In 1952, Downbeat readers voted Art Pepper the second greatest saxophonist on earth, behind only Charlie Parker. A few years later he was in San Quentin. This episode traces a life born into an earthquake in Gardena, California, with a 14-year-old runaway mother and violent alcoholic parents, and how a boy raised by his grandmother found order in the alto saxophone and a substitute family in the nightclubs of Central Avenue.

The conversation covers his professional start at 17 with Benny Carter and Stan Kenton, his role in West Coast jazz alongside Chet Baker, Gerry Mulligan and Shelly Manne, and albums like Art Pepper Meets the Rhythm Section and Smack Up. It then follows the heroin addiction that sent him through repeated prison terms, the Synanon program that became a cult, his comeback with Buddy Rich, methadone therapy, tours of Europe and Japan, the autobiography Straight Life, the documentary Notes from a Jazz Survivor, and his death in 1982 at 56.

• Was West Coast jazz a real movement or a critic’s marketing label?
• How Pepper fused California arrangement with East Coast bebop fire
• Playing in a prison ensemble with Frank Morgan inside San Quentin
• Mental practice: how technique survived years without a horn
• The ethical complexities of an unfiltered memoir co-written with Laurie Pepper