A sonic exploration and tonal analysis of contemporary creative music in a myriad of improvisational/composed settings, textures, and expressions.
Welcome to Sound Projections
I'm your host Kofi Natambu. This online magazine features the very best in contemporary creative music in this creative timezone NOW (the one we're living in) as well as that of the historical past. The purpose is to openly explore, examine, investigate, reflect on, studiously critique, and take opulent pleasure in the sonic and aural dimensions of human experience known and identified to us as MUSIC. I'm also interested in critically examining the wide range of ideas and opinions that govern our commodified notions of the production, consumption, marketing, and commercial exchange of organized sound(s) which largely define and thereby (over)determine our present relationships to music in the general political economy and culture.
Thus this magazine will strive to critically question and go beyond the conventional imposed notions
and categories of what constitutes the generic and stylistic definitions of ‘Jazz’, ‘classical music’, ‘Blues.’
'Rhythm and Blues’, ‘Rock and Roll’, ‘Pop’, ‘Funk’, ‘Hip Hop’, etc. in order to search for what individual
artists and ensembles do cretively to challenge and transform our ingrained ideas and attitudes of what
music is and could be.
So please join me in this ongoing visceral, investigative, and cerebral quest to explore, enjoy, and pay
homage to the endlessly creative and uniquely magisterial dimensions of MUSIC in all of its guises and expressive identities.
Saturday, November 12, 2016
Archie Shepp (b. May 24, 1937): Legendary, iconic, and innovative musician, composer, arranger, ensemble leader, producer, poet, critic, teacher, and playwright
Archie Shepp (b. May 24, 1937) Artist Biography by Ron Wynn
Archie Shepp
has been at various times a feared firebrand and radical, soulful
throwback and contemplative veteran. He was viewed in the '60s as
perhaps the most articulate and disturbing member of the free
generation, a published playwright willing to speak on the record in
unsparing, explicit fashion about social injustice and the anger and
rage he felt. His tenor sax solos were searing, harsh, and unrelenting,
played with a vivid intensity. But in the '70s, Shepp
employed a fatback/swing-based R&B approach, and in the '80s he
mixed straight bebop, ballads, and blues pieces displaying little of the
fury and fire from his earlier days. Shepp
studied dramatic literature at Goddard College, earning his degree in
1959. He played alto sax in dance bands and sought theatrical work in
New York. But Shepp switched to tenor, playing in several free jazz bands. He worked with Cecil Taylor, co-led groups with Bill Dixon and played in the New York Contemporary Five with Don Cherry and John Tchicai. He led his own bands in the mid-'60s with Roswell Rudd, Bobby Hutcherson, Beaver Harris, and Grachan Moncur III. His Impulse albums included poetry readings and quotes from James Baldwin and Malcolm X. Shepp's
releases sought to paint an aural picture of African-American life, and
included compositions based on incidents like Attica or folk sayings.
He also produced plays in New York, among them The Communist in 1965 and
Lady Day: A Musical Tragedy in 1972 with trumpeter/composer Cal Massey. But starting in the late '60s, the rhetoric was toned down and the anger began to disappear from Shepp's albums. He substituted a more celebratory, and at times reflective attitude. Shepp
turned to academia in the late '60s, teaching at SUNY in Buffalo, then
the University of Massachusetts. He was named an associate professor
there in 1978. Shepp toured and recorded extensively in Europe during the '80s, cutting some fine albums with Horace Parlan, Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen, and Jasper van't Hof. Shepp
continued to tour and record throughout the '90s and '00s. Moving from
provocative free-jazz icon in his youth to elder jazz journeyman in his
latter years, Shepp
has appeared on a variety of labels over the years including Impulse,
Byg, Arista/Freedom, Phonogram, Steeplechase, Denon, Enja, EPM, and Soul
Note.
Archie Shepp was born in 1937 in Fort Lauderdale in Florida. He
grew up in Philadelphia, studied piano and saxophone and attended high
school in Germantown; he went to college, became involved with theatre,
met writers and poets, among them, Leroy Jones and wrote: «The
Communist», an allegorical play about the situation of black Americans.
In the late fifties, Archie Shepp also met the most radical musicians of
the time: Lee Morgan, Bobby Timmons, Jimmy Garrison, Ted Curson, Beaver
Harris ... his political consciousness found an expression in plays and
theatrical productions which barely allowed him to make a living. In
the beginning sixties he met Cecil Taylor and did two recordings with
him which were determining.
In 1962 he signed his first record
with Bill Dixon as co-leader. During the following year, he created the
New York Contemporary Five with John Tchichai, made four records for
Fontana, Storyville and Savoy and travelled to Europe with this group.
Starting in August 1964, he worked with Impulse and made 17 records
among which, Four For Trane, Fire Music, and Mama Too Tight, some of the
classics of Free Music. His collaboration with John Coltrane
materialized further with Ascension in 1965, a real turning point in
Avant- Garde music. His militancy was evidenced by his participation in
the creation of the Composers Guild with Paul and Carla Bley, Sun RA,
Roswell Rudd and Cecil Taylor.
In July 1969 he went for the first
time to Africa for the Pan African Festival in Algiers where many black
American militants were living. On this occasion he recorded Live for
Byg the first of six albums in the Actual series. In 1969 he began
teaching Ethnomusicology at the University of Amherst, Massachusetts; at
the same time he continued to travel around the world while continuing
to express his identity as an African American musician.
The
dictionary of Jazz (Robert Laffont, Bouquins) defines him in the
following way: «A first rate artist and intellectual, Archie Shepp has
been at the head of the Avant-Garde Free Jazz movement and has been able
to join the mainstream of Jazz, while remaining true to his esthetic.
He has developed a true poli-instrumentality: an alto player, he also
plays soprano since 1969, piano since 1975 and more recently
occasionally sings blues and standards.»
He populates his musical
world with themes and stylistic elements provided by the greatest voices
of jazz: from Ellington to Monk and Mingus, from Parker to Siver and
Taylor. His technical and emotional capacity enables him to integrate
the varied elements inherited by the Masters of Tenor from Webster to
Coltrane into his own playing but according to his very own combination:
the wild raspiness of his attacks, his massive sound sculpted by a
vibrato mastered in all ranges, his phrases carried to breathlessness,
his abrupt level changes, the intensity of his tempos but also the
velvety tenderness woven into a ballad. His play consistently deepens
the spirit of the two faces of the original black American music: blues
and spirituals. His work with classics and with his own compositions
(Bessie Smith’s Black Water Blues or Mama Rose) contributes to
maintaining alive the power of strangeness of these two musics in
relationship to European music and expresses itself in a unique mix of
wounded violence and age-old nostalgia.
The scope of his work
which registered in the eighties a certain urgency (at the cost of a few
discrepancies) is a witness to the fact that in 1988 Archie Shepp was
with Sonny Rollins one of the best interpreters in the babelian history
of jazz.
With his freedom loving sensitivity Archie Shepp has made
an inestimable contribution to the gathering, the publicizing and the
inventing of jazz.
Cincinnati’s April riots, ignited by the police shooting of
Timothy Thomas and fuelled by lingering racial tensions, took me back to
the culmination of Spike Lee’s 1989 film Do the Right Thing: I was
searching for a context in order to understand the images of violence
and destruction unfolding on my television. The blazing sun and
stifling heat throughout had foreshadowed the film’s eruptive climax.
Personal tensions mounted as the mercury rose in the thermometer.
Cincinnati was not this hot—not in April, anyway. But it wasn’t hard to
comprehend how a single act of violence had compelled an entire
community to rise up and lay waste to its own home.
Mention Cincinnati and Do the Right Thing to Archie Shepp, however, and you’ll get a far different reaction.
“I found that film somewhat nostalgic,” says the veteran saxophonist
and legendary ’60s firebrand. “I mean, all I could think was, didn’t we
do that in the ’60s? Break somebody’s windows? Is that what the new
black experience is about, simply recapitulating old failures?”
Shepp is not speaking metaphorically. “At the end of Do the Right
Thing, I thought, well, this is ironic. I can remember myself in the
1960s on the corner of 125th Street, breaking the window of a jeweler. I
don’t know exactly what had happened, but there was a huge
manifestation in the streets that night. There were people all over
125th Street breaking windows, looting, doing all sorts of antisocial
things. I think it was part of the spirit of the time. There had been
many instances of police brutality against the community. I mean,
people weren’t just out breaking windows and looting, they were
responding to some grievance that they considered profound enough to
respond in that manner.
“I suppose it was something like we saw in the film, with Spike, you
know. Something had triggered it off, and the reaction was at that
point arbitrary. It had no political end other than to prevent anger.
But I was saying, when I saw that film, it seems as though we should
have some answers now, other than just our rage and frustration.”
For Shepp, that answer came in the form of his music. He was not the
first to inject politics into jazz—Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus and
Max Roach were all there before him. But Shepp harnessed the rage and
frustration he saw and felt into a potent style of playing and writing
unlike any that came before or since. His anger and defiance manifested
themselves in such compositions as “Los Olvidados” and “Malcolm,
Malcolm—Semper Malcolm,” both from his breakthrough 1965 Impulse!
release Fire Music. The shards of broken glass were in his tenor
saxophone, an aggressive, brawling sound. The most overtly political of
the young avant-gardists coming up under the wing of John Coltrane,
Shepp became the jazz world’s analogue to Malcolm X. His impassioned,
sometimes inflammatory statements about race relations and justice only
added to this perception.
An abiding loyalty to the jazz tradition set Shepp apart from such
fellow “energy” tenor players as Pharoah Sanders and Albert Ayler—both
of whom also recorded for Impulse! On The House I Live In, a 1963
Copenhagen club date with baritone saxophonist Lars Gullin issued 30
years later by SteepleChase, Shepp performs “You Stepped Out of a Dream”
and “Sweet Georgia Brown” with a European bop rhythm section. In his
solos, he tugs and strains against the conventions of the form much as
Coltrane had done on tour with Miles Davis in 1960, but otherwise the
record captures a typical mainstream set.
Even as he established his radical saxophone language and
forward-thinking compositional style in subsequent years, Shepp
continued to engage the tradition. His first record for Impulse!,
1964’s Four for Trane, featured cubist reconfigurations of music by his
mentor. Fire Music included “Prelude to a Kiss” and “The Girl from
Ipanema,” performed without irony or condescension, while Live in San
Francisco (Impulse!, 1966), contained a version of “In a Sentimental
Mood” that, aside from Shepp’s roiling opening solo, lived up to its
name. His tone evoked the throaty growl of Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis, the
virile balladeering of Ben Webster. And while Ayler’s rhythm sections
shattered and splintered time to bits, Shepp swung, and swung hard. Late in the ’70s, Shepp seemed to turn his back on his avant-garde
past. A 1977 album, Ballads for Trane (Denon), found him once again
covering works associated with the elder saxophonist. But this time he
played them straight, leaning heavily on the pop standards that Trane
had recorded during his earlier years. Shepp went on to record albums
of traditional blues, gospel tunes and tributes to Charlie Parker and
Sidney Bechet, some well received, some less so. Rehabilitating his
embouchure after surgery in the early ’80s, he began to sing more and
more often. He performed live less and less frequently, immersing
himself in academia and spending much of his time in Europe. He
recorded frequently for small European and Japanese labels. Shepp was
assuming the mantle of elder statesman, just as Sanders had done in
recent years. But in the process, he was rendering himself invisible.
Recently, though, Shepp has mounted something of a comeback. In
1998, Austrian producer Paul Zauner united Shepp with bassist Richard
Davis and drummer Sunny Murray, fellow ’60s avant-garde icons, to record
St. Louis Blues. If early live performances had been tentative, the
album, recently issued domestically on Jazz Magnet, was bold and
assured, reacquainting the modern day itinerant blues singer with his
radical past. The following year, A.A.C.M. percussionist Kahil El’Zabar
invited Shepp to record Conversations with his Ritual Trio for Delmark.
The album forced critics to take notice.
Late last year, trombonist Roswell Rudd—who has been enjoying a
renaissance of late himself—invited Shepp to join him for a week at the
Jazz Standard in New York City, revisiting the territory they had first
explored on Live in San Francisco. The engagement also reunited Shepp
with trombonist Grachan Moncur III, who had joined the band after the
1966 San Francisco run to record the funky Mama Too Tight (Impulse!) and
the volcanic Live at the Donaueschingen Music Festival (MPS) alongside
Rudd. Bassist Reggie Workman, a longtime colleague and boyhood friend,
and drummer Andrew Cyrille completed the band. For Shepp, it marked a
return to form, the results of which can be heard on Live in New York,
to be issued in August on Verve. Reporting in the Village Voice, Gary
Giddins quoted playwright Edward Albee: “Sometimes you have to go a
long way out of the way to come back a short distance correctly.”
Archie Shepp was born in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., in 1937. His father,
who worked a succession of blue-collar jobs to support the family,
introduced Shepp to music via the radio and through his collection of
swing sides and folk songs. He took up his father’s instrument as well.
“My first instrument was the banjo,” Shepp says, “and as a young
child I learned to play the first four bars of James P. Johnson’s
‘Charleston’ rag. I could make four-string chords—not too easy for a
young kid, but I could do that.” The family relocated to Philadelphia
when Shepp was seven, and soon the young musician felt he needed to
switch to an instrument more suited to his new urban surroundings.
