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| 6.554 Ft
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| 1. | Donna Lee
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| 2. | 'Round About Midnight
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| 3. | Blues for Brother George Jackson
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| 4. | Confirmation
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Jazz / Avant-Garde, Free Jazz
Recorded: Jan 9, 1979
Archie Shepp's 1979 quartet of American and European musicians (Clifford Jarvis, drums; Seifried Kessler, piano; Bob Cunningham, bass) put more fire under him as an improviser than anybody since Coltrane. These cats came to play, and they were playing for keeps. It's all Shepp can do to lead the band. Opening with a furiously paced "Donna Lee," with Shepp's solo winding all around the intervals and changing them in mid-phrase, Jarvis double times even his legato. For 16 minutes the band changes through the tune changes, and Shepp can't decide which key to play in; he goes through all 12 eventually and solos both in and out of the tradition -- off-mic occasionally, too. Things slow down a bit when the band shimmies into "'Round About Midnight," with Kessler taking a firm grasp of the harmony; Shepp shifted around so much on the last cut he couldn't afford to be left in the lurch on such a harmonically complex tune. As Shepp slips out the first couple of notes, Kessler is already tinkering with Monk's line, giving Shepp just a small pause before easing into a deep, Ben Webster-ish solo as Kessler moves through the minor mode into some diminished ninths, inverts the entire harmony, and begins rebuilding. Shepp is in full ballad mode while the rhythm section is waiting for the sign to kick it into groove, which they do about three minutes in. The real kicker on the set is "Blues for George Jackson" from Attica Blues, which lasts nearly half an hour. Shepp takes the sum total of everything he learned from cats like Dollar Brand, Pharaoh Sanders, and Coltrane and slips it all into a Pan-African groove. He states his theme in the lower register in ostinato until Kessler grabs hold of it and moves the harmony through a diatonic shift. When Cunningham begins to accent that bassline and Jarvis slides along the backbeat, Shepp gets funky, blues-out, and wailing. But it's only the beginning of a tune that goes through modes, scales, intervals, and rhythmic changes to find the heart of that same groove across musical -- especially jazz -- history that quotes everything from Miles Davis, to Coltrane's "India," to Horace Silver, to Coleman Hawkins, Machito, and Sun Ra. By the time it's over you don't even need to hear the rip, rig, and panic version of Bird's "Confirmation," which takes it out -- you're exhausted. This set, the second of the night, was great. Period.
---Thom Jurek, AMG
Archie Shepp
Active Decades: '60s, '70s, '80s, '90s and '00s
Born: May 24, 1937 in Fort Lauderdale, FL
Genre: Jazz
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. He has recorded extensively for Impulse, Byg, AristaFreedom, Phonogram, Steeplechase, Denon, Enja, EPM, and Soul Note among others over the years. Unfortunately his tone declined from the mid-'80s on (his highly original sound was his most important contribution to jazz), and Shepp became a less significant figure in the 1990s than one might have hoped.
---Ron Wynn & Scott Yanow, All Music Guide |
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