Art Pepper: Notes from a Jazz Survivor

Looking at Art Pepper's face, there seems nothing left there that’s instinctual or joyful or even ordinarily pleasurable. It seems a face that's long past illusion, long past waiting to hear or receive some news or message or information which would matter. But then Pepper picks up his alto sax, and then finally there's exhilaration and foith. I won't attempt to describe bis music, except to say that it reveals those qualities which must be least indispensable to bis artistry and most destructive to his personality : a kind of submission to freedom and violence and the courage to go where the two take him. But the film's title says this man is a survivor and so he is. He has survived heroin and prison and a self-loathing so hostile it still seems to haunt him...