“As I got into elementary school, my friend Reggie Workman was taking
piano lessons, and I told my mother that I wanted to take piano
lessons, too.” Shepp’s mother granted his wish when he was 10 years
old. Around the same time, a friend of his father rented a room in the
family house, bringing with him a collection of more recent recordings
by Sonny Stitt and Lester Young. Those records provided a decisive
influence. “When I got into junior high school, I picked up the
clarinet, and a year later I started playing the saxophone. I continued
playing piano through high school, but the saxophone became my
instrument of choice.”
Shepp’s political activism was inherited early on from his father as
well. “When I was in the third grade, I wrote a paper on racism. I
used to hear my father and the man upstairs talk all day about political
matters. After work, they’d often discuss the way things were, and as a
young child I was very much influenced by that. My third grade teacher
was shocked that I would take on such worldly matters, and it’s stayed
with me throughout. When I began to get into music, I’d look for ways
in which my music could begin to state some of the things that I felt.”
Such worldly concerns did not manifest themselves immediately,
however, as Shepp was drawn initially to the popular music of the day.
“I’m a bluesman, basically,” he asserts. “My first experiences were in
blues. When I was 16, I played in an R&B band, the Jolly Rompers.
Carl and John Holmes were the two brothers that ran the band. I saw
Carl maybe 10, 15 years ago and we laughed and reminisced about the old
days.”
But Shepp soon found himself accompanying a neighbor in casual
weekend practice sessions. Trumpeter Lee Morgan was a year younger than
Shepp, but already an accomplished musician. Shepp would comp behind
him on piano while Morgan practiced the standard jazz repertoire on
Saturday afternoons. The two went on to work together in public, if
only briefly. “I got Lee in the same band I was in. ’Course, he was
such a good player that the guy eventually fired me and kept Lee,” he
adds with a laugh. As he struggled to master his instrument, Shepp learned of another
local player quickly establishing himself as a major figure. “There was
a boy I played with from time to time in high school, and one day I
told him, ‘I’ve been trying to play above high F on the saxophone, and
I’m having so many problems. I wonder who plays like that?’ I said to
him, sort of naively. And he said, ‘There’s a guy in North Philadelphia
named Coltrane who’s known for that.’ And from that time on, John was a
guy I sort of made it my business to find somewhere.”
After high school, Shepp intended to become a lawyer. He entered
Goddard College as a pre-law student, while continuing to play the
saxophone. But a dramatics teacher convinced Shepp to change his course
of study. “I wrote a short story for him, and he said that I had
talent and I could become a playwright. So that was my major area of
concentration for the next two years, until I graduated.” Shepp finally encountered Coltrane during a vacation in New York in
1957. “I saw him down at the Five Spot with Monk. After his
performance, I came to him and told him I was from Philadelphia and I
knew of him and wondered if I could take a lesson. He was very
gracious, and wrote his name down for me on a piece of paper in a very
neat hand.” Coltrane invited the younger man to stop by his home.
“The next day, I was at his place very early, 10 or 11 in the
morning. And I hadn’t thought at all that he’d just given me his
autograph at about five that morning! He had a habit of going home and
practicing until he went to sleep, so when I got there, he hadn’t been
asleep very long.”
Juanita Coltrane—Naima—invited the young man to wait for her husband
to arise. “He didn’t get up until about 1:30, but I waited patiently.
When he got up, he came out in his T-shirt, and I was amazed at how big
he was. His arms were really quite developed, and he had a set of
weights in the corner, so he’d apparently been working out and trying to
get himself together physically. John had a lot of problems with drugs
back in the old days, and I think at that point he had just stopped.
“When he smiled, all his teeth were rotted out except for the two
incisors, and I understood at that time that he had a great deal of
trouble playing. It’s amazing that he played so well, ’cause he was
always in pain. His saxophone was lying there on the sofa. He picked
it up and he sort of ripped off something that might have been ‘Giant
Steps.’ He played about 10 minutes of uninterrupted saxophone, just
coming out of bed like that, you know, just stepped into his horn. And
then he put his horn down and says, ‘Can you do that?’”
Shepp laughs at the memory. “He wasn’t being arrogant or anything—he
was just trying to find out where I was. I think he wanted to know if I
understood what he was doing.” Shepp explained that no, he hadn’t
reached that level yet. Coltrane asked him to play something, and gave
him advice on fingering the horn. “For the rest of the day, we talked
about the techniques of music, harmony and his favorite musicians, who
were Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk and Art Tatum.
“Trane was so helpful to me, as a man who wanted to see beyond the
techniques of music, who saw music as a spiritual and a healing force,
in a way. I was quite naturally drawn to that, because I felt music as
having other implications as well. He was able to reconnect black music
up with its most spiritual aspects. The preacher, really, is what
Coltrane was. He opened my eyes to the fact that other elements could
also be brought out by the music, that things I’d learned from the
theater could be used in my performance. In fact, I began to look at
the stage as a stage—not simply as a musical stage, but a place where
something dramatic takes place.”
Shepp earned his degree from Goddard two years later, and headed back
to New York. “My major was in dramatic literature. And I came to New
York, playing the saxophone but looking for parts in a play, or thinking
that I might someday write a play.” He auditioned unsuccessfully for
several roles. A chance encounter on the street with pianist Cecil
Taylor provided his entrée into the theater, if indirectly. It also
introduced him to the “new thing,” New York’s burgeoning avant-garde
jazz scene.
Taylor was supplying the music for an off-Broadway play, The
Connection, and invited Shepp to join his band. “I knew who he was, and
I hadn’t particularly liked his music. Blues was my thing, and when I
met Cecil, initially it was a conflict. Up to that time I hadn’t taken
any music seriously but music that came out of the tradition. But I
began to like his music more and more, and I tried to give him as much
as I could as far as what he asked me to do.
“Joining Cecil’s band really opened my eyes to a world of other music
and possibilities I’d never dreamed of. The stuff he was writing at
that time, I don’t think anyone else has come close to, up to this time.
Technically, he showed me that there were other ways to still play
correctly outside the structure of a chord, through scales, modes and so
on. Apart from that, he showed me the connections, the social meanings
[in music]. We would practice all day in his loft on Day Street, and
then we’d talk and he would explain things to me. Cecil gave me an
impression of the implications of Negro music, how powerful it was, and
how, if we nurture it, we can make it work for us.”
Shepp remained with Taylor until 1962, recording for Candid and
Impulse! But a year earlier, he had co-founded a new group with
trumpeter Bill Dixon, another architect of the New York avant-garde.
The band toured Europe and recorded for Savoy (a session long since lost
and highly sought after). By 1963, Dixon developed embouchure problems
that prevented his playing in the group. Trum-peter Don Cherry joined
the group, by then known as the New York Contem-porary Five. Dixon
continued to write for the band and lead its rehearsals, but after
another tour of Europe, he and Shepp went their separate ways. They
owed the label another album, however, and ended up splitting it, each
recording a side apiece. Savoy reissued that album, Bill Dixon
7-tette/Archie Shepp and the New York Contemporary 5, earlier this year.
After the dissolution of the New York Contemporary Five, Shepp
performed frequently as a guest in John Coltrane’s band, which had
become a de facto workshop for many of the leading young saxophone
firebrands of the day, including Ayler, Sanders and altoist Carlos Ward.
Shepp prevailed upon Coltrane to help him get a recording contract
with Impulse!, which led to Four for Trane. Later that year, Shepp
joined Coltrane to record a long-lost session for the A Love Supreme
album. In 1965 Shepp shared the album New Thing at Newport with
Coltrane, played on his seismic 1965 album Ascension, and made a
notorious appearance with him at the Down Beat Jazz Festival in Chicago.
Over the next four years, Shepp recorded for Impulse! the albums upon
which the bulk of his reputation rests, including Fire Music, On This
Night, Live in San Francisco, Mama Too Tight and The Way Ahead, all
reissued in recent years. He gave free rein to his dramatic and
political leanings in the impassioned declamation of his poetry in
“Malcolm, Malcolm—Semper Malcolm” and the quasi-classical “On This Night
(If That Great Day Would Come).” The records cemented Shepp’s stature
as a leading member of his generation’s avant-garde. In 1967, he
realized his ambition of writing and producing a play, Junebug Graduates
Tonight!, which ran off-Broadway in 1967.
Shepp parted with Impulse! briefly, performing and recording for a
time in Paris with artists as diverse as Philly Joe Jones and the
up-and-coming Chicagoans Lester Bowie and Roscoe Mitchell. Returning to
Impulse! in the early ’70s, he began to make albums with a notable
R&B influence and an expanded instrumentation orchestrated by Cal
Massey. Shepp’s political agenda was never more overt than on Things
Have Got to Change, The Cry of My People and Attica Blues.
Impulse!, under the new ownership of ABC, continued to allow Shepp to
pursue his vision for a time. “That was my very best recording
contract, for a number of reasons. They gave me an almost unlimited
budget. Any shot I called, they would back up, because they had the
budget to accommodate my artistic ambitions. I spent my whole days just
writing.
“Ironically, I was on welfare, because I lived off my check from ABC.
My contract called for 15,000 dollars a year, which they paid me in
two installments. To raise three kids on 7,500 bucks even at that time
was not easy. And I was often at odds with the company for that reason.
I wanted them to record me more, ’cause I needed money and there were
things I could do. But I wasn’t a commercial success, so there was no
real incentive for them to record me more.”
Shepp noticed that a handful of jazz tunes were beginning to appear
on pop music radio stations. “That’s when I decided I’d try to do more
commercial things. Blue Note was doing all these things with Herbie
[Hancock]’s ‘Watermelon Man,’ and you could hear Freddie Hubbard
everywhere on the jukeboxes. I recorded a thing called ‘Money Blues,’
and they did make some 45s for me. But I think I’ve got all the 45s
that were ever made of that record!” he laughs. “They never did a damn
thing with them.”
His attempt at crossover failed and, shortly afterward, ABC
dismantled the Impulse! label. Shepp continued to record frequently,
for such well-regarded independent labels as Freedom, Enja and the
nascent Black Saint. But by the end of the decade, on his albums for
Denon, Shepp was recording standard repertoire almost exclusively. Was
this a conscious decision, a repudiation of his avant-garde past and
political agenda?
“It was part of a strategy,” Shepp asserts, “and I have, thank the
Lord, survived. I think I would not have, had I continued to do the
things that you’re talking about. I’m speaking artistically. I would
have been more vulnerable to the wrath of everything from establishment
critics to clubs that were changing their whole demographic profile in
terms of younger people. Nowadays, kids come to hear me, man; I sing
the blues. To me, the most important part of this whole thing is an
aspect of survival. And that’s as much as a man can say.”
For his efforts, Shepp sometimes faced critical rebuke. Making
matters worse, in the early ’80s, he was plagued by problems with his
embouchure, which required two operations on his lower lip. A handful
of the recordings released over the past few decades rank among the
finest of his career, particularly the two albums of gospel tunes and
blues standards recorded with pianist Horace Parlan for SteepleChase,
Goin’ Home and Trouble in Mind. But Shepp himself, in a recent
interview, admitted to the unevenness of some of his recent output.
“It was a personal and honest observation,” he now says. “I think it
can be used against you, and it has been by some people. And it’s
coming from people that I wouldn’t have expected. But it was honest—I
didn’t have to say it. I don’t think they would have known any
difference.
“One advantage of being an avant-garde player—people don’t know the
difference,” he adds, with a tone of rueful irony. “I could be very
chesty about it— ‘I’m playing better than ever.’ But I always want to
be honest with myself and with the people I’m performing for. I
continued to work and play, but I wasn’t as happy with my work. But I
had to survive. I had a family, and my kids were in college at the
time, so I kept working and recording.”
Shepp also supported his family by taking an active role in academia.
He taught at the State University of New York in Buffalo from 1969 to
1974, then moved on to the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, where
he remains active. “I’m a fully tenured professor, and I teach two
courses. One is a lecture course, ‘Revolutionary Concepts in
African-American Music,’ and the other is a practicum for performers,
‘The Black Musician in the Theater.’”
Still, over the years Shepp has seen a sweeping change in the makeup
of his classes, a change reflected in the audiences for which he
performs. “This music is becoming a white, middle-class phenomenon.
There are very few blacks that are getting into so-called jazz music.
Most of them are engaged in rap and dance music idioms. The clubs in
the black communities very seldom produce this kind of music. The radio
and TV is given over to production of primarily rock’n’roll and rap
music.”
Shepp doesn’t begrudge rappers their popularity, however. He views
the music as a continuation of the work with texts that he pioneered
with “Malcolm, Malcolm—Semper Malcolm” and “Mama Rose.”
“I think that aspect of my work is overlooked, the fact that I’ve
been doing that for years,” he asserts. “Just because young kids
weren’t dancing and they weren’t selling a million records, it doesn’t
mean that it wasn’t rap.”
Beyond the mass media, Shepp sees more fundamental reasons for the
decline in interest in jazz among young African-Americans. “I think
since Reaganomics, since the 1980s, a lot of the schools have cut back
special programs. When I was in school, we had the special music
programs, and there were teachers in the schools. You could borrow
instruments to take home. I can remember very well Reggie Workman
borrowing his bass on weekends to make gigs with Lee Morgan and Leon
Grimes, Henry’s brother.
