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Pepper Adams - Out of This World

To grasp the significance of that, you have to bear in mind how fantastically few record collectors possessed such an interest at the end of the 1930s. Early jazz was a thing in certain hip circles, but only a few true freaks were into the country blues. There was twitchy, rail thin Jim McKune, a postal worker from Long Island City, Queens, who famously maintained precisely 300 of the choicest records under his bed at the Y.M.C.A., had to keep the volume low to avoid complaints. He referred to his listening sessions as séances. Summoning weird old voices from the South, the ethereal falsetto of Crying Sam Collins.

In the ’50s McKune would become a sort of salon master to the so called Blues Mafia, the initial cell of mainly Northeastern 78 pursuers who evolved, some of them, into the label owners and managers and taste arbiters of the folk blues revival. An all white men’s club, several of whom were or grew wealthy, the Blues Mafia doesn’t always come off heroically in recent, and vital, revisionist histories of the field, more of them being written by women... Still, no one who seriously cares about the music would pretend that the cultural debt we owe the Blues Mafia isn’t past accounting. It’s not just all they found and documented that marks their contribution.


Pepper Adams - Out of This World
  • Composed by: Harold Arlen, Johnny Mercer
  • Released in: 1961
  • Recorded on: March 2, 1961

"Pepper Adams lead a long and fruitful career spanning 28 years, and over 600 recordings. He gained an early ear for the music from listening to the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra, and Fats Waller’s nightly radio show, and would go on to make a name for himself on the Detroit scene."

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