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Archie Shepp was born in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, in 1937. Live in San Francisco), and foremost a musician, Shepp has
He grew up in the Philadelphia ghetto and later attended never let himself get tied down to a single stylistic tau. He has
Goddard College in Vermont, where he majored in drama. never moved in predictable patterns. The only constant in
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Always a prolific musician, Shepp began playing tenor sax Shepp s music is the consciousness contracting quality
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full-time while at Goddard, which eventually led him into the inherent in every aspect of his musical delivery. From the
New York jazz scene, where he met pianist Cecil Taylor. In oscillations and temporal variations of single notes, chords,
1959, the laylor-Shcpp group replaced Jackie McLean and grunts and squeals, to the linear relationships of instruments in
Freddie Redd in performing the background music lor the his layered ensembles, Shepp s music always retains the
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celebrated Jack Gelber play, The Connection Shepp uncanny effect of contracting entire histories of aesthetic
performed on one Cecil Taylor album, Air,and with Cecil and antecedents, total ambivalences of any given emotive quality,
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other musicians on Gil Evans Into the Hot.In 1963, he lead a and the utter quotidian aspect of its melodic and thematic
band with trombonist Bill Dixon, and later was a member of factors to the purely Dionysian and cosmic.
the New York Contemporary Five, which also included Everything in Shepp s creative vision is metrical. His
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saxophone player John Tchichai, trumpeter Don Cherry and trenchant ability to warp out a traditional introductory vamp,
drummer J.C. Moses. a well-worn and equally distorted pivot chord, which somehow
In 1964, the first record under his own name. Four for smoothly leads out into virgin excurses of eurythmics and then
Trane was released on the Impulse label. It was followed by end up playing a shattered “O Dcm Basses’ - complete with
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Fire Music, still one of the landmarks of recorded Sixties jazz, tuba - somewhere in the mctagalactic slime, is nothing short
and a series of explorations which have not peaked yet and of beatific.
have made Archie Shepp one of the most important jazz The total flow of Shepp ' s music is equalled only by his
musicians of our era. catholicity. (Not catholic in the sense of Mantovani or Lou
Rawls or Andre Kostelanetz, who seemingly have no end to
In the early and mid-Sixties, foreshadowing a similar their repetoircs of insipid versions of folk, rock, jazz, classical
phenomenon in rock, a tendency arose to approach jazz from and pop ditties which they spew out as examples of some
an increasingly cerebral perspective. This development was due hideously bland universal music to which they allude, but in
partly to the critical “need” to rationalize, in comfortably the sense of intuitively utilizing various musieforms, regardless
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academic terms and postulates, the then recent and jarring of their supposed canons.) In 1968, on his For Losen album,
stylistic proclivities of John Coltrane and others, and due as he added some electric instrumentation and a strong
well to certain musicians’ own affectations and strivings, r&b/ Fcnder bass backbone to come up with “Stick Em Up, ” a
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because of the intimidation fostered by Western cultural song which, in a flurry of categorical innocence, was
precepts and for the sake of raison d ' etre. towards a more overlooked in everyone ' s rush to announce the best rock and
classical, Apollonian-oriented musical concept. It is an roll song of the year. Yet the song remains a monster of
approach which, with the notable exception of Imaru Amiri mutant hard rock, and I wouldn ' t be at all surprised to see it
Baraka and a handful of others, has persisted until the present. make the AM Top 40 sometime around 1979. ( Asa matter of
The music of Archie Shepp has consistently responded with fact, whole chunks of the song can be found on Commander
ad hominem ass-kick to these pedantic attempts to transform Cody & his Lost Planet Airmen’s new album, on “Watch My
the jazz aesthetic into an easily-categorized and intellectually .38.“)
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palatable generical sub medium of Art (with an upper- case A.) Also on For Losen, Mr. Shepp dusted off Duke Ellington ' s
Since his emergence in the beginning of the last decade, Mr. classic I Got It Bad (and that Ain ' t Good) and created one
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Shepp has, perhaps more than any other artist (with the of the most wonderful examples of mixing the old with the
possible exceptions of John Coltrane and Gato Barbieri) new on record. At times, he has veritably hypnotized entire
constituted the most viable and relevant jazzforms of the audiences by the simple repetition and alteration of piano
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post- Parker era. Throughout the last twelve years and in as triplets. At other times, he will intermix fifty year-old Buck
many albums, his creative vision has retained its original clarity Johnson funeral marches with barrages of whitenoise, creating
and power, until, at this point, his is one of the few musicks hour- long tapestries of sound which cause some people to.
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still pertinent to today’s eidos-jolting, man on- moon universe. dance like drunken maniacs, and others to wince and, clicking
A playwright (he is the author of, among others, 69 and their tongues, walk away. One thing is certain: Archie Shepp s
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Skull ), a poet (two of his poems arc available on albums: music doesn t fuck around.
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“Scag” on New Thing At Newport, and “The Wedding on Nick Tosches
November, 1972 91