“After the ’80s, all these programs were out, and I think we see this
music becoming more and more a middle class phenomenon. You see people
more like the Marsalises, where the father’s a schoolteacher, or who
come from rather middle class backgrounds. It’s much more complex than
when I was a kid. Coltrane and all those people were accessible. These
people used to live in the black neighborhoods. The local saxophone
player who was my teacher told me the guys to listen to. Lee Morgan
lived just up the street, and Bobby Timmons lived in South Philly.
There was a really diverse community of young people and older people
who were actively playing this music. Today I think it’s become more
and more a conservatory experience, and to some degree it’s attenuated
the real meaning of this music. The blues elements are slipping away.”
Shepp gives Wynton Marsalis credit for his efforts at educational
outreach. “I heard a thing that Wynton did on public radio the other
night. He was making the comparison between Jelly Roll Morton’s
compositions and King Oliver. I thought it was astute and impressive,
and certainly it’s important to establish these kinds of community
outreach. “The problem is that I think Wynton is probably too much caught up in
re-creative music, with the result that African-American music, which
used to be a dynamic music, is now becoming a kind of classical music,
locked into the 1920s and techniques which were valid then but which may
or may not be valid now. We should know about our history, but we
should not be so locked into our history that it keeps us from evolving
new ideas. I think that builds out of Wynton’s antipathy toward the
’60s, that whole generation that I come from. I mean, you can’t ignore
Coltrane today, or even Cecil Taylor. Those sounds are in the air.”
With St. Louis Blues and Live at the Jazz Standard, Shepp reengages
that history head on, reclaiming for his own what he helped to create,
with the added benefits that hindsight and experience bring. “I feel I
know a lot more now. In the old days, I could execute almost anything;
I just didn’t have the ideas. Now I’ve got the ideas and I wish I had
all the chops I had back then! I could really do a lot more than I’m
doing. But I’m not unhappy now; I feel very satisfied by my work. My
embouchure’s beginning to regroup, and I feel better about it.”
The ideas, as he says, are proliferating. Shepp has personally
recorded several albums’ worth of music that he hopes to release. He
wants to collaborate with an Afro-Cuban band such as Irakere. Boom Bop,
a Jimi Hendrix-infused collaboration with jazz-rock guitarist Jean-Paul
Bourelly recently released by Jazz Magnet, has left him eager to try
his hand at making a straightforward pop record. But ultimately his
larger ambition lies elsewhere.
“Eventually I’d like to retire from teaching, and continue in music
if I’m able to. Performance, I’m doing a lot of that, more than I had
been. But if I had my druthers, I’d go into film. I’d really like to
make my own film and to write the music for it. I’d like to begin to
really put it all together in a kind of a context, and to make a
statement or statements, somewhat the way Spike Lee has been able to do.
But I think I could do it another way. There are many dimensions,
even the intellectual, psychological ones, which can be augmented
through music. I don’t know if I’ll ever get to do that, but it’s
something I dream of doing.”
Listening Pleasure
“I’ve been spending a lot of time lately listening to blues, both
urban and rural, particularly for the course I teach... Robert Johnson
and Charley Patton, especially. B.B. King is someone I’ve admired for
many years, ever since he did ‘Sweet Sixteen.’ I also like Lightnin’
Hopkins and Johnny Copeland.
“I listen to a lot of traditional African music, especially music of
West Africa, from Nigeria, Ghana and the Ivory Coast, music of the
Yoruba people and so on.
“I’ve been listening to some rap lately as well. Public Enemy is a group I admire. Digable Planets as well.
“In jazz, Roy Campbell and James Carter are two players I admire.
Roy is a fine player, sort of in the avant-garde group, but I think he’s
got a lot of talent and he’s a very sensitive man. James Carter is
another, I think he’s a fine player, he’s very sensitive, and he’s
playing a very good saxophone. I think he’s going to be okay.
“I listen to Wynton Marsalis, Roy Hargrove, all those guys. They’re
fine musicians, just maybe overrated too early on. You don’t become a
Marcus Belgrave or a Clark Terry overnight, you know. Branford
Marsalis, too, is a fine saxophonist. But music is more than notes;
it’s experience. Anyway, I know I listen to those guys more than they
listen to me!
“I don’t listen so much to classical music, but lately I’ve been
listening a lot to Mozart for technique. I never used to like him, but
just recently I’m beginning to appreciate what he did. I’ve got a
‘Music Minus One’ recording of his Flute Concerto in G major, which I’ve
been adapting to soprano.”
Gearbox
“Since 1962 I’ve used an Otto Link metal mouthpiece. I bought it
secondhand at a shop in Copenhagen—it used to belong to Paul Gonsalves.
During the 15 or 20 years that I was having embouchure problems, I
switched to a hard rubber mouthpiece, ebonite, but I’ve just recently
switched back to the Otto Link. It’s a #3, and I use a medium Rico reed
with it, though lately I’ve been experimenting with plastic reeds made
by Harry Hartmann, a friend of mine in Stuttgart. On soprano I
exclusively use a La Voz #3 with a hard reed. My horns are Selmers.”
Are New Minstrel Men Robbing the Blacks? By ARCHIE SHEPP MARCH 7, 1971 New York Times
THROUGHOUT the Negro's painful existence in this country, white Americans have consistently gone to great lengths to prove to him how unnecessary he was in the creation of this huge industrial complex. So effective have these efforts been that many of our most original and gifted black artists, such as Don Byas, Richard Wright, Josephine Baker and scores of others, chose to leave these shores, never to return again.
A fact that is equally clear, but less apparent, is that while whites summarily dismiss the Negro and his culture, they seem to envy desperately his life style, which has locked both races in a syndrome of perennial emulation, especially the white who, because of his patent racial assumptions, is pressed to continually show off his manhood vis a vis the black.
This is the premise on which the myth of the White Hope is based. For while the Negro can never in the eyes of whites achieve a certain “Hellenic Ideal,” he is none‐theless permitted to serve as as a kind of reluctant base against which the contours of Western history are set in stark relief. This tendency is admirably portrayed in a painting which hangs in the palace of Frederick the Great, Sans Souci (now a museum in East Germany). It depicts a Negro dwarf tied to white “lady” by a leash, apparently to accentuate her beauty and his ugliness.
Though this form of transference is gratuitious and egotistical in the main, it lends itself very readily to the theories and half‐truths which constitute what is the world's “knowledge” of the Negro.
Perhaps the most elaborate and, esthetically speaking, interesting manifestation of the phenomenon took place in the United States in the mid‐nineteenth century. The period marked the earliest development of the minstrel show, that bizarre configuration of asides in which white men put on black face to depict comically, what it was really like to be a “darky.” Oddly enough, although the early ministrel carricatures were drawn verbatim from the folk culture of “slaves” — a word whose meaning we are wont to forget—none of the episodes they depicted showed the Negro at work, or doing anything which remotely touched on the terrible reality that was in fact the black man's lot in the new world.
Rather, the minstrel show was an elaborate white psychological fantasy, whose exotic rhythms and language. brought pleasant’ relief from stale Italian light Opera and sententious drawing room comedies imported from Europe.
The minstrel show might be called the first genuine “African‐American” creation, for while the Negro provided the theme for its song and dance, whites provided the instant illusions so essential to the experience. While the white interlocutor threw out lines which parodied Negroes, their shiftlessness and imagined stupidity, whites in the audience were permitted to partake in a strange theatrical rite, fraught with ambivalence. For in many ways they were “uptight” to be the very same Black they poked fun at.
Secretly, whites identified with the rebelliousness of the Negro, his iconoclasm, and innate nonconformism. His economic value of course lay in the fact that he could be worked to death. But his human value lay in the fact that, thus racially transferred and ritually emasculated, he could be observed without posing a threat to the narrow world‐view of white society. Any dangerous political implications he might have possessed were exorcised in the process of the white man's merely “becoming” him.
Historically this occurs again and again. Where the black man is not copied move for move or note for note, he is ingested, transmogrified to a higher, whiter essence. Suddenly Wilson Pickett is Tom Jones in the flesh and Aretha is a freaked out, outof‐tune stringy blonde, oozing hip things in hippie jargon.
Leslie Fiedler has intimated an underlying homosexual inclination between the races. Frankly I don't buy this idea; the cause of the transmogrification seems to me rooted in the institution of slavery itself and the cultural bankruptcy of that society which fostered it, that society which appropriated the black man's strength, and even murdered with impunity.
Thus, ours is, as Richard Wright once suggested, “a confrontation not so much of races but of realities,” for while it is clear that whites can tolerate the physical presence of the Negro, they seem incapable of rationalizing his pre‐existence as a separate, racially autonomous, sociocultural entity. On the other hand, I, Black Man, Negro, could never accept Big Daddy Jim Rice, the first popular white minstrel, as the prototype and chief arbiter of “Coon” dancing, any more than I could accept Paul Whiteman as patriarch and musical czar of the pre‐swing era, or Goodman as king of my musical heritage, forever. Yet these all seem so plausible and manifestly factual to whites.
To me, jazz is an implacably black event. Yet it excludes no one. It contains all the references which form the composite of the American experience. It Is the first conscious blending of town and country life styles into one esthetic whole.
What strikes one as slightly less than incredible is that with all the Negro's talk about Black Power, he has been more than reluctant to seize the economic potential of his own music, perhaps his ultimate natural resource. Unfortunately, though blacks are well aware of the politics of culture, they seem to be naive in regard to the economic modes which render both culture and politics a viable entity.
This is so because even Negroes themselves view the implication of Black music differently—ambivalently. It was only recently for example that Howard University instituted a program of jazz study under Dr. Donald Byrd; and in general, most Negroes of a certain “class” tend to follow Western cultural values abjectly.
Whites on the other hand have worked painstakingly to shed their minstrel habit and to take the Black man's place as chief practitioner of the Black Arts. This, coupled with the revival in popularity of country blues forms (which are relatively easy to learn because they've been around for a long time), has finally created the possibility of a minstrel in whiteface. Thus, race becomes ostensibly irrelevant.
The Beatles were first to cash in on this new minstrelsy, which was more than appropriate, for England is now experiencing a situation that was “more or less” resolved in this country in 1865. Many other white groups were to follow the Beatles's example both in the United States and abroad, with varying degrees of success.
Moreover white entrepreneurs dug their fists deep into the rock market, abetted by aficionados who gave the outward appearance of egalitarianism, while actually playing down the Negro's role in the creation of his own music. To my way of thinking, this was tantamount to the institution of “cultural plantationism”; that is, a young “hip” white, money‐hungry establishment which fostered its own cultural images while destroying all non‐white references.
Young black people today grow up with no knowledge of black jazz, of the great Fletcher Henderson band, the poetry of Fats Waller, the rhythmic complexity of Mr. Willie “the Lion” Smith. What is behind this whole concept is a kind of 1984 brainwash, in which Negroes become their logical “fingerpoppin” selves, jigging endlessly to the latest “Soul Brother” number one.
Black people no less than white should be wary of this new electronic trick and the implied destruction of American culture. For when Negroes cease listening to John Coltrane to Duke Ellington, to Cecil Taylor, they lose that continuity from the farm to the city (since blues music is and always has been primarily country music) and they lose that sense of, and pride in, their own cultural heritage, robbed of them again by the new white minstrel man.
Although
many have tried to mystify “free jazz” with intellectual trappings,
this was a music of expression – an expression of the times. The free
jazz, or avant-garde, movement began in the late ’50’s with the
inventions of artists such as Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane and Cecil
Taylor. Following their lead, Archie Shepp, Pharoah Sanders, Don Cherry
and other younger musicians in the ’60’s further stretched the
boundaries of the jazz idiom by refusing to allow structure to inhibit
free expression. Although they dispensed with many of the rules that
previously goverened jazz, this music was not chaotic; all the good free
jazz had an underlying structure and an artistic concept.
Moreover, these were artists with a social conscience. They were
keenly aware of the Civil Rights Movement, and they were participants
and contributors to the cause. As African- Americans across the country
were creating a social revolution, Archie Shepp and other musicians were
creating a musical revolution. Song titles like Shepp’s “Malcolm,
Malcolm – Semper Malcolm”, reflected this awareness. Perhaps this
political agenda was one of the factors that prevented free jazz from
reaching a broader audience.
The music and ideas of Archie Shepp have been much examined. His
impact on jazz has been substantial from both a musical and political
perspective; his artistic vitality and social understanding – as a
saxophonist, composer, poet, playwright and educator – have continued
through to the present. Today, Shepp’s music seeks to explore more
traditional forms of jazz, while incorporating ideas advanced in the
’60’s.
My own interest in jazz began ten years ago, when I enrolled in one
of Shepp’s classes at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. I was
originally interested in the blues, but I rapidly became focused on jazz
and other African-American musical styles. Shortly thereafter I spent
three years managing nightclubs and presenting jazz concerts. I have
worked with Shepp in a variety of contexts for more than a decade: as
Student and teacher, as club manager and artist, and now as interviewer
and subject.
Scott Cashman: I’m very interested in discussing
with you some things that may influence the style of music that you
play, some of the things that you feel affect you and that you respond
to . It’s particularly interesting to me that you’re in great demand in
Europe. Compared to America, it’s a whole different audience with a
different perspective.
