Art Pepper - Everything Happens To Me: 1959 - Live At The Cellar / 4 CD Box Set

The release of Art Pepper’s Everything Happens To Me: 1959 – Live At The Cellar is the stuff music archivists can only dream of finding. Recordings by an historic and important jazz artist, at a storied venue, at a time when the artist was making some of their most essential work. In this case, catching Pepper on tape at The Cellar in 1959 finds him in the midst of creating and straddling landmark releases like, Art Pepper Meets The Rhythm Section (1957), Modern Art (1957), Art Pepper + Eleven (1959) and Gettin’ Together (1960). Though Pepper was going through a down time, Vancouver, Canada’s jazz club, The Cellar was in full swing and in the middle of its seven-year run (1956–1963).

There was an ongoing free exchange between the L.A. and San Francisco jazz players; the distance between the two cities amounted to six or seven hours by car. Sometimes a San Francisco booking stretched into stops in Portland and Seattle. Between 1956 to 1963, there was a northernmost jazz outpost in Vancouver, The Cellar. The basement space at 222 East Broadway (entered through the alley on Watson Street) grew from jam session site to full-fledged jazz club. —excerpt from liner notes by Kirk Silsbee

Dave Quarin, a saxophone player himself, managed The Cellar at the time, “The Cellar years were a good time for us,” Quarin states. “There were a half a million or so people in Vancouver then. We had CBC radio in the late 1950s, and they did live shows from Vancouver. We were very in-touch with American news, so I knew about the good musicians.” It was Quarin who captured Art on tape. Pepper was accompanied by pianist Chris Gage, bassist Tony Clitheroe and drummer George Ursan.

Everything Happens To Me: 1959 – Live At The Cellar utilizes a fly-on-the-wall approach that includes all the existing music as the recordings happened. As a result, the set includes some incomplete tracks, but most songs run near to completion. The producers Laurie Pepper (Art’s widow) and Omnivore Recordings’, Cheryl Pawelski didn’t want to omit the near hour of additional music just because tape ran out on a track. Restoration and mastering engineer Michael Graves, restored and unified the existing audio to welcome you into The Cellar environment despite microphone placement changes within the club with nearly every change of tape.

Album notes by Kirk Silsbee include interviews with Laurie Pepper and Dave Quarin who also provided archival photos from the era, and the album art is built around the linocut that used to hang above the bar at The Cellar, a stunning piece called The Trio by Harry J. Webb (1954). It’s not often that ephemeral moments at pivotal times during an artist’s career are captured such that nearly 70 years later they are ours to experience, but Art Pepper’s 1959 visits to The Cellar were transformative, “Pepper would later say that the experience was so emotionally satisfying that he would subse¬quently recommit himself to jazz.”