" data-original-title="" title="">Pepper Adams was essential to this reviewer's formative years as a jazz enthusiast. During the 1970s, in Storrs, Connecticut, New York City, northern New Jersey, and Kansas City, Missouri, I had many opportunities to witness Adams's blazing talent. Regardless of the setting and the capabilities of the musicians surrounding him, he was always on. It was heady stuff. Lengthy improvisations were the rule. Challenging and rewarding in equal measure, his virtuosic, rapid-fire, bop-oriented flights demanded full attention, commitment, and mindfulness. It was not unusual to feel sated, exhilarated, and utterly exhausted at the end of a performance. Adams invariably took charge and did not let up—yet the excitement he generated never overshadowed the architecture, intelligence, and wit of his impromptu lines.

Gary Carner's Pepper Adams: Saxophone Trailblazer tells the story of a complicated individual within the context of jazz in America during the mid-to-late twentieth century. The book's origins lie in Carner's extensive interviews with Adams two years before he died in 1985 at the age of 55. In the years following Adams's passing, Carner interviewed approximately 250 of his colleagues and admirers, created the website, produced a box set of "Adams's entire oeuvre" performed by selected artists, as well as an annotated discography before beginning to write the book in earnest in 2017.

In his mid-teens, Adams was already becoming an accomplished tenor saxophonist when he fell in love with the baritone. While