toussaint was an important but mostly behind-the-scenes figure in New Orleans rhythm and blues during the 50s and 60s, when RB was shaping the sound of early rock and roll.

Early in his career, he was the chief songwriter, producer, arranger, and pianist for Minute Records, which at the time was the most important New Orleans record company.

He and a partner formed their own label in the 60s.

The songs he wrote and or arranged and produced include Working in a Coal Mine, Mother-in-Law, Lipstick Traces, Ruler of My Heart, It's Raining, Right Place, Wrong Time, Lady Marmelot, Yes We Can, and Southern Nights.

Among the musicians he worked with were The Meters, The Rolling Stones, Paul Simon, The Band, and Paul McCartney.

After stepping out from behind the scenes, Toussaint also became known for his own recordings and performances, including his collaboration with Elvis Costello.

Toussaint died in 2015 at the age of 77.

I spoke with him in 1988.

Alan Toussaint, welcome back to Fresh Air.

Thank you.

I'm going to ask you, I'm going to start with a request

to play one of the songs, one of the first songs that was a big hit for you that you wrote, mother-in-law?

Oh, yes, it was one of our very first ones.

This was originally recorded by Ernie K.

Do.

Right.

Could you play it for us your way?

The worst person I know, mother-in-law, mother-in-law.

She worries me so,

mother-in-law, mother-in-law.

Every time I open my mouth, she steps in and try to put me out.

How could she stoop so low?

Mother-in-law, mother-in-law, mother-in-law, mother-in-law.

Why, Satan could have been her name.

Mother-in-law, mother-in-law.

To me, they're about the same.

Mother-in-law, mother-in-law.

If she'd leave us alone,

we we would have a happy home.

Sent from down below, mother-in-law, mother-in-law, mother-in-law, mother-in-law.

I come home with my pay,

mother-in-law, mother-in-law.

She asked me what I've made,

mother-in-law, mother-in-law.

She thinks her advice is a contribution.

But if she would leave, that would be the solution.

And don't come back no more.

Mother-in-law, mother-in-law, mother-in-law.

So how old were you when you wrote that?

Oh,

let's see.

I guess 21.

Were you married?

22.

Oh, no.

But mother-in-law was a national joke.

That's true.

It really was at the time.

Things have changed.

The mother-in-laws themselves weren't natural jokes, but most comedians used to use that.

That's right.

So how did you first start writing songs?

Well, I came up imitating most people that I heard on the radio.

I imitated most piano players, of course, and most all kinds of music.

And after I would play and become totally saturated with it,

I would sit and randomly play around.

So little melodies came, and that started my writing.

You know, I think two of your influences have been Fats Domino and Professor Longhair, two of the great New Orleans musicians.

Do you think that, I mean, I think they can be heard in your style.

Would you play something

of theirs and tell us how they affected you?

Oh, yes.

Well, Professor Longhair, I must say, of the local people, local meaning New Orleans and the New Orleans area,

has been the strongest influence on my playing

and even some of my writing, the way I construct certain things.

Early Professor Longhair, things like

when I first heard that as a child, that just knocked me out.

And later on, Professor Longhair began to add things to his music like

Yes, he was very, very important to me.

Was it hard to learn that when you were young?

Not hard.

It was very, very exciting.

Once I heard it, I could get involved.

It was just the idea of it, how unique it was to me.

It was off the beaten path of most other things that were all generally related in some fashion, but Professor Longhair didn't seem related to anyone else who was out there at the time.

I remember one of your early recording sessions was filling in for Fat's Domino because

his piano track hadn't been laid down yet.

You really could play in Fat's Domino star Professor Longhairs and Ray Charles.

How did you learn how to play like Fat's Domino?

Well, Fat Domino was flooding the market.

He had so many recordings out and he discovered a secret to success with triplets.

So as a child, that was,

I could immediately hear what that was.

And most of his recordings had that in it, except for one, The Fat Man, which I thought was very exciting, but he never recorded any more like that, which was a very different kind of piano.

It was kind of raunchy, like

Which was wonderful, but

he never played like that again except maybe on one other tune.

The rest of them was

turned out to be mostly

like the one I want you to know that I played on.

Right, right, right.

Dave Bartholomew, who knew that I could play like most of the folk that were out at the time,

called me in to

play on a fats domino recording recording session.

We were up to two tracks at that time, so we could do wonderful things.

And he called me in to play like Fats would play this song, and I went in and did.

That's really great.

