American Record Guide
Martin Williams : September, 1958

Adams is, first, probably as close to a virtuoso of baritone saxophone as there. Like that of several other saxists (who have probably gained attention in part through a fashionable reaction to cool jazz) his style seeks to achieve the most immediate kind of emotional projection. It recalls some swing and “rhythm and blues” improvisation in this respect, in rhythm, and in that it walks and hops from chord to chord with short riff-like phrases, as much agility and as little repetition as possible, but with apparently little real recognition of the possibilities of larger melodic or rhythmic design or development. Within his medium, Adams is unquestionably good; the question is the apparently fragmentary and transitory nature of the medium itself.

—–

The Lima News (Lima, Ohio)
Bob Herdien : 10/11/1958

One of the best of the new jazz releases is the Pepper Adams quintet’s 10 To 4 At The 5-Spot (Riverside 12-265), five tracks cut at the New York nitery last spring.

Adams, the finest baritone man since Serge Chaloff, is one of those exceptionally talented Detroit musicians who have emigrated to New York. With him are Don Byrd, trumpet; Bobby Timmons, piano; Doug Watkins, bass and Elvin Jones, drums.

The 5-Spot isn’t one of Gotham’s better known “plush sewers.” Actually, it’s a bar similar to Chicago’s Mr. Kelly’s. A hundred people crowd it, dress is informal and the cafe itself isn’t too far from New York’s famed Bowery. The 5-Spot made its mark as a jazz house in 1957 after Thelonious Monk put on a show there. A bust of Monk, executed by a neighborhood sculptor, presides over the 5-Spot’s festivities from atop the air conditioning unit!

Adams’ group is a hard-swinging outfit that stays close to the old bop school. Best track in the album is Hastings Street Bounce, a rousing blues adapted by Pepper from a tune he remembered from an ancient recording. The band stretches out and records a little longer than the usual studio date, and the method seems to improve the group’s relaxation. Each tune moves swiftly with greater spontaneity and a lack of self-consciousness.

Byrd, like all the others except Timmons a Detroiter, composed The Long Two Four and the tonal Yourna. The others are Tis, by Thad Jones – a brother of Elvin and pianist Hank and the ballad You’re My Thrill. On the latter Byrd is absent. This is a fine, swinging group, and the entire work is a testimonial to the greater freedom of on the spot recording as compared to studio dates.

Adams comes into his own here, blowing with more warmth and feeling than he did in his “break-in” days with Stan Kenton and Chet Baker three years ago. He played with the late Wardell Gray – a close personal friend, and patterned his playing after that of Harry Carney, Ellington‘s great baritone artist. Adams got his first big-time break when Oscar Pettiford helped him get into the Kenton band. Now he’s a name himself – and will be one of the great ones.

—–

New York Daily News
Don Nelsen : 03/23/1958
All Kinds of Jazz Around Town

There are, at present, a number of very appetizing jazz groups about town. One of the best is the Pepper Adams quintet, now dealing out sounds at the Five Spot Cafe.

Adams is a baritone saxophonist from the coast who came here highly touted by those privy to his work out west. The feeling here is that he is even better than his advance notices. He is a swinging, lyrical, logical, imaginative improviser. The rest of the group is up to his musicianship. Pianist Don Friedman and trumpeter Don Byrd check in with some excellent choruses. The bottom of the combo is solidly filled out by bassist Doug Watkins and drummer Elvin Jones.

At Birdland, the fare is Count Basie and the Randy Weston trio. Basie, as usual, blows like a hurricane. Weston, a far more subtle practitioner, is in a sense much more rewarding because of the variety in his work and his challenging ideas.

The Lee Konitz quartet, being held over at the Half Note, is probably producing the most subtle jazz of all. Konitz, a remarkably perceptive alto saxophonist, leads leads guitarist Billy Bauer, bassist Peter Ind and drummer Eddie Levinson through a thoughtful yet exciting repertoire. The interplay between Konitz’ alto and Bauer’s guitar is really something to hear.

For the thinkers, there is the Jimmy Giuffre 3 at the Bohemia, featuring trombonist Bobby Brookmeyer and guitarist Jim Hall. This is esoteric jazz at its height. Enjoyable but weighty.