Archie Shepp: Yes, the audience is so important to Negro music,
especially the element of call and response. I find that here in the
States, audiences are generally less knowledgeable, from the cognitive
point of view, though they are emotionally more receptive. Americans,
particularly white Americans, have spent so much time in the company of
each other that I find that when I play for an American audience it’s a
much more intimate experience. It’s a language that by now everybody
understands, especially because of rock and roll and popular music. A
whole generation of young whites have involved themselves with
traditional Negro music. What is important to them are the focal
aspects: the beat, the blues scale. Jazz was absorbed here even though
there was no particular movement or philosophy which went with the
post-’60’s music. There was never anything comparable to the European
movement in this country. In Europe it evolved out of a whole
intellectual process. The European intellectuals were and are very much
into so-called avant-garde music. In America, for a brief time, people
who followed Coltrane were studied and considered important, but it
didn’t last long. The result is that the kind of music I played in the
’60’s is completely dismissed in this country as a wrong turn, a
suicidal effort.
SC: With the avant-garde movement in Europe, is it not so much a
question of magnitude – that the movement was bigger there – or is it
just that it lasted longer?
AS: Well, I think, too, it’s because of the climate in Europe. Their
historical, cultural and aesthetic values were formed from a critical
perspective that was, at first, Anglo- and Francophilic: with Hughes
Panassie, Andre Hodeir, Ernst Ansermet, Eric Borneman. some of the major
artistic movements exploded there: cubism, Stravinsky’s “Rite of
Spring”, the poets – Rimbaud and all those. There is a tradition of
intellectual and aesthetic radicalism in Europe which is also peculiarly
related to politics. Beginning in the 1960’s, I think Europeans –
particularly the European Left – saw me as a spokesperson for the
avant-garde because I tended to articulate some of the political
frustrations that black people felt in America at the time, vis-a-vis
people like Martin Luther King and organizations like the Black Muslims.
It was a particularly interesting and exciting time, and the European
political and artistic establishment was turned on by the Civil Rights
Movement and the artistic revolution that was becoming a part of jazz.
What evolved here in the United States is almost an anti-climax to the
import of the signal that was sent out in the ’60’s. I mean, during that
period we were able to engage another aesthetic idea. At least we were
able to expand our perceptions of things. Blacks and whites who had
formerly listened to black music exclusively for entertainment started
to listen seriously to John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor,
Albert Ayler and myself. I think we expanded the horizons of the music,
and white youth were politicized by us as well as by the Civil Rights
Movement. Jerry Rubin and those guys were spinning off another ethic,
which took the conventions of its own independent line as far as
politics was concerned, but within that milieu there was a possibility
for a really interesting synthesis to evolve. In a very significant
sense, John Coltrane was perhaps the greatest radical of the
avant-garde. It couldn’t be far enough out for Trane. Trane is the guy
that created us, in a way. He believed in us. He was our mentor. To view
it from an historical perspective, he freed black music from the
entertainment syndrome. Black artists had always been told, there was a
certain amount of “time” in which to do your thing. Coltrane was an
artist who decided to play not simply because people wanted to be
entertained. He could, as Elvin Jones has pointed out, play a matinee
for three hours without a break. He played what he felt. The way
Stravinsky might have thought on paper, he did in his head. That was his
genius – improvisation. It is amazing that this kind of process could
have evolved out of the black experience. The question is, can we accept
this? Does a black artist have the right to demand our attention the
way we attend to beethoven, Stockhausen, or Phillip Glass? It’s a
challenge. Coltrane’s challenge is, I think, still before us. Today,
music is visual. You get a show where people are jumping up and dancing,
but it’s not a critical event in the sense of profound catharsis.
Essentially it’s celebratory. Coltrane was celebratory in that original
sense. He was digging for something; he was looking for that other
dimension and he often found it. With music he did create a fourth
dimension; the sound was something total – at some points fear. He could
combine all of those elements, audience participation, the response
mechanism; it was like church sometimes with Coltrane’s performance.
What was interesting was that the experience informed members of
disparate people as an audience, blacks and whites – and this was not an
easy music to listen to. That it didn’t survive here in the states is, I
think, partly because we tend to be very conservative politically. No
real movement like that which began in the ’60’s, could really take root
in this country. For it to become pervasive in this land without, a
total political, aesthetic, cultural revolution, uniting races and that
sort of thing, would be difficult. So maybe some of those things were
much easier for Europeans to accept, especially the political and
cultural relationships. They really didn’t have the same hangups.
SC: So, when you go over to Europe do you change the arrangements or
whatever style of music you play? Would a club date in Paris be
different than one in New York?
AS: To some degree, yeah, because I have to play a certain number of
originals that might be considered avant-garde material. I realize
though, that only a few people in the audience actually know what that
music is, or understand it. More and more I’m playing for the sons and
daughters of my erstwhile patrons. It’s a new generation of young kids
who come to hear me. If, in fact, I play for them the music that I
played for their parents in the ’60’s, I’d run them all out of the place
(laughs). So I try to give them just a little taste of it.
SC: Do you enjoy doing that?
AS: I do. Today when I play what they call “outside”, that is, in the
avant-garde style, I get a real feeling form that. I play less and less
that way because it’s not commercially viable. For another thing, there
are not too many people that I feel play convincingly in that style. The
musicians I’d choose to play with today would be guys like McCoy Tyner
and Elvin Jones. Men who know where they’re coming from, who have
synthesized the roots of the blues, who make that kind of music come to
life. Even if I’m playing “outside”, the music has to say something – as
Lester Young said, “to tell a story. ” When you’re running off, playing
“outside” for its own sake, you can miss the quintessential quality of
the medium. As much as they may criticize us for what we did back in the
’60’s, you can’t say the music was dull (laughs). You know, people
would comment, “That guy’s crazy, my two-year-old kid could play that. ”
But they were moved passionately either for or against it.
SC: Is that emotional aspect an outgrowth of black culture?
AS: Let me put it this way. Negro music and culture are intrinsically
improvisational, existential. Nothing is sacred. After a decade, a
musical idea, no matter how innovative, is threatened. Just look at
what’s happened since Parker and Coltrane. The reason is that black
music thrives on change. We’ve got to keep trying new things just to
stay around. It’s hurt us in a way because we haven’t been able to
develop retrospective, re-creational institutions that would preserve
our culture the way others have. So, we’ve had to be cultural
guerrillas, in a sense, just in order to survive.
SC: To me it seems a given that when you move out of the mainstream you
are also confining yourself to a limited audience: those that can seek
out and accept new things. Of course, this has commercial and financial
implications. Was that something that you were aware of when you started
working with Cecil Taylor, and then going out on your own and playing
music that was not the mainstream jazz of the time?
AS: Well, I’ve been a rebel all my days. I didn’t give a damn about
money (laughs). Me? Actually, I felt that I was somewhat politicized
musically, radicalized by Cecil Taylor. I was a very conservative guy
coming out of Philadelphia. I had done my homework, had a fair knowledge
of piano and started out on clarinet before I went to the saxophone and
so on. I listened to the inside players of the day: Wardell Gray and
Sonny Rollins and all those cats, Bud Powell and Bird. And when I met
Cecil Taylor it was a complete transformation of musical identities. All
the tenets that I had grown up with were thrown out the window. So, I
was just a young guy, maybe with an idea, and Cecil Taylor, himself a
rebel, would take a chance on a guy like me. It turned out to be a very
symbiotic partnership. I learned a lot from him. Not so much specific
musical things, but more importantly I was impressed by the enormity of
his intellect. His complete sense of freedom, unfettered in the sense
that there were no set parameters or boundaries. I was right on the
frontier, on the cutting edge of music with him. Black music has become a
commercial commodity. Live performances are not so accessible as they
were previously. It use to be possible to go to the bar on the corner
and hear music. It was available for a fifteen cent beer. Kids were
playing it and the entire community was involved in its creation. That’s
all gone now. Music has become something else. I mean, what is the
difference between Madonna and Prince, or Boy George and Michael
Jackson? They are all dealing with the same fundamental ideas: blues,
Afro-Latin rhythms.
SC: It seems that the only real difference is coming out in rap music.
AS: Rap is probably the most original. Here I find an amazing
phenomenon. These kids don’t learn poetry in school. Nobody taught them
iambic pentameter or rhymed couplets. They, unfairly, haven’t read Pope
or Dryden. Yet here they are, spinning this stuff off and making money
reciting poetry. On the one hand, I think that is really commendable and
exciting, but I also find it very limited. For example, I’ve done a few
poems, which I don’t think the black community has heard much of
(laughs). My work isn’t as accessible as Miles Davis’ or Herbie
Hancock’s. Most of the recordings that I made were done in Europe. They
aren’t popular recordings in the sense that their intellectual content
renders them less marketable to a mass audience. In rap music, even
though the element of poetry is very strong, so is the element of the
drum, the implication of the dance. Without the beat, its commercial
value would certainly be more tenuous. In fact, without the orchestral
and theatrical concepts that evolved with it, the lights, the spectacle,
etc.,it’s doubtful what you would have. Denuded of all accoutrement
what you would have is rapping, which perhaps wouldn’t be as exciting to
the mass of our youth. Also, there is the dimension of the media,
television, that thrives on the youthful image, the pretty girl, the
handsome young man or the bizarre: The Fat Boys, King Sized Dick and the
like. This is the nature of pop art in our country today. Much of it is
defined by Negro spirit and the thrust of black art. This is presented
to us as Jefferson Airplane or the Rolling Stones. It’s not clear who
actually created all this. It’s not made clear and it never was. The
packaging of black art forms is a highly sophisticated and insidious
business.
SC: I think there is another point, that rap has drawn on traditional
elements like tap, minstrelsy and the church. I heard Playthell Benjamin
and Amiri Baraka speak a couple of weeks ago and their point was that
rap is not anything new. They pointed out that rap is related to the
form called “hambone.”
AS: Very similar in style.
SC: The difference to me is that rap music is no longer art as art,
but art as commodity. While accepting the fact that it started out on
the streets, these people who are on the top now have the best managers,
the best agencies; they are packaged and sold to television, and they
make good-looking videos, really expensive performances.
AS: Rap actually took root in the Negro community, and then in the
Hispanic community, long before it impacted on the larger American
community as a whole. I can even remember, maybe five or six years ago,
being in an airport in Switzerland and some young kids, all European,
with their caps turned around were breakin’ and doing the thing. And I
thought, “Gee, it’s all the way over here!” Partly it’s television and
the media. On the other hand, it’s what you say: There is something very
functional about, and there has been, about Negro art, Negro music. The
blues player speaks not for himself, but for every man. To that extent,
a rich man could walk into a Muddy Waters concert and walk away feeling
catharsized. Even though Muddy might have been singing about
sharecropping, he announces the whole community’s blues. So, rap has
that quality, for youth anyway; it’s a kind of blues element. It’s
physical, almost gymnastic. It speaks to you organically. Rap grows out
of what young people really are today, not only black youth, but white —
everybody. There is a certain genius to it. But does it speak to
erstwhile generations? Now part of the problem may be that these young
musicians are not getting a broad sense of continuity from previous
generations. Like the Last Poets, I think that my poetic style could
have enormous implications for younger poet-musicians. It is
discouraging to me that they probably won’t be encouraged to hear my
work, largely because of its political content. And to that degree I
question, not the validity of rapping, but its limitations. It is
primarily designed for commercial consumption, interests, popular
tastes, though the people who do it accept willingly that they are
accomplices to their own exploitation. One may speak against drug abuse
and other social problems, AIDS and so on, because rap has that quality,
a very topical quality like the blues, which is essential. It addresses
the day to day problems with music. On the other hand, to take it that
extra step and treat rap as real poetry — for example, to change the rap
rhythms from rhymed couplets and utilize all the poetic elements that
are accessible — raises other problems. Are we ready to accept that from
Negroes? Are Negroes ready to create this, given the limited education
that our young people receive in school? They are not about to come out
in iambic pentameter, or start reciting sonnets to rap, not because they
wouldn’t, but because they don’t know anything about that. So, rap,
though it comes to us with much that is commendable, it also has many
built – in limitations, some of which I would consider even racist or
chauvinistic because these youngsters are never encouraged to go outside
what sells.
SC: That seems to be true. Most of what you see of rap on MTV and
what not is pure silliness, which has its place, but it becomes
distressing and even boring when it is exclusive. It is rap, as a
musical form, but its content generally does not differ from most other
“popular” or mainstream music. People who are making serious political
statements, and who might be ruffling a few feathers, people like Public
Enemy, are not on television. you can’t see that. You have to go out
and buy it if you want to hear it, and that puts it in a whole different
arena. That is not the stuff that people are getting introduced to.
AS: Right, so there is a formula.
SC: And again, it’s like jazz as well; the artist has to decide. If
they want to do that kind of stuff they have to know up front that they
are not going to get the same financial return that other artists are
going to get. And that is a decision that you’ve got to make right up
front.
AS: And there is no guarantee that if you make that decision that you
are going to get over. A lot of guys turn to rhythm and blues and pop
music and never make the big buck. I was talking to my kids in class and
a couple of black students endorsed the idea that it was a good thing
that black and white music was coming closer together. In the ’60’s we
might have argued, “Look brother, this is our thing; these people are
ripping us off. ” Today those arguments seem less credible, less cogent
when everybody is doing it, when Negroes are borrowing music from whites
and whites are borrowing from blacks. The question of clear theft is
not as evident as it was in the ’60’s. When we thought of Lee Konitz and
Charlie Parker, or Stan Getz and Sonny Rollins, there was a much
clearer separation in style and aesthetic: the more ethereal, cool music
on the West Coast with Chet Baker and all those guys vis-a-vis the hard
bop on the East Coast. black music was a strongly identifiable ethnic
movement. Thelonious Monk was quoted as saying, “We were trying to keep
the white boys from learning what we were playing.”