I guess if you're just joining us as Alan Toussaint, And I should say, you know, I always, I've all, you know, whenever I said your name, one day it would be Toussaint, and one day it would be Toussaint.

And so I asked you how I should really say it, and you said Toussaint.

But your father's side of the family used to say Toussaint?

My father used to say Toussaint

without a T on the end.

It seems very common for New Orleans families to have different pronunciations of their names.

Oh, yes.

Bonnarise Bagnaris.

Yes.

We're listening to my 1988 interview with Alan Toussaint.

We'll hear more of it after a break.

This This is Fresh Air.

I'm going to ask you to play another song of yours, a song that you wrote.

Maybe do another one of your early hits?

Well, Lipstick Traces,

the guy, Bennett Spellman, that sung the bass part on Mother-in-Law,

he didn't know what it was worth at the time we were doing it, but when Mother-in-Law came out and so

and went to number one, let's say, Bennett Spellman that sung the bass part made show that everyone everyone within the sound of his voice got to know that he sung that part.

And he would go around, he would gig based on he sung the low part on Mother-in-Law.

And he encouraged me

with much force to write him a song that he could use that concept.

And one result of that was

the song, Lipstick Traces.

Your pretty brown eyes

Your wavy hair

I won't go home no more cause

you're not there

I've got it bad like I told you before

I'm so in love with you Don't leave me no more

Lipstick traces

on a cigarette

Every memory lingers

with me yet

I've got it bad like I told you before

I'm so in love with you Don't leave me no more

Won't you come back home

Won't you come back home?

Cause I'm crazy about you, can't do without you.

Won't you come back home?

Lipstick traces

on a cigarette,

every memory lingers

with me yet.

I've got it bad, like I told you before.

I'm so in love with you.

Don't leave me no more.

Leave me no more.

Don't leave me no more.

Leave me no more.

Mother-in-law.

Mother-in-law.

Don't leave me no more.

I guess you can see how bad that was.

He really owed you one after you wrote that for him.

Oh, thank you.

I love it when you can do both parts as you're singing the high part and the low part.

Oh.

No, another song you wrote that was a big hit, I guess it was the early 60s, working in a coal mine, that Lee Dorsey recorded of?

The Lee Dorsey, yes.

Now I remember when I interviewed you a few months back, you explained that you had never been in a coal mine when you wrote this song.

Not only never been, I don't know no one, know anyone who's ever been in a coal mine.

And I don't know why that came.

Lee Dorsey was a great inspiration for me.

When it was time to write for him, I would just sit back and begin to listen to the sound of his voice.

And one day,

while sitting on St.

Philip Street in New Orleans, I heard him saying, Working in the coal mine, going down, down, down.

I have no idea why, but he was a great inspiration.

His voice sounded like a smile to me.

And I wrote lots of songs for him.

Yes.

Would you do it for us?

We'll give it a go.

Working in the coal mine, going down, down, down, working in the coal mine, about to slip down, working in the coal mine, going down, down,

working in the coal mine, about to slip down.

Five o'clock in the morning,

I'm already up and gone.

Lord, I'm so tired.

How long can this go on now?

Working in the coal mine, going down, down, down, working in the coal mine, about to slip down, working in the coal mine, going down, down, down, working in the coal mine, about to slip down.

Of course, I make a little money

hauling coal by the ton.

But when Saturday rolls around,

I'm too tired for having fun.

Too tired for fun now.

Working in the coal mine,

going down down, working in the coal mine,

about to slip down, working in the coal mine, going down, down, down, working in the coal mine, about to slip down.

Lord, I'm so tired.

How long can this go on?

God, that sounds great.

Songwriter, pianist, producer, singer, Alan Tussant is my guest.

And

I'm going to ask her to do another song.

I've been listening to a lot of Irma Thomas lately.

She has a new record out, and you wrote some of her early songs, and you wrote a song she sings on her new record, as a matter of fact.

I'm going to ask you to sing one of her earlier songs that you wrote for her called It's Raining.

Would you do that?

It's raining so hard.

Looks like it's gonna rain all night.

And this is the time I'd love to be holding you tight.

I guess I'll have to accept

the fact that you're not here.

I wish this rain would hurry up and in, my dear.

I've got the blue so bad, I can hardly catch my breath.

And the harder it rains,

the worse it gets.

This is the time

I'd love to be holding you tight,

but I guess I'll just go crazy tonight.

Is there a story behind writing the song?

