Archie Shepp
From Fort Lauderdale
Popularity
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About
Also known as: Archie Vernon Shepp
Few saxophonists have blurred the line between music and politics as boldly as Archie Shepp. Coming up through the New York avant garde scene in the early 1960s, he earned John Coltrane's admiration and a deal with Impulse! Records, recording Four for Trane in 1964 and appearing on Coltrane's landmark Ascension the following year. His 1965 album Fire Music wove in an elegy for Malcolm X, and The Magic of Ju Ju from 1967 planted his sound firmly in African percussion traditions. By 1972, Attica Blues took a direct swing at the prison industrial complex. Through it all, his tenor playing stayed rooted in the emotional weight of Ben Webster and Coleman Hawkins, raw and tender at once. Shepp spent three decades teaching at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and in 2004 he and partner Monette Berthomier founded the Paris based label Archieball. His collaborative range is genuinely wide, taking in blues, spirituals, R&B and free improvisation across dozens of records. More recently he has been recorded alongside pianist Jason Moran, showing no sign of slowing down.