SC: It’s interesting you bring up that Monk statement. In many of the
interviews that I did I’ve found that the black musicians didn’t feel
much tension about working with white musicians. It almost seemed like a
natural thing to do. But as I talked to some white musicians, well, let
me read you a quote from a white musician I interviewed that I think is
telling: “I find when I’m sitting on stage playing the music, that I
feel I’m being disassociated sometimes, when they say ’black classical
music. ’ I feel embarrassed for not being black so that I can play the
music properly, you know? And I don’t want to put them in that position,
so I don’t want them to put me in that position. But you know, I have
to go along with it. ” There seems to be a certain underlying tension
for white musicians that is almost that white guilt type of thing.
AS: Well, you know, Negro music is often misunderstood. It is a
tradition, a community experience, and not an individual’s experience.
Very few black or white musicians understand what the process is. The
seeds of this music are not gathered simply by learning to imitate an
individual, a Mahalia Jackson, or John Coltrane, or learning to play in
the style of Count Basie. By that I mean, if you were to look at the
roots of a Count Basie you would have to go back to Lucky Roberts and
Fats Waller and probably to dozens of others we could name whose music
he loved much better than his own. The black aesthetic flows out of the
oral tradition. This is often misconstrued by players who themselves are
informed through an academic process. They miss the meaning and the
implication, the functional qualities that derive from the oral
tradition which, ultimately, is a part of the Negro aesthetic. What I
think is confusing and threatening to whites, especially those in this
country who feel that this is their music too, is that somehow they
associate the race of the player with the type of music expressed,
regardless of cultural origins. Especially when the player is Caucasian.
For example, even though Stan Getz unmistakably imitates a Negro
musical style, we tend to credit his ethnic origins rather than the
originators of the style itself. So, when you say black classical music,
some white people feel threatened because they can’t accept that they
are spectators, in a sense, in another people’s arena. When Grace Bumbry
plays the role of Madam Butterfly, she does not alter the authenticity
of Western European musical tradition because she is black, not does it
matter that Madam Butterfly (the character) is Japanese. We are all
aware that she is singing in a European style and that the musical
techniques she employs derive not only from Puccini, but an entire
Western musical tradition. White people are participating in a tradition
whose authenticity and parameters lie outside the European tradition.
When Roswell Rudd was playing trombone with my band back in the ’60’s, I
didn’t think of him as black or white, but I knew that he was a white
guy playing Negro music. I don’t think he had any question in his mind
about it either. And I’ll say the same for Charlie Haden. They are two
of the best white performers that I’ve heard in the Negro musical idiom.
Part of the reason for it is the fact that thy know who they are.
Gershwin, I think, understood very well what he was doing. That accounts
partly for his artistic success. I don’t think he ever thought of
himself, as a Negro, but he clearly perceived that there was such a
thing as Negro music. His knowledge of himself, his acceptance of his
outsider status was just that touch that elevated him to the very unique
stature he achieved. He was not simply a Negro imitator, but an artist
who culled from Negro music another form of expression.
SC: Really, the way I see it is that it’s not my tradition, but I experience an interaction with that tradition.
AS: Sure, and this is America. Despite racism and all of the rest, a
few performers outside the Negro race were distinguished in the idiom
and are well remembered by their peers — Bix Beiderbecke, Bill Evans,
the pianist, Gil Evans, Al Haig, Scott LaFaro and others. But in the
case of other nationalities, we can admit, for example, this is an Irish
folk song or Chopin was a Pole; yet when Negroes begin to express their
identities as separate, that’s a problem. We are encouraged to think of
ourselves as Americans, except in certain situations. There is a
peculiar ambiguity about race in this country. A black guy fights in
Vietnam, he’s American. But when he has to be buried, here in the U. S. ,
in a grave that is reserved for white folks–he was an American, now
he’s a Nigger. If we want to talk about “jazz” as a cultural heritage,
it’s “American”. On the other hand, if a Negro–say, Duke Ellington–is
nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, which actually happened, “jazz” suddenly
assumes the color of its creators and a badge of international honor,
and pride reverts to a stigma of shame. Thus, when it’s in everyone’s
interest, the black enjoys a tentative “American-ness. ” Yet in many
social and economic situations we are made to be very aware that we are
not a part of the mainstream. This amounts to no more than the
conferring of an “instant whiteness” on a social fabric, which lasts
only until the next laundering. Radio programs like Voice of America add
to the confusion. Such programs give the impression that we are all one
big happy family. But there is enormous discrimination and racism
within the realm of culture, music, dance–right here in the United
States of America. White Americans have been influenced greatly by the
Negro music idiom, Negro culture, and Negro speech, so the melting pot
is a multi-layered phenomenon. And our music, our popular music really
spells it out, going all the way back to Elvis Presley and before. White
youth have always been enamored of Negro folk music and culture. This
has brought us together in a way that words, and politics and laws
probably never could.
Source: Scott Cashman | Spit: A Journal of the Arts on Archie Shepp.net
May 24 was Archie Shepp’s 75th birthday. I heard little fanfare
about this milestone around the jazz watercooler, certainly nothing to
compare with the silver anniversary celebrations of Miles Davis and John
Coltrane a decade ago. But since his retirement from the University of
Massachusetts, where he was a professor in the W.E. B. DuBois Department
of Afro-American Studies for 35 years, Shepp spends most of his time
residing in Paris, far from the jazz publicity mills. You may be tempted
to echo the late Senator Bentsen, to wit, “Archie Shepp’s no Miles
Davis or John Coltrane,” and in terms of name recognition, you’d be
right. But during the ’60s, when Coltrane was creating a radical new
music and Davis was grappling with the dichotomy between his own legacy
and the challenge of the New Thing, Shepp had substantial interactions
with both, though one is much better known of than the other.
Ben Ratliff includes Shepp’s 1965 recording Fire Music in The NewYork Times Essential Library of Jazz,
a survey of 100 recordings, and writes, “Archie Shepp was John
Coltrane’s gift to America’s broader consciousness.” Coltrane may have
been apolitical, but if not, he was reticent to say anything about
politics or race no matter how hard-pressed he was by reporters. Still,
Martin Williams suggested that Ascension, Coltrane’s notoriously
riotous work, was such a bellwether of what was going on in mid-’60s
black America that it should be listened to by policemen, social workers
and politicians. Shepp was one of the participants on Ascension,
and given reports of the shattering intensity of what took place when
Trane and Archie sat in together at various times before June 28, 1965,
one can only conclude that the young firebrand was an influence on the
increasingly radical direction that Ascension epitomized in Coltrane’s music.
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Archie Shepp
By Jimmy Katz
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John Coltrane with Archie Shepp, Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ 1965
By Chuck Stewart
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But where Coltrane was verbally taciturn, Shepp used every available
forum to decry racism not only in the nation, but in the music business
too. He was the most outspoken voice of Black Power in jazz, telling
Leroi Jones in 1965, “The Negro musician’s purpose ought to be to
liberate America aesthetically and socially from its inhumanity.” And in
both words and music, he articulated a bold assertion of the primacy of
black culture in the jazz tradition, into which he inserted gospel
songs and spirituals, classic blues, theater music, Sousa marches,
Ellingtonia, bossa nova, drum chants, poems, polemics and a tenor
saxophone sound that ranged between the barnyard and the boudoir.
Shepp’s career got a major boost when Coltrane interceded on his
behalf with Impulse! Records and encouraged Bob Thiele to produce a
record on him in 1964. Thiele agreed on the condition that Shepp devote
his first album to tunes composed by Coltrane, and thus his debut became
Four for Trane. Shepp went on to create one of the most
substantial bodies of original and varied work for Impulse! over the
next decade; before signing him, Coltrane was the sole avant-gardist in
the Impulse! catalog (three titles by Cecil Taylor were buried under Gil
Evans’ name on Into the Hot), but the ABC Records subsidiary
eventually established itself as the major label home of the
avant-garde, producing sessions on Pharoah Sanders, Albert Ayler,
Roswell Rudd, Marion Brown, Charlie Haden, Alice Coltrane and Sam
Rivers.
In addition to the role he played in securing Shepp’s Impulse!
contract, Coltrane intended to feature him on his most deeply personal
recording, A Love Supreme. Shepp appeared on the first take of “Acknowledgment,” the opening movement of A Love Supreme,
but it was the second that was released. ”I didn’t use [Shepp’s] part,”
Coltrane said in 1965. ”I had two [takes], I had one that I was singing
on [the chant, “A Love Supreme”]…then I had another that Archie and
[bassist Art Davis were] on.” That take, long believed to be lost, was
eventually unearthed and included in the deluxe edition reissue of A Love Supreme in 2002.
Where Coltrane obviously respected Shepp and expressed “admiration”
for him, Miles apparently feared him. When the two were on the same bill
during a long 1967 European tour that George Wein produced, Davis,
though the headliner, insisted on playing the opening set. According to
his biographer Ian Carr, the trumpeter said “he didn’t want to play to
an audience of sick people—the implication being that they would be sick
after listening to Shepp.” More likely, Miles wasn’t up for coming on
after a charismatic figure like Shepp, who played with a marked degree
of theatricality and had a devoted following of his own. (Archie studied
playwriting and acting at Goddard College, appeared in the Living
Theater’s production of The Connection, and wrote three plays that were produced Off-Broadway: Junebug Graduates Tonight, The Communist and Lady Day: A Musical Tragedy.)
But there was already bad blood between Davis and Shepp, and it
reputedly stemmed from an encounter that took place a year earlier at
the Village Vanguard, one that proved to be something of a watershed.
Late in 1965, during Davis’ Thanksgiving week engagement at the
Vanguard, Shepp, at the urging of Tony Williams, asked to sit in with
the band. Ian Carr says that Miles rejected him, and an argument broke
out that could be heard outside the Vanguard’s dressing room. Once the
matter seemed settled, the group returned to the bandstand. But when
Wayne Shorter concluded his solo on the Davis standard “Four,” Shepp
“walked out of the shadows playing his tenor and sat in with the band.
Davis simply melted away and was not seen again that evening.”
As Carr writes, “Accounts of the occasion said that Shepp’s playing
sparked Miles’ group into a new level of vitality.” And as disagreeable
as it seemed to Miles, it may have precipitated an expansion of his
repertoire. For even though the group with Shorter, Williams, Herbie
Hancock and Ron Carter had released highly acclaimed recordings
featuring their compositions, Miles had yet to begin incorporating any
of the new material in concert. Indeed, Davis’ concert repertoire hadn’t
changed much since 1960. But not long after the night of Shepp’s bold
incursion, the group began agitating to incorporate newer compositions
in concert, and as we know from newly released recordings like Live in Europe: The Bootleg Series, “Footprints,” “Riot,” “Agitation,” “Masqualero,” and other originals became part of the repertoire.
Credit Archie Shepp with broadening the consciousness not only of America but of Miles Davis too.
Interview: Archie Shepp on John Coltrane, the Blues and More
Phil Freeman talks to the legendary jazz man about his work
Saxophonist, educator and playwright Archie Shepp
has long been a crucial figure in American jazz. Complex and
multifaceted, he’s difficult to pigeonhole, but his first
decade-and-a-half as a leader includes some of the most forceful and
important jazz – free, bluesy, swinging, gospelized – ever recorded.
Shepp debuted in Cecil Taylor’s band in 1960, but it
was a friendship with John Coltrane that finally brought Shepp into the
spotlight: He played on tracks that were recorded for A Love Supreme, but not released until 2002, and also appeared on 1965’s Ascension. The two saxophonists’ groups also split a live LP, 1965’s New Thing at Newport. Shepp’s Impulse! debut as a leader, Four for Trane, featured reworkings of four Coltrane compositions and one of his own.
Between 1964 and 1969, Shepp recorded regularly for Impulse! Albums like Fire Music, On This Night, Live in San Francisco, The Magic of Ju-Ju, The Way Ahead and Mama Too Tight
are blustery, forceful outings that combine blaring free jazz fury with
tender ballads, interpretations of vintage jazz standards, dramatically
recited poetry with a civil rights/social revolutionary tone, and a
deep feeling of and for the blues.
In
the summer of 1969, he traveled to Paris, and joined a group of
avant-garde players who recorded for, and performed at festivals
sponsored by, the upstart BYG/Actuel label. Making several albums, and
guesting on several more between 1969 and 1971, his sound grew even more
radical and fiery, and groups came to encompass not just horns, piano
bass and drums but harmonica, various vocalists, violin, electric guitar
and more. Discs like Blasé, Black Gipsy, Poem for Malcolm and Yasmina, A Black Woman contain some of the most arresting music of the period, even incorporating Touareg percussionists on Live at the Pan-African Festival.
When he returned to the United States in the early
’70s, Shepp’s music shifted gears again. As the political fires of the
’60s burned down, and jazz became art music for the white middle class,
he embraced vernacular African-American forms more explicitly,
incorporating funk, soul, gospel and more of the blues than ever. Attica Blues,
a mournful response to a prison uprising, juxtaposed Duke
Ellington-esque big band swing, Isaac Hayes-esque orchestral funk, deep
blues balladry, poetic recitations, and even an album-closing ballad,
“Quiet Dawn,” sung by a child. Albums like For Losers, The Cry of My People and Things Have Got to Change offered additional, and at times equally rewarding, takes on this “trans-African” blend of sounds.