Well, with Irma, again, she was sitting right there that day,

and it was raining.

And Irma was a great inspiration for me.

I could write for her all day long, and sometimes I did.

And she was sitting there, and it was raining, and I could see the rain hitting on the window pane and it was just perfect.

Yes.

Well, it has really been such a pleasure to hear you play and sing.

Thank you so much for joining us, really.

Thank you very, very much.

My pleasure.

Alan Toussaint recorded in 1988.

He died in 2015.

He was 77.

And with that, we conclude our archive series, RB, Rockabilly, and Early Rock and Roll.

I hope you enjoyed it.

After a break, our jazz historian Kevin Whitehead remembers Alto Sax phonist Art Pepper, who was born 100 years ago today.

This is fresh air.

Jazz saxophonist Art Pepper was born 100 years ago today.

He started on clarinet at age 9 and debuted on record with Stan Kenton at age 18.

Pepper had an intensive and creative alto saxophone style that kept his services in demand, but owing to personal problems, he'd drop out of music from time to time.

Then in the 70s, after a long hiatus, Art Pepper came roaring back.

Our jazz historian Kevin Whitehead has the details.

Art Pepper's tune Mambo Koyama from 1978 when the saxophonist was enjoying one of the great jazz comebacks after 15 years laying low.

His return would soon get a further boost from his candid autobiography, Straight Life.

As Pepper tells it there, he was an unloved kid afraid of everything from closets to clouds, who then discovered two things he loved music early and a few years later the addictive narcotic heroin in his book he makes the first time he shot up sound like coming home

art pepper the jazz musician got early exposure in stan kenton's 1940s big band all the young alto players dug charlie parker's fleet brilliance but pepper had his own bright tone warm inflections skittery phrasing and floating swing feel

Art Pepper on Stan Kenton's Dynaflo, 1950.

Other West Coast leaders sought Pepper out, but he could burn a little hot for LA's new new cool jazz scene.

Shorty Rogers showcased him on an arrangement of Over the Rainbow, which barely contained Pepper's energy and creativity.

Art Pepper's life could be a mess, but he played with with a lot of heart.

You really hear it on a pair of stark blues with bassist Ben Tucker from 1956.

On Blues In, Pepper balances elegant lines and woozy splats as if bearing his internal contradictions.

One thing Art Pepper fretted about a lot was that African-American colleagues didn't respect him enough, Pepper being white and ever insecure.

He was anxious before a 1957 record date with Miles Davis' rhythm trio, fearing they'd cop an attitude.

But they couldn't have been nicer, and the album Art Pepper Meets the Rhythm Section was an instant classic.

Pianist Red Garland had suggested, you'd be so nice to come home to, where Pepper warms up his solo with some thick, slabby low notes.

Art Pepper made more fine albums through 1960.

Then he didn't make one of his own for 15 years.

To be a drug addict was to be an outlaw, and Art did a few stretches in California prisons, followed by a stint in a drug rehab program he made sound like jail all over again.

But he kept playing and keeping track of new developments, in particular John Coltrane's way of mixing form and freedom.

Comeback Pepper wrote some new style tunes like Mambo Koyama and the sleek and streamlined Landscape.

The tune Landscape was a staple of Art Pepper's last years when he performed and recorded often.

I saw him a few times toward the end and his playing was a marvel.

Sometimes a bit rougher, but with his old, beautifully sculpted phrases and headlong rhythm.

Here he is on Landscape from a festival set at the Kennedy Center.

Art Pepper May 1982 on his final concert.

His abused body had been failing and he'd die two weeks later.

That Pepper made it to age 56 56 owed much to his wife and co-author Lori Pepper, who's issued many late-period live dates, like the one we just heard, on her Widow's Taste label.

In the end, the saxophonist got all the acclaim he'd been craving from peers, critics, and audiences.

Art Pepper's last studio dates were a close-listening duo with an African-American pianist he bonded with, who's still with us, the formidable George Cables.

With Art Pepper's final performances, the old outlaw went out in a blaze of glory.

Kevin Whitehead is the author of New Dutch Swing, Why Jazz, and Play the Way You Feel.

Tomorrow on Fresh Air, our guest will be Jane Fonda.

At the the age of 87, the Academy Award-winning actor is pouring her energy into activism.

She'll talk about her decades-long career, how she first began her fitness empire to fund her activist work, and why the first season of the Netflix series Grace and Frankie sent her back into therapy.

I hope you'll join us.

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I'm Terry Gross.

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