A companion release to Hollywood Quintet Sessions, The Complete Regent Sessions (including tracks from the LPs Art Pepper/Sonny Redd, Jazz Is Busting Out All Over, and The Cool Sound of Pepper Adams), also from 1957, features emerging baritone saxophone star Pepper Adams in a series of lengthy jazz jams, unlike the shorter and compact studio recordings he did with West Coast musicians. These two East Coast dates done during the early winter in Hackensack, NJ, at Rudy Van Gelder's house studio feature Adams' running mates who matriculated from Detroit to New York City with him, including Doug Watkins (who was also on the Hollywood tracks), Elvin Jones on all selections, Hank Jones, and Bernard McKinney.
"Arctic Dreams" (2020) is both warmly seductive and intense—a work whose seven sections bloom with passion as they map a musical journey through landscapes real and imagined. George Grella wrote in the New York Classical Review, “Adams’s manner is that of Thoreau—to be in a place, incorporate it into his memory and values, and recreate that through music. It misses the point to say he is inspired by nature—Adams is changed by nature and his music is a catalogue of the places that changed him.” Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, has called Adams “one of the most original musical thinkers of the new century.”