—–

San Francisco Chronicle
Ralph J. Gleason : 09/21/1958

Titled 10 to 4 at the 5 Spot (which means it was recorded during those hours at the New York night club called The Five Spot) this LP offers Adams, D. Byrd, B. Timmons, D. Watkins and E. Jones in some excellent modern jazz with good solos, a fine basic swinging groove and occasional stretches of exciting improvisation. Adams is the best of the new baritone men and Jones is a very unusual drummer. One of the better modern LPs issued this summer.

—–

Toronto Star
Roger Feather : 07/26/1958
Three Stars

This album was recorded, with qualified success, during a two-month stay by the Adams quintet at a New York club called The 5 Spot. There is occasional interference from bad balancing and background noise but, more important, the desired in-person excitement is only rarely evident. Pepper’s gutty,
slashing baritone work is, for the most part, arresting and inventive. Byrd has his usual drive but his work here is less decisive or assured than some of his other recent efforts. Watkins plays well but Jones, although he swings hard, is often unmusical and tasteless particularly in solo. Timmons, the only group member not from Detroit, is a consistently engaging pianist who blends lyricism, percussiveness and humor into some of the album’s best solos.

The mid-tempoed blues, Hastings Street Bounce with a shuffle rhythm, is the LP’s best tune. It has extended thoughtful solos by everyone except Jones. Yourna, a Byrd original, is a sensitive, well-played ballad and You’re My Thrill features a probing, well-conceived, lyric solo by Pepper. The two up-tempo tunes which round out the album, Tis and The Long Two/ Four tend to be sloppy and without any particular merit.

Adams and his cohorts are not yet matured, fully-developed musicians but Adams certainly has the vigor and conception required.

—–

Down Beat : 11/13/1958
Dom Cerulli : 3.5 stars

This is pretty much the way things were the weeks that Pepper & Co. held forth in the Five Spot in New York City. All that’s missing is owner Joe Termini’s warm grin and placid disposition, plus a few persons working at being members in good standing of the Beat Generation.

Pepper plays with bite, even on the ballad (on which Byrd laid out), and Don displays the growing warmth of sound that indicates his own growth.

It’s a typical set by the group with good blowing, a few high spots (notably on the Long Two/Four) and no real lapses.

—–

Liner Notes by Orrin Keepnews

Pepper Adams is, in current jazz jargon, “a tough man.” This does not mean that Pepper, who is a rather thin, mild-looking, quite soft-spoken young man with a dry sense of humor, goes around picking fights with people. “Tough,” in this usage, is both an accurate description of the impact of his playing and a reference to the fact that he is mighty tough competition for just about any horn man.

In the spring of 1958, Adams, the “New Star” choice on the baritone sax in the preceding year’s Down Beat Critics Poll, brought a quintet into New York’s Five Spot Cafe for an intended two-week run that came closer to two months before it ended. The group, featuring some of the many exceptional young musicians who have in recent years emigrated to New York from Detroit, is notably hard-swinging, spirited and close-knit. The playing of Adams, Donald Byrd and the rest is of course the main story of this album. But the unusual club in which they were working, and in which the LP was recorded, is also very much a part of the story…

On-the-spot recording of jazz performances is always a very tempting prospect, promising – if all goes well – greater spontaneity and spirit and less self-consciousness than can be guaranteed in the studio. But it also offers potential problems all its own: acoustics and layout not necessarily ideal for recording; the impracticality of stopping a “take” if someone hits a passing clinker; the possibility that some high-flying customer will shout something censorable in the middle of a great solo. Balancing pros and cons, record companies usually prefer the more readily controllable studio way of doing things. Once in a while, however, the temptation grows too strong: a group that seems particularly well-suited for on-the-spot recording is playing in a particularly intriguing club, and you decide to try it.

Such circumstances led Riverside to bring its equipment into the Five Spot during Pepper’s engagement there to sample a full evening’s action: from, as the album notes, 10pm to 4am. Since jazz can be so much a product of its surroundings, it should be pointed out that the Five Spot, which first became an important factor on the New York jazz scene in 1957, has quickly gained a reputation among musicians as a club significantly lacking in tension or formality, an unusually good, relaxed place to play in. The atmosphere of the club and the talents of the Adams quintet seemed to use a most exciting combination. We hope we’re correct in feeling that this album vividly captures that excitement.

