Jazz Articles about Archie Shepp

Cecil Taylor: Mixed To Unit Structures Revisited

by Mark Corroto
March 10, 2021

A listener could make it their life's work to absorb and appreciate the music the music of Cecil Taylor. One could possibly approach it as a scholar and musician through notation and transcription—not the recommended approach. Such a task would be similar to the process of systematizing a DNA sequence. Taylor's music, and pardon this analogy, might be best grasped as one might attend to the oxymoronic genre noise music. If you are still reading, allow an explanation. ...

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 ...

New York Contemporary Five: Consequences Revisited

by Mark Corroto
June 27, 2020

This 2020 reissue of the New York Contemporary Five recordings from 1963-64 can't help but draw one's attention to the social unrest occurring in America in 2020. In 1964 the riots in Harlem and Philadelphia over police brutality were followed by similar riots a few years later in Watts, Newark, Detroit, etc. In the growing civil unrest these recordings were born. The New Thing was the equivalent to what Chuck D of Public Enemy claimed when he said rap music ...

Vision Festival 2018

by Luciano Rossetti
July 17, 2018

Archie Shepp Quartet at the 2018 Torino Jazz Festival

by Antonio Baiano
May 17, 2018

Archie Shepp: Archie Shepp And The New York Contemporary Five

by Chris Mosey
January 4, 2015

The New Thing is now old hat; all those squawking saxophones, blipping trumpets and discordant piano explorations a thing of the past. With its arrival in the early 1960s, jazz reached the end of its historical road. The New Thing wasn't The Shape Of Jazz To Come, as an Ornette Coleman album title had it. It was simply the final stop on the music's path from New Orleans. This, and all the other stops, could be revisited ...

Archie Shepp and Joachim Kuhn: Wo!man

by Chris May
June 14, 2011

Archie Shepp & Joachim KühnWo!manArchie Ball2011 At first glance, the pairing of veteran American saxophonist Archie Shepp and German pianist Joachim Kühn seems an unlikely one. But Wo!man is not the first time the two have performed together. Two or three decades back--Shepp says that he cannot now remember the year exactly--the saxophonist worked with Kühn in a band led by Finnish drummer Edward Vesala. It is a real pleasure, Shepp ...