In
the ’70s and ’80s, Shepp almost entirely abandoned the avant-garde and
soul/funk/R&B both, choosing to concentrate on the blues, gospel and
the jazz tradition. Releasing mostly live albums, and collaborating
with a broad range of American and European musicians, he explored
standards and ballads. At times, music of rare beauty resulted, as on Goin’ Home,
an album of saxophone-piano duo versions of spirituals and gospel tunes
recorded with Horace Parlan. But as jazz got more gentrified and
festival-oriented, it became difficult for him to retain an audience in
the US, and most of his albums were made for European labels like Enja,
Soul Note, and Steeplechase.
Last year, Shepp revisited the music of Attica Blues on I Hear the Sound,
a live recording with the Attica Blues Orchestra, featuring guests like
pianist and singer Amina Claudine Myers, Art Ensemble of Chicago
drummer Famoudou Don Moye, and trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire. This was
his third time recasting this music; in 1979, he released a double
album, Attica Blues Big Band, which featured a nearly 40-piece ensemble. I Hear the Sound was funded through Kickstarter, and appears on his own Archieball label, which he’s been running from his home in Paris for a decade.
What was your first recording session as a leader?
That’s quite a while ago; it was with Bill Dixon. We
had an arrangement at a studio in New York called Gulf Sound Studios,
and the man who was the engineer was named Art Chryst. We did several
recordings, and one of them we managed to sell to Herman Lubinsky at
Savoy Records.
What did you see as the aesthetic common ground between you and Bill Dixon? Your approaches to the music seem very different.
Well, in fact, Bill was like an older brother to me.
He was at least ten years older than I am, and maybe more than that,
and at the time we were broke, looking for a gig, and didn’t have
anyplace to work. Personally, I always liked Bill and respected him; as a
younger man, he always gave me good advice. So first we were good
friends, and then musically, everything else just fell into place. At
the time, I had just been fired by Cecil Taylor, and I needed a place to
work, as he did. Bill was doing some copying, copying music for George Russell
at the time, and his ideas coincided with mine. It was a period in
which, because of my having worked with Cecil, I had a much more
experimental perspective on the music, and we coalesced and got together
very easily. We had a very good relationship.
What was your relationship like with John Coltrane? You played on A Love Supreme, though the tracks weren’t released until later, and you were on Ascension, and you recorded his songs on Four for Trane. Was there a sense from Impulse! that you were being groomed as the next man in line?
Oh, I don’t think so. What eventually happened was
rather fortuitous for me, in the sense that I had the chance to meet
John Coltrane and it was he who was the intermediary for me, in
connecting me with Bob Thiele and Impulse! Records. In fact, Bob was
totally negative in terms of doing that recording [Four for Trane].
I had been calling him for months, trying to get him on the phone, and
his secretary always told me he was either out to lunch or he was gone
for the day. [laughs]
He said, “You’re a free jazz player,” which I wasn’t. My father was a bluesman, I grew up with the blues.
But
by this time I had met John Coltrane, and John’s always been a hero to
me, and was certainly very helpful in my career. I spoke to him
personally and told him that I’d been trying to reach Bob, and I never
could get him, and so he told me – the way he would answer was, he
wouldn’t say he’d do it, he said, “I’ll see what I can do.” And the next
day, after months of calling Bob Thiele, I called him again, and his
secretary Lillian, whom I got to know rather well after some time, she
said, “Well, Bob’s out to lunch, but he’ll be back in an hour.” [laughs]
So John had apparently spoken to him, and we
arranged to do this recording, and even then I think he tried to turn me
off by saying, you know, “You’re a free jazz player,” which I wasn’t.
My father was a bluesman, I grew up with the blues. It was only because
of Cecil Taylor and my association with him that he had turned me in
another direction. So Bob said, “You’re a free jazz player, and really
what I wanted was someone to play Coltrane’s music.”
You’ll
see on the album [cover photo], John [Coltrane]’s not wearing any
socks, because he got out of his bed to come hear the recording.
Well,
I knew about this predilection on his part, that he did want someone to
record, to cover John’s music, and I had already been working on it, in
fact. I had chosen the songs we would do – which appear on that album.
So I told him, “No problem, I love John’s music.” In fact, the night of
the recording, at Rudy Van Gelder’s studio, Bob was there – he was
totally in bad spirits, totally against this recording, and was way at
the other end of the studio when we did the first track.
He smoked a pipe – you could see him smoking the
pipe like a chimney. But after the second or third cut we did, he said,
“Hey, this stuff isn’t so bad!” So he got on the phone and called John,
and said, “Hey John, this stuff is great!” Because he didn’t like free
music, but that wasn’t exactly free music. I wasn’t Albert Ayler or
Ornette. I had a very clear concept, to try to fuse so-called standard
jazz with the New Thing, and I think it came out rather well on that
album. So by the fourth song, he called Trane and told him he should
come down to the studio and listen to the music. Which he did. He was
living on Long Island, and it was about 11 PM when Bob called. So you’ll
see on the album [cover photo], John’s not wearing any socks, because
he got out of his bed to come hear the recording.
Your Impulse! albums had a lot of blues and
standards in addition to free music – did you think other players were
ignoring the blues, to their detriment?
Well, I wasn’t so much concerned about what other
people were doing, though some other people seemed to be concerned about
what I was doing; they accused me of selling out by playing the blues
and so on. But I was raised with the blues, my people were blues people,
so I’ve always felt that was an essential element of African-American
music, whether one decides to call it “free” or whatever. It should
never lose that aspect of the blues.
I think that’s borne out by the music of people like
Charlie Parker, and Coltrane, who was an excellent blues player. In
fact, in my estimation, any of the great improvisers and performers in
this music have always been great blues players. That’s true of Art
Tatum and Fats Waller [for example], and those who can’t play the blues
are really, I believe, somehow outside the box.
When
you came back to Impulse! in the early ’70s, your music had a lot more
elements of soul, R&B, larger ensembles and things – what inspired
you to make that change?
Well, part of it had to do with discussions I had
with people that were close to me, like my mother. My mother died rather
early, when she was 50, but I remember one of my last conversations
with her, where she asked me, “Well, son, are you still playing those
songs that don’t have any tunes?” And I thought about that. Later, just
after her funeral, I spoke with a friend of hers, and she looked at me
with this sort of quizzical look and asked, “When are you going to
record something that I can understand?”
Very few black people really listened to what I was doing.
I
began to see and reflect that basically the audiences for this music
were essentially white, middle-class audiences. That very few black
people really listened to what I was doing. Even though I had a very
strong blues background, I rarely played the blues, I didn’t play
standards or songs that might have appealed to them like the recordings
of Horace Silver, Freddie Hubbard,
or Lee Morgan…so at that point I began to think maybe I should include
some of the experience of my youth. I’d played a lot of songs, ballads
and so on, growing up in Philadelphia, and maybe I should begin playing
some of this music that people could understand. Today it’s different. A
lot of younger players have come along, David Murray and people like
that, who actually play the kind of music I played then and have found
an audience for it.
Attica Blues
is one of your best-known records from that period – how did it come
together, and what was the inspiration for it, beyond the riot that gave
it its title?
Yeah, that was the inspiration – not only the prison
uprising, but the fact that there were several rebellions, prison
rebellions going on at that time. The ’60s was a time for change, and
during my formative period, when I was a younger man, I was very much a
part of the civil rights movement that was taking place at the time. So
the recording had a lot to do with the whole civil rights ambience, from
a political point of view. But from a musical point of view, I got to
really explore my interest in the blues and write some compositions that
were blues and ballad-oriented.
And you recently revisited that music with
the big band, so how would you contrast the newer versions of those
songs with the older ones?
Well, in some ways I prefer the second recording,
the one that was recorded at the Palais des Glaces, because of the level
of musicianship. We had [trumpeter] Eddie Preston, [trombonist] Charles
Greenlee, we had 39 pieces on the album, an outstanding ensemble. Some
things could not be repeated, but I think on this last recording we did
get a feeling which is new, which introduces some very interesting young
people like Cécile McLorin Salvant, a very fine young singer, Ambrose
Akinmusire.
One of the albums you did in the 70s – Goin’ Home with Horace Parlan – was very interesting; it put you in a whole different light. What are your feelings about that record now?
Oh, it’s still one of my favorite recordings,
because it really reaches deep inside, as far as my feelings. I remember
we did these spirituals, and somehow before we started to record, I
felt full, as though I was going to cry, and I had to really get hold of
myself. And I thought, well, if I’m truly too moved to make this
recording, I’ll never make the statement that this music requires. So I
got myself together, and I think all of that feeling went into the
recording, and when I listen to it, I’m very sensitive to what state of
mind I was in when I did it, and I think a lot of it comes through in
the music. Especially a song like “My Lord, What a Morning.”
You’ve done a few duo records – do you think
that kind of very intimate setting works well for your particular sound
on the horn?
Actually, I prefer to have at least a trio. I’ve
gotten used to playing piano duo combinations partly through working
with Horace, because he’s such a great accompanist and has such a
wonderful feeling, a deep spiritual feeling on the piano no matter what
he plays. So I eventually got used to working without bass and drums,
though I still prefer to have at least bass in context of a piano and,
when possible, to have a full quartet. But there are things you can do
within the duo context that are very special and personal, that can
reach an audience.
For the last 10 years you’ve been running
Archieball, your own label, and now that you’re doing it, do you have
sympathy for the labels you recorded for over the years? What did you
learn from them that you’re applying now?
Well, that most of them are crooks. No, my
sympathies for record label owners haven’t improved any, but Archieball
is pretty much what I expected – it’s working hard, not making very much
money. At some point, if we ever do make any money, I’d like to be able
to help other musicians to get their careers off the ground.
Last month, I spoke with saxophonist Archie Shepp, one of my heroes for more than 40 years now. Shepp spoke at length about growing up in Fort Lauderdale and Philadelphia. He told stories about John Coltrane and Lee Morgan. He discussed the current movement, led by trumpeter Nicholas Payton, to retire the term “jazz” from the lexicon, and instead to call it “BAM,” or Black American Music.
Here’s the complete transcript of my interview with Shepp, who performs Oct. 11-12 at Yoshi’s in Oakland, his first Bay Area club dates in about 20 years. What a trill, for me to speak with Shepp: In my mind, I can still see him so vividly, strutting onstage, sharp as can be, ready to fire up his soul-power at the John Coltrane Memorial Concert at New York’s Town Hall, in 1971. It was the first of many times when I’ve been privileged to see/hear this legendary figure – also a blues singer, a playwright, a poet and leader of the “new breed” that instigated the ‘60s black jazz avant-garde, the “fire music” from which one of Shepp’s classic albums takes its name.
He can play a ballad with tender beauty; almost excruciating to hear. His “Attica Blues” album, from 1972, was to jazz what “What’s Going on” was to soul music. But why even differentiate? Shepp is a soul man, a jazz man, a blues man. Now 75 years old, he divides his time between Paris, France, and Hadley, Mass, where he got on the phone to talk about his life in music.
This transcript expands considerably on a shorter version of this interview, recently published in the San Jose Mercury News.
Q: Archie, I watched a new video of you rehearsing your band and – just like 40 years ago – you were dressed in the sharpest suit and brimmed hat.
A: I grew up in a tradition where musicians were generally – they were sharp, they were well-dressed. I’m thinking of Ellington and Earl Hines, people who were models for me: Miles Davis, Roy Haynes, Max Roach. These were the people who were generally impeccably attired; it’s part of the ambiance of the music. Apart from the fact that they were playing beautifully, aesthetically they looked good.
People come to hear music. But as in the theater, they also come to see it. So there’s a visual aspect to the whole presentation.
Q: Your sound on the horn is so distinctive; it’s unmistakable. Do you remember a point where you discovered your sound?
A: It took me a while to realize what my sound really is. I remember one of my first recordings; it was with Bill Dixon, back in the early ‘60s. Prior to that I had recorded with Cecil Taylor, and of course I had a lot of favorite tenor saxophonists: John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Lucky Thompson. I suppose at that point I was trying to arrive at a sound like Trane; I really loved his sound and what he was doing. But this was a recording date; and, with each take, it wasn’t at all like Coltrane, though I was trying desperately to find that sound. It just wasn’t there. It sounded a little thin to me. And then we did a Leonard Bernstein song — maybe it was “Somewhere” — and I just decided to let go and play the way I really felt and really played.
I thought, “What the hell, I don’t like what I’m doing. I might as well sound like myself.” And when they played it back, I really liked the sound. It was more like Ben Webster, a classical saxophone sound. And I really liked that sound and it’s been my sound ever since.
And then when I was about 40, I had a problem. I actually cut my lip from the inside and I had a scar inside my lip.
Q: What caused the problem? A: I remember I got a brand new baritone sax from Selmer, (a model) with the low A, and when I got home I tried it out and hit that lowest note. And when I hit that low A — they had a special key to reach it — my lip split wide open from the vibration. And from that point on it’s been a journey for me to rebuild my embouchure. It was rough going for a while. Now I’ve sort of arrived at something that works for me — not like I used to; I’ve lost some of the attack. But there are things I didn’t do before that I do now: circular breathing.
