The Jazz Legacy of Jim Pepper: An American Original
“Here was something truly American…”
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Jim Pepper (1941-1992)
by Bill Siegel
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 Hillon 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, after Gary Burton“lured” Coryell and Moses into his own band, Pepper and the remaining Free Spirits formed Everything is Everything, and Pepper’s composition, “Witchi Tai To” – eventually 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 in nearly 100 recordings by countless pop and “world music” musicians.