The Five Spot is by no means an ordinary night club (which is intended as a compliment). About as far from stuffy formality as you can get, it is – to come right out with it – not really a “night club” at all. It is unashamedly a bar. Something under a hundred people will (and do) crowd it; the waiters do not hover; the customers do not necessarily wear jackets; and the bar is probably the best vantage point for seeing and hearing the band. Located close by that part of lower Manhattan known as the Bowery, it is an area that has been breathing somewhere more steadily since the shadow of the archaic Third Avenue El was removed from above it. The natives now include many of the same sort of people of varying artistic bent who used to inhabit Greenwich Village exclusively; these mix with jazz fans and musicians to make up the basic clientele. As if in deference to this fact, the walls are splattered with as extensive and colorful a collection of out-of-date posters advertising art exhibits as you’ll find anywhere, and, mixed in among them, jazz-concert posters (equally out-of-date). The purpose is mood, not information! Possibly it is symbolic that a figure of Thelonious Monk (whose long, highly successful engagement in 1957 really put the place on the jazz map) seems to preside over the proceedings from on top of the air conditioning unit; it is the work of a sculptor who lives just a few blocks away…

Pepper Adams and his associates belong to a category of jazz musicians that is perhaps not as large as it might be: those who play with drive and enthusiasm and humor, who make it clear that they mean it and that they like what they are doing. Pepper, who appears to swing somewhat more than is humanly possible on the baritone, first gained the attention of the jazz world through his work with Stan Kenton in 1955, and then played for a short time with Chet Baker. But despite such previous associations, his jazz tastes and feelings lie completely with the warmer, harder groups with which he has worked and recorded most recently.

Born in Highland Park, a suburb of Detroit, in October of 1930, and brought up in Rochester, NY, Adams’ early jazz indoctrination came through hearing the big bands of Ellington, Basie, and Lunceford in local theaters. Back in Detroit at 16, and having already begun to play clarinet and tenor sax, he became fascinated by an unclaimed baritone sax that had been brought for repairs into the music store where he was working. Pepper persuaded his boss to sell the instrument to him, and his career was launched. He played locally with the late Wardell Gray (a close friend; Pepper was to be one of his pall-bearers.), Tommy Flanagan, Barry Harris, and in a band led by Lucky Thompson. In those formative years, his principal influence was the big, deep sound of Coleman Hawkins; on baritone, Pepper most respected Harry Carney, whom he had known sinch boyhood. After Army service (1951-53), Adams came on to New York. The going was rough (there was a particularly stultifying daytime job in an insurance company office) until Oscar Pettiford helped him to get into the Kenton band, which, although he actually wasn’t to stay there for long, was the turning point – the start of an upward climb in jazz popularity that seems likely to take him very high indeed.

Donald Byrd, Elvin Jones and Doug Watkins are all fellow-Detroiters, whom Adams first came to appreciate at local sessions. Byrd has been most highly regarded and in demand ever since he first hit New York; his constantly improving tone, technique and imagination indicate that he will continue that way. Jones, a brother of pianist Hank and trumpeter Thad (and unrelated to all the others of the startling number of current jazzmen of that last name), has worked with J.J. Johnson and Sonny Rollins; he is a drummer of striking inventiveness and much fire, qualities that are particularly in evidence here on Byrd’s jazz march, The Long Two/Four. Watkins is a firm young bassist who has worked and recorded extensively with top Eastern groups; Bobby Timmons, the quintet’s only non-Detroit member, is a promising young pianist whose credits included service with Art Blakey‘s Jazz Messengers.

The selections here, as culled from the full night’s work, immediately reflect one distinctive facet of ‘live’ recording: the natural tendency to stretch out freely and at greater length than in the studio. Actually, Pepper noted, “we were holding down a hit; sometimes, when we really get going, one tune can last for a half hour, but I didn’t think you’d want that.” Included are the group’s theme, ‘Tis, written by Elvin’s Jones’ brother Thad (reputedly, Thad wrote two tunes on the same day: one was a blues – ‘Tis – and the other was not – ‘Tain’t); a standard ballad (You’re My Thrill) spotlighting Pepper in a lyrical vein; two examples of Byrd’s fine composing talents: the sensitive Yourna and the swinging 2/4 march; and a rousing blues, Hastings Street Bounce, adapted by Pepper from a number remembered from an old recording.