And my range from the bottom to the top of the horn — the bottom of the horn, I can still access that pretty much the way I used to. But the top of the horn I use a different embouchure, more of a trumpet embouchure.
Q: So overall, how do you assess your comeback? A: Am I better or worse? It’s not that simple. In the medium or lower register, I feel very comfortable. In the upper register, I still work for intonation. Some things are easier, some things are harder. You know, I’ve listened to an interview with Stephane Grappelli, the violinist, and he was saying that some years ago he was in an accident, and he lost the use of two fingers. And it completely changed his approach to the violin, as one might imagine. But it was inspiring to me; from that I gleaned that one can reinvent one’s self on an instrument.
I’ve been helped or inspired more than once by hearing from other people who had problems. Coltrane had problems, especially with his teeth, and eventually he had to have transplants — twice, I believe. His upper teeth were replaced. He had problems getting back into the music, but you wouldn’t know it. He sounded better after he had his teeth replaced. His embouchure was more intact, I’m quite sure, after he had his teeth worked on.
Q: Was that after you met him? A: When I first met him he had only the two incisors, and all the rest of the teeth seemed to be gone, except in the back. But you wouldn’t know it, he had such a great sound. He worked his way through it. Q: Where did you meet Coltrane? A: I met John at the Five Spot when I was just out of college. I used to go down there to hear Monk. It was just after I married. I lived not too far from the old Five Spot at 5 Cooper Square, and I would go there every night and I would hear Monk — and Ornette Coleman, when those guys first came from California. And when Trane was with Monk, I frequented the club every night, because he was a man who exerted a great deal of influence on me. So one day I got up my nerve and said I’d like to ask him to show me something — like a tutorial. And I said I was from Philadelphia, like he was; I tried to do as much as I could to bond with him as much as possible. (Laughs). And he was a very nice man, John, and he wrote his address down in a very careful neat hand, and I showed up the next morning at his home on Columbus Avenue, not thinking that he had finished his gig at the Five Spot at 5 in the morning — and I was there at 10. And he had practiced himself to sleep, no doubt, until about 7.
Well, his wife of the time, Anita – Naima – opened the door, and she asked me in, and I waited for John until about 1:30, when he got up. And his horn was lying on the sofa; he hadn’t put it in its case. And he picked it up, and he started to play immediately — something like “Giant Steps,” for about 10 minutes, just uninterrupted saxophone. He put his horn down and said, “You want to play something for me?”
Q: Uh-oh. A: (Laughter.) Yeah, right. We talked all day. We just talked about music and his philosophy, what he was trying to do, how he was trying to find a way of resolving chords, five or six chords within one scale. So a lot of my information came to me theoretically from John. Q: Were you playing alto or tenor when you met Coltrane? A: I was playing alto at the time, even though my grandmother had helped me to buy a brand new tenor saxophone, when I was living in Philadelphia. You see, Coltrane was a legend in Philadelphia, when I was growing up. I remember as a young man in high school, I worked from time to time with a drummer named Warren Ivers – I-V-E-R-S — and I told him about some problems I was having in the upper register. He said, “There’s a guy in North Philadelphia named Coltrane, who’s a specialist in playing the harmonics above where the instrument is normally played.” And from that time on, his name stuck in my mind and I was on a mission to meet this man who played the saxophone from the bottom to the top. But I didn’t meet him until after college. So finally, when I did get to hear him, it was like a dream come true. And when I heard that he and Jimmy Heath — I was a big fan of Jimmy’s, too — when I found out they both had started on alto sax, I traded in my brand new tenor for an old Conn alto. My parents were flabbergasted when I brought it home. But that’s the horn that remained my saxophone until I got married. And when I met John at his apartment, I had this alto, and he asked me to play.
Q: What came out of that tutorial? A: Many things. One thing he said was, “You should practice keeping your fingers closer to the keys,” which in itself was a lesson to me. And then he talked about his favorite people: Miles and Monk and Art Tatum. We talked for hours. Q: You once said of Coltrane and his influence, “Trane is the guy that created us.” What did you mean? A: He showed us the way. He stretched the melodic line out, horizontally. You see, up until Bird, and going back before him to Louis Armstrong and the beginnings of this music — throughout that period, so-called jazz music was happening vertically. Normally the soloist would look for the root of the chord or the 3rd or the 5th — right up to Charlie Parker. Charlie begins the change of the line from a vertical line to a horizontal one. And Coltrane, by his use of the mode in tunes like “Impressions” and “Blues Minor” — he’s actually using a modal approach, a more scalar approach. The scale is the basic approach to his solos vis a vis the chord. So instead of a C minor seventh, he actually plays a Dorian scale that can be C Dorian or D Dorian or whatever, where you play all the notes in the chord. And what becomes possible are the accidentals within the chord, so it’s kind of a 12-tone approach, actually. And then he plays notes that aren’t on the horn. Q: What was Coltrane’s message? A: John was very inspired, one could say religiously. His mother was very much a part of the church; she played piano. Then his father and uncles; I think his uncle was a preacher. He had a very spiritual approach to music, Coltrane, and to some degree I suppose I felt the same way that he did. I heard his message. And certainly, Albert Ayler was very similar, as well; he comes from a very religious background. There are some churches, fundamentalist churches, black churches, where they use the musical instruments: drums, trumpets, saxophones. And Albert had very much the sound of the music played in the fundamentalist church — the vibrato, using the very high notes, high register. Q: There’s always been a political aspect to your music; some might say a militancy. A: Well, it’s the way I grew up. My father, my people, were always engaged politically, if only to say that they read the op-ed page in the newspaper and they frequently discussed politics. Even when I was in the third grade, I remember my teacher asked us to write a paper. She expected something simple; I wrote a paper about racism. She said where did you come up with this? I said, “By listening to my father and the man upstairs.” That became a part of me, and why not? I’m from Fort Lauderdale, Florida. In 1935, two years before I was born, a man named Rubin Stacy was lynched right outside of Fort Lauderdale. And it was an infamous lynching; you can see it online. And the people who lynched him have almost a festive ambiance, while this man is hanging from the tree.
So I grew up in a place and a time that was rather like apartheid. Blacks couldn’t use toilets; they were marked “colored” and “white only.” Park benches were marked “colored” or “white” — if there were any benches for blacks, at all. And, as late as 1959, I can remember my aunt saying she tried to use a public restroom in Fort Lauderdale, and there were none in what they called “White Town.” She had to wait an hour and go all the way back home before she could use the toilet.
So I grew up in a time and a place that was very tough, especially regarding race and religion. Jews couldn’t even swim on the beach in Fort Lauderdale, until the Jewish community was able to buy into a number of the facilities, most importantly in Miami Beach. Before that, they couldn’t use it, either. In fact, the first people of color to perform on the beach were Johnny Mathis and Sammy Davis, Jr.
There’s been a lot of changes since I was a young man, including a black president. But fundamentally, I think America remains the same; we’ve still got a long way to go. When I hear some of the comments people make about Obama — those that don’t like it him — it confirms my sense that we have a long way to go.
I support Mr. Obama and recently contributed what I could to his campaign, and I would say that Mitt Romney is a rather dangerous man. He would say anything and perhaps do anything to get himself elected to the presidency. He changes his message from day to day; it’s incredible.
Q: You have a tune called “Mama Rose.” Who is she? A: My grandmother, my father’s mother. She’s the one who bought me the tenor sax. She’s the one who used to take me to church, where I first head the spirituals and the gospel music and the jubilees. Q: When you sing and recite that song, “Mama Rose,” it’s as if you’re speaking to her – as if she’s still your sounding board. A: Well, she is, in fact. She was the model for me. She inspired me to go to college and to stay in school and to join the church. Q: Which church? What denomination? A: A Baptist church; it wasn’t an evangelist church, but perhaps close. And she was that very important role model for me, along with my mother and father. My father played the banjo and it was really through him that I was inspired to play music. Q: Did your dad play any other instruments? A: He played a little piano, and, more importantly, my mother and father provided me with piano lessons. Q: Who were your other mentors? A: Growing up in Philadelphia — I lived in Germantown — I was very close to Lee Morgan. Lee was a mentor to me and I can remember meeting him; it was rather like my meeting with Coltrane, although Lee was only 15 or 16. But he was already very well known around Philadelphia. He’d only been playing about four years, but he was already one of the best trumpet players in the city; he was a child prodigy, Morgan. So I asked him for help with my saxophone. At that point, I didn’t know anything about it, and I was about a year younger than Lee. Well — like Coltrane, later — Lee agreed to help me. And at that point, I hadn’t heard anybody but Stan Getz. Because in those years, rarely did they play Charlie Parker or Sonny Stitt or anyone like that on the radio. But occasionally they would play Stan Getz; that was about the only jazz musician who was played on popular radio at that time. I can remember Getz’s “Moonlight in Vermont,” which he recorded with Jimmy Raney. So that’s what I tried to play for Morgan; I gave him my best Stan Getz imitation. And a couple of people in the room, they started to smile and smirk and they were holding back from me a little bit, maybe because my imitation of Stan Getz wasn’t that great — though I don’t think they were great admirers of Stan Getz, either. So they said, “Enough of that. Let’s play the blues.” Well, I learned the blues from my father; he sang the blues, he was a blues man. That was about all I could play. I had never learned the 12-bars; it was just a feeling for me, like politics. Anyway, they started something in medium tempo. And when I finished my solo, Morgan looked at me and he said, “Man, don’t ever change.” And that’s how we became friends.
Lee had blues gigs from time to time, and he would call me. And eventually I would learn to play chord changes. In fact, my first professional gig on piano was with Lee Morgan in Providence, Rhode Island. He couldn’t find a piano player! Well, I eventually learned to voice chords and play a little piano by accompanying him.
Q: Archie, do you consider yourself a musical populist? Your music often has a way of entertaining as it challenges and prods people from a political angle, too. I’m thinking of something like “Attica Blues.” A: I arrived at a certain place with “Attica Blues” in terms of my musical prowess as a composer. I did some arranging for the album, too. So for me, that recording had implications other than just my soloing, my improvising. It was the first album on which I composed for large orchestra and did some arranging for big band. In that sense, “Attica Blues” was sort of a transitional moment. But even before that, on my very first album with Impulse — “Four for Trane” — I had a piece titled “Rufus (Swung, His Face at Last to the Wind, Then His Neck Snapped).” It’s a song about a lynching. So frequently, even before “Attica Blues,” the things that I wrote carried some implication beyond just notes of music; there were socio-political implications. Q: I always loved little Waheeda Massey, singing her dad Cal Massey’s tune “Quiet Dawn” on “Attica Blues.” She must have been about nine years old, right? What ever happened to her? A: Oh, you know Waheeda’s married now and she lives in Upstate New York, but I haven’t seen her since she was ten years old. Q: She is so loveable, singing that song. A: She sure is. I thought the simplicity would be important, because we’re so used to professionalism. And I wanted simplicity, the sound of a child. Q: Jazz was such a strong black cultural expression when you came up. Is it still? A: No, not at all. The ambiance has changed. For example, it seems to have moved from Harlem to Lincoln Center, that is from uptown to midtown. It’s taken on another meaning. It also is attracting an entirely different audience. It used to be this music – African-American music — was in the African-American community. You’d find it in Chicago in the South Side, in North and South Philadelphia, in Harlem. But all those clubs are gone now; they’ve disappeared. It’s only to be expected, because it’s become more and more a middle class music and less and less a music that comes from the working classes. It seems people in the ghetto would rather spend their money on Prince or Michael Jackson than Coltrane. To some degree it’s the fault of the jazz musicians; their music has become more intellectual or academic. The people in the community have held onto their blues invention. It’s a question of musicians going to colleges and universities and becoming more and more like Stravinsky and less and less like Charley Patton! Q: Archie, you’ve lived through lots of arguments over the word “jazz.” Nicholas Payton, the trumpeter, wants to retire the term. He’s campaigning to bring the music under the big umbrella of what he calls “BAM” – an acronym for Black American Music. What do you think of that? A: He’s right. Jazz is a term that seems to originate in questionable circumstances. It begins in New Orleans with the bordellos and the houses of prostitution. And it’s probably no accident that the first people, scholars, to seriously write about this music were francophones, people like Hugh Panassie, Andre Hodeir, Charles Delaunay. Also, it seems the term “jazz” itself might have some French origins. For example the French use a term “jaser,” a verb that means to talk, to chat, to speak in light conversation. And in the Occitan dialect, which one finds in the southwest of France, they actually have a term “jass,” which is spelled as it originally was spelled in New Orleans, with an “s.” In this case, it means a stable, a place where the animals were kept. So the term “jazz” might have some French origins: The fact that the first people to write about it were francophones, and that the people in New Orleans were people who spoke French.
Nicholas may be right. People like Sidney Bechet rejected the use of the term jazz. Also Duke Ellington, Max Roach, Yusef Lateef. Why are we saddled with it? It’s not a name created by black musicians for their own music. It’s a word created by the critics who wrote about the music, and at a certain point one wonders why the “King of Swing” wouldn’t be Count Basie or Louis Armstrong. In fact, all the important innovators in this music are black. There are a lot of great white musicians; I like Scott LaFaro, Charlie Haden. Roswell (Rudd)’s a great player, and you can talk about Beiderbecke. But none of them fundamentally changed or led this music.
