Archie Shepp Quartet with Roswell Rudd & Leon Parker

Archie Shepp (saxophone, vocals), Tom McClung (piano), Steve McCraven (drums), Daryll Hall (bass), Roswell Rudd (trombone), Leon Parker (percussion)

Saxophone player, composer and vocalist Archie Shepp was one of the loud voices of  the radical sixties. But he   has shown a romantic side and in recent years more blues colours were integrated into his music.
 
During his early years the 73-year-old Archie Shepp played saxophone in rhythm and blues bands in Philadelphia, where he met Lee Morgan, Jimmy Heath and John Coltrane. In New York he worked with pianist Cecil Taylor and he was co-director of the New York Contemporary Five with Don Cherry and John