AROHIE SHEPP
Archie Shepp was born in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, in 1937. He grew up in the Philadelphia ghetto and later attended Goddard College in Vermont, where he majored in drama. Always a prolific musician, Shepp began playing tenor sax full-time while at Goddard, which eventually led him into the New York jazz scene, where he met pianist Cecil Taylor.
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AROHIE SHEPP
Archie Shepp was born in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, in 1937. He grew up in the Philadelphia ghetto and later attended Goddard College in Vermont, where he majored in drama.
Always a prolific musician, Shepp began playing tenor sax full-time while at Goddard, which eventually led him into the New York jazz scene, where he met pianist Cecil Taylor. In 1959, the Taylor-Shepp group replaced Jackie McLean and Freddie Redd in performing the background music for the celebrated Jack Gelber play, The Connection. Shepp performed on one Cecil Taylor album, Air, and with Cecil and other musicians on Gil Evans’ Into the Hot. In 1963, he lead a band with trombonist Bill Dixon, and later was a member of the New York Contemporary Five, which also included saxophone player John Tchichai, trumpeter Don Cherry and drummer J.C. Moses.
In 1964, the first record under his own name, Four for Trane was released on the Impulse label. It was followed by Fire Music, still one of the landmarks of recorded Sixties jazz, and a series of explorations which have not peaked yet and have made Archie Shepp one of the most important jazz musicians of our era.
In the early and mid-Sixties, foreshadowing a similar phenomenon in rock, a tendency arose to approach jazz from an increasingly cerebral perspective. This development was due partly to the critical “need” to rationalize, in comfortably academic terms and postulates, the then-recent and jarring stylistic proclivities of John Coltrane and others, and due as well to certain musicians’ own affectations and strivings, because of the intimidation fostered by Western cultural precepts and for the sake of raison d’etre, towards a more classical, Apollonian-oriented musical concept. It is an approach which, with the notable exception of Imaru Amiri Baraka and a handful of others, has persisted until the present.
The music of Archie Shepp has consistently responded with ad hominem ass-kick to these pedantic attempts to transform the jazz aesthetic into an easily-categorized and intellectually palatable generical sub-medium of Art (with an upper-case A.)
Since his emergence in the beginning of the last decade, Mr. Shepp has, perhaps more than any other artist (with the possible exceptions of John Coltrane and Gato Barbieri) constituted the most viable and relevant jazzforms of the post-Parker era. Throughout the last twelve years and in as many albums, his creative vision has retained its original clarity and power, until, at this point, his is one of the few musicks still pertinent to today’s eidos-jolting, man-on-moon universe.
A playwright (he is the author of, among others, 69 and Skull), a poet (two of his poems are available on albums: “Scag” on New Thing At Newport, and “The Wedding” on Live in San Francisco), and foremost a musician, Shepp has never let himself get tied down to a single stylistic tau. He has never moved in predictable patterns. The only constant in Shepp’s music is the consciousness-contracting quality inherent in every aspect of his musical delivery. From the oscillations and temporal variations of single notes, chords, grunts and squeals, to the linear relationships of instruments in his layered ensembles, Shepp’s music always retains the uncanny effect of contracting entire histories of aesthetic antecedents, total ambivalences of any given emotive quality, and the utter quotidian aspect of its melodic and thematic factors to the purely Dionysian and cosmic.
Everything in Shepp’s creative vision is matrical. His trenchant ability to warp out a traditional introductory vamp, a well-worn and equally distorted pivot chord, which somehow smoothly leads out into virgin excurses of eurythmics and then end up playing a shattered “0 Dem Basses” — complete with tuba — somewhere in the metagalactic slime, is nothing short of beatific.
The total flow of Shepp’s music is equalled only by his catholicity. (Not catholic in the sense of Mantovani or Lou Rawls or Andre Kostelanetz, who seemingly have no end to their repetoires of insipid versions of folk, rock, jazz, classical and pop ditties which they spew out as examples of some hideously bland universal music to which they allude, but in the sense of intuitively utilizing various musicforms, regardless of their supposed canons.) In 1968, on his For Losers album, he added some electric instrumentation and a strong r&b/Fender bass backbone to come up with “Stick ’Em Up,” a song which, in a flurry of categorical innocence, was overlooked in everyone’s rush to announce the best rock and roll song of the year. Yet the song remains a monster of mutant hard rock, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see it make the AM Top 40 sometime around 1979. (As a matter of fact, whole chunks of the song can be found on Commander Cody & his Lost Planet Airmen’s new album, on “Watch My .38.”)
Also on For Losers, Mr. Shepp dusted off Duke Ellington’s classic “I Got It Bad (and that Ain’t Good)” and created one of the most wonderful examples of mixing the old with the new on record. At times, he has veritably hypnotized entire audiences by the simple repetition and alteration of piano triplets. At other times, he will intermix fifty-year-old Buck Johnson funeral marches with barrages of whitenoise, creating hour-long tapestries of sound which cause some people to dance like drunken maniacs, and others to wince and, clicking their tongues, walk away. One thing is certain: Archie Shepp’s music doesn’t fuck around.
Nick Tosches