Look at the impact that Coltrane has had on modern music. There’s not a saxophone player today, not a young one, who hasn’t gotten something from Coltrane. And that goes for trumpet players and others, too, because he brought so much to the music from a theoretical standpoint.
Q: You’re such a collaborator. You’ve worked in recent years with Chuck D, with dancers, with Cuban pianist Chucho Valdes. A: I think there are clear connections to be made between, say, the music of Chucho and African-American music from North America. W.C. Handy talks about having gone down to play in Cuba when he was a young man. And Jelly Roll Morton talks about the “Spanish tinge.” So there’s always been a kind of rapport between Latin American music and so-called jazz music from North America: Chano Pozo and Dizzy Gillespie. I’ve tried to connect my music with traditional African music, as well, partly by way of Coltrane, whose music has a number of implications — through Olatunji and also Ravi Shankar.
And lately, I did something with a younger guy named Vincent Joseph, who’s from Trinidad, very fine young man. He’s a rapper. I couldn’t help but feel — when I heard his music, somehow I had a sense of déjà vu, that maybe somehow I already did some of this earlier, in the ‘60s. Of course he’s doing his own thing; I don’t mean to take that away from him. But in some ways I feel that I’ve already been there and that maybe I’m a kind of godfather to that way of doing things. You mention Chuck D; I started rapping on recordings in 1966, when I did something called “Malcolm, Malcolm – Semper, Malcolm.” Today they call that “slam.” Back then, it didn’t have a name; it was just jazz and poetry. I must admit, I was influenced by people like Langston Hughes and maybe Melvin Van Peebles. I wasn’t the first, but I wasn’t the last. Q: Archie, for me, one of the greatest moments on any of your records happens on “Live at the Donaueschingen Music Festival,” in ’67, when the whole band is in the midst of this amazing, beautiful chaos – and then, it’s like a curtain is lifted, and suddenly, it’s just you, playing “The Shadow of Your Smile.” How hard did you work at the arrangement to make that happen? It’s like magic.
A: Believe me, it was carefully worked out. We had worked on it for months — because we didn’t get many gigs! I used to work in my little studio; I was just learning to arrange and I worked some of it through by ear, and we’d do it over and over again. I was inspired originally by a march by John Philip Sousa, called “King Cotton.” The band also recorded it with tuba on “Mama Too Tight.” And on the record you mention, “Donaueschingen,” it evolves into all this freedom, and in the middle of all this freedom, I had crafted this version of “The Shadow of Your Smile” — which was always a shock whenever we performed it, because it seems to come out of nowhere.
We performed it one time in Paris at a big hall called the Salle Pleyel, where we followed Miles Davis. Now, Miles had gotten a standing ovation. This was in 1967, just before the student rebellion in Paris. And so we came on, and we were shocking to look at: Roswell was wearing a baseball cap; I was wearing a dashiki. And there was this explosion of sound, cacophonous, and we only played one song, one long piece for about an hour and a half. And about 15 minutes into it, all the people who were sitting in the orchestra — they were mostly older people, the bourgeoisie — they all started heading to the exits. And it was just at that point that “The Shadow of Your Smile” evolved out of that arrangement, and it was something to watch. I tell you, the first person — the leader of this mass exit — had his hand on the door and he suddenly stopped, as if something had hit him. He released his hand and he came back to his seat; they all did. They all came back and sat down. It was incredible to watch, because easily 100 people had been about to leave.
And when we finished, contrary to Miles, there was an outcry of boos – oh, it was terrible. But up in the balcony — where all the young people were seated, in the cheap seats — everyone was cheering. So there was a standoff for about ten minutes between the boos and the cheers. And finally I was asked to do an encore; it was amazing. And the following year they had that student rebellion, so I guess it was an indication of things to come.
Q: Do you ever get nostalgic for those old days? A: Well, no. Things never come back exactly as they were. What’s gone is gone.
THE MUSIC OF ARCHIE SHEPP: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS WITH MR. SHEPP:
Archie Shepp - "Attica Blues"
Track Listing : "Attica Blues" - 00:00 "Invocation:Attica Blues" - 04:48 "Steam, Part 1" - 05:07 "Invocation To Mr. Parker" - 10:24 "Steam, Part 2" - 13:30 "Blues For Brother George Jackson" - 18:39 "Invocation:Ballad For A Child" - 22:39 "Ballad For A Child" - 23:09 "Good bye Sweet Pops" - 26:45 "Quiet Dawn" - 31:08 Personnel : Archie Shepp: tenor and soprano saxophones Clifford Thornton: cornet Roy Burrows, Charles McGhee, Michael Ridley: trumpet Cal Massey: fluegelhorn Charles Greenlee, Charles Stephens, Kiane Zawadi: trombone Hakim Jami: euphonium Clarence White: alto saxophone Marion Brown: alto saxophone, flute, bamboo flute, percussion Roland Alexander, Billy Robinson: tenor saxophone James Ware: baritone saxophone John Blake, Leroy Jenkins, Lakshinarayana Shankar: violin Ronald Lipscomb, Calo Scott: cello Dave Burrell: electric piano Walter Davis, Jr.: electric piano, piano Cornell Dupree: guitar Jimmy Garrison, Gerald Jemmott, Roland Wilson: bass Ollie Anderson, Nene DeFense, Juma Sultan: percussion Beaver Harris, Billy Higgins: drums Joshie Armstead, Henry Hull, Waheeda Massey, Albertine Robertson, Joe Lee Wilson: vocal Bartholomew Gray, William Kunstler: narrator RoMas: arranger Romulus Franceschini: conductor
Archie Shepp - 'Fire Music':
Released 1965 Recorded February 16 and March 9, 1965 Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs Label Impulse! A-86 Producer Bob Thiele
Track Listing: 1. (0:00) "Hambone" (Archie Shepp) 2. (12:29) "Los Olvidados" (Shepp) 3. (21:24) "Malcolm, Malcolm Semper Malcolm" (Shepp) 4. (26:13) "Prelude to a Kiss" (Ellington, Gordon, Mills) 5. (31:04) "The Girl from Ipanema" (DeMoraes, Gimbel, Jobim) 6. (39:14) "Hambone" [Live] - 11:53 Bonus track on CD, recorded live at the Village Gate on March 28, 1965
Personnel: Archie Shepp - tenor saxophone Ted Curson - trumpet Joseph Orange - trombone Marion Brown - alto saxophone Reggie Johnson - double bass except track 3 Joe Chambers - drums except track 3 David Izenzon - double bass on track 3 J.C. Moses - drums on track 3
Archie Shepp - "Hipnosis"
(Composition by Jackie McLean; arrangement by Archie Shepp):
Tracklist: 1. Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans? 2. I Know About The Life 3. Georgia On My Mind 4. Embraceable You 5. Smoke Gets In Your Eyes 6. How Deep Is The Ocean 7. Lush Life 8. Déjà Vu 9. Angel Eyes 10. All Too Soon 11. Ain't Misbehavin' Personnel:
Piano – Horace Parlan Tenor Saxophone, Alto Saxophone – Archie Shepp Bass – Wayne Dockery Drums – Steve McRaven
Archie Shepp - "I Didn't Know About You" --(Full Album):
Tracklist:
1. Go Down Moses (Let My People Go) (Traditional) 2. I Didn't Know About You (Bob Russell, Duke Ellington) 3. Billie's Bossa (Horace Parlan) 4. Hot House (Tadd Dameron) 5. The Good Life (Jean Broussolle, Sacha Distel) 6. Now's The Time (Charlie Parker) 7. Ask Me Now (Thelonious Monk) 8. Party-time (Archie Shepp)
Personnel: Drums – George Brown Bass – Wayne Dockery Piano – Horace Parlan Tenor Saxophone, Alto Saxophone, Vocals – Archie Shepp
Archie Shepp - 'Four For Trane'-- (Full Album):
Tracklist: 1. Syeeda's Song Flute (John Coltrane) 2. Mr. Syms (John Coltrane) 3. Cousin Mary (John Coltrane) 4. Naima (John Coltrane) 5. Rufus (Swung, His Face At Last To The Wind, Then His Neck Snapped) (Archie Shepp)
Bass – Reggie Workman Drums – Charles Moffett Alto Saxophone – John Tchicai Flugelhorn – Alan Shorter Tenor Saxophone – Archie Shepp Trombone – Roswell Rudd
Archie Shepp -- 'Mama Too Tight'-- Full LP:
Tracklist:
A A Portrait Of Robert Thompson B1 Mama Too Tight B2 Theme For Ernie B3 Basheer
Archie Shepp - "Mama Rose"--Live:
Warsaw, Poland-- 1978
Wilber Little on bass Clifford Jarvis - drums Seigfried Kessler - piano
Shepp participated in the sessions for Coltrane's A Love Supreme in late 1964, but none of the takes he participated in were included on the final LP release (they were made available for the first time on a 2002 reissue).[1] However, Shepp, along with Tchicai and others from the Four for Trane sessions, then cut Ascension with Coltrane in 1965, and his place alongside Coltrane at the forefront of the avant-garde jazz scene was epitomized when the pair split a record (the first side a Coltrane set, the second a Shepp set) entitled New Thing at Newport released in late 1965. In 1965, Shepp released Fire Music,
which included the first signs of his developing political
consciousness and his increasingly Afrocentric orientation. The album
took its title from a ceremonial African music tradition and included a
reading of an elegy for Malcolm X.[1] Shepp's 1967 The Magic of Ju-Ju
also took its name from African musical traditions, and the music was
strongly rooted in African music, featuring an African percussion
ensemble. At this time, many African-American jazzmen were increasingly influenced by various continental African cultural and musical traditions; along with Pharoah Sanders, Shepp was at the forefront of this movement. The Magic of Ju-Ju defined Shepp's sound for the next few years: freeform avant-garde saxophone lines coupled with rhythms and cultural concepts from Africa.
Shepp continued to experiment into the new decade, at various times
including harmonica players and spoken word poets in his ensembles. With
1972's Attica Blues and The Cry of My People, he spoke out for civil rights; the former album was a response to the Attica Prison riots.[1] Shepp also writes for theater; his works include The Communist (1965)[3] and Lady Day: A Musical Tragedy (1972).[4] Both were produced by Robert Kalfin at the Chelsea Theater Center.[5]
In 1971, Shepp was recruited to the University of Massachusetts Amherst by Randolph Bromery,[6]
beginning a 30-year career as a professor of music. Shepp's first two
courses were entitled "Revolutionary Concepts in African-American Music"
and "Black Musician in the Theater."[7] Shepp was also a professor of African-American Studies at SUNY in Buffalo, New York.[8]
In the late 1970s and beyond, Shepp's career went between various old
territories and various new ones. He continued to explore African
music, while also recording blues, ballads, spirituals (on the 1977 album Goin' Home with Horace Parlan) and tributes to more traditional jazz figures such as Charlie Parker and Sidney Bechet, while at other times dabbling in R&B, and recording with various European artists including Jasper van't Hof, Tchangodei and Dresch Mihály.
Later career
Since the early 1990s, he has often played with the French trumpeter Eric Le Lann. Shepp is featured in the 1981 documentary film Imagine the Sound, in which he discusses and performs his music and poetry. Shepp also appears in Mystery, Mr. Ra, a 1984 French documentary about Sun Ra. The film also includes footage of Shepp playing with Sun Ra's Arkestra. In 1993, he worked with Michel Herr to create the original score for the film Just Friends.
In 2002, Shepp appeared on the Red Hot Organization's tribute album to Fela Kuti, Red Hot and Riot. Shepp appeared on a track entitled "No Agreement" alongside Res, Tony Allen, Ray Lema, Baaba Maal, and Positive Black Soul. In 2004 Archie Shepp founded his own record label, Archieball, together with Monette Berthomier. The label is located in Paris, France, and features collaborations with Jacques Coursil, Monica Passos, Bernard Lubat and Frank Cassenti.
Kofi Natambu, editor of and contributor to Sound Projections, is a writer, poet, cultural critic, and political journalist whose poetry, essays, criticism, reviews, and journalism have appeared in many literary magazines, journals, newspapers, and anthologies. He has written extensively about music as a critic and historian for many publications, including the Black Scholar, Downbeat, Solid Ground: A New World Journal, Detroit Metro Times, KONCH, the Panopticon Review,Black Renaissance Noire, the Village Voice, the City Sun (NYC), the Poetry Project Newsletter (NYC), and the African American Review. He is the author of a biography Malcolm X: His Life & Work (Alpha Books) and two books of poetry: The Melody Never Stops (Past Tents Press) and Intervals (Post Aesthetic Press). He was the founder and editor of Solid Ground: A New World Journal, a national quarterly magazine of the arts, culture, and politics and the editor of a literary anthology Nostalgia for the Present (Post Aesthetic Press). Natambu has read his work throughout the country and given many lectures and workshops at academic and arts institutions. He has taught American literature, literary theory and criticism, cultural history and criticism, film studies, political science, creative writing, philosophy, critical theory, and music history and criticism (Jazz, Blues, R&B, Hip Hop) at many universities and colleges. He was also a curator in the Education Department of Detroit’s Museum of African American History. Born in Detroit, Michigan, Natambu currently lives in Berkeley, California with his wife Chuleenan.
THE MUSIC OF ARCHIE SHEPP: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS WITH MR. SHEPP: 
