Jazz Articles about Archie Shepp

Archie Shepp: Four For Trane To Live Newport 1965 Revisited

by John Eyles
April 25, 2023

Ezz-thetics have already released several '60s albums featuring Archie Shepp which were recorded before or after the music on Four For Trane to Live Newport 1965 Revisited. These have included the New York Contemporary Five's Copenhagen 1963 Revisited plus Shepp's Fire Music To Mama Too Tight Revisited, recorded in 1965 and 1966, and Blasé and Yasmina Revisited, recorded in 1969. All of which makes the current release very welcome as it includes Shepp's first studio recording as sole leader, Four ...

Archie Shepp: The Way Ahead, Kwanza, The Magic Of Ju-Ju Revisited

by Mark Corroto
January 20, 2023

Allow me to expand on a much restated quote from Albert Ayler: “Coltrane was The Father, Pharoah was The Son, and I was... The Holy Ghost." If we remain with the Christian iconography, that makes Archie Shepp, Simon Peter, or the Apostle Peter whom Jesus called the rock upon which he built his church. Christened by his tenure in the early 1960s with Cecil Taylor, Shepp was baptized into what we now call a modernist approach. In meeting Coltrane, a ...

Archie Shepp: The Way Ahead, Kwanza, The Magic Of Ju-ju Revisited

by Chris May
January 13, 2023

2023 kicks off with the bangingest back-in-the-day bang from the Swiss-based ezz-thetics label, whose carefully curated and remastered 1960s sessions from Archie Shepp, Horace Silver, John Coltrane and Albert Ayler lit up the reissue calendar in 2022. Shepp's The Way Ahead, Kwanza, The Magic Of Ju-ju Revisited comes in at a whisker over seventy-nine minutes and includes all four tracks from The Way Ahead (Impulse!, 1968), two tracks from Kwanza (Impulse!, recorded 1969, released 1974) and the ...

Archie Shepp: Fire Music To Mama Too Tight Revisited

by Chris May
September 26, 2022

In 2022, it is widely accepted that, when free jazz (aka the New Thing) was in its ascent in New York in the 1960s, there was, despite superficial appearances, no fundamental incompatibility between it and the historical jazz tradition. More contentiously, revisionist historians are now suggesting that there was no real conflict between New Thing and changes-based or modal-based musicians either. They should try telling that to Archie Shepp. In autumn 1966, during the Miles Davis quintet's ...

Archie Shepp: Blase And Yasmina Revisited

by Chris May
June 23, 2021

The three albums tenor saxophonist Archie Shepp recorded in Paris for BYG Records during one week in August 1969 tend to get overlooked in the slipstream of the dozen or so he made in the US for Impulse earlier in the decade. More is the pity, for as Blasé And Yasmina Revisited so resoundingly attests, the BYGs contain some of the most audacious, many splendored and deep roots music that Shepp has recorded in his still-kicking career (at the time ...

Archie Shepp & Jason Moran: Let My People Go

by Mark Corroto
February 21, 2021

Now an octogenarian, Archie Shepp's name is quite often spoken in the same sentence as that of John Coltrane. Shepp was born a decade after Trane and is associated with the great one's 'New Thing' and 'Fire Music.' His music though, post-Ascension (Impulse!, 1965), might be better equated to that of Billie Holiday, who was born, incidentally, a decade before Coltrane. Just as Holiday presented her music (especially in the later years) in a frank, warts-and-all manner, Shepp has for ...

Vision Festival 2018

by Luciano Rossetti
July 17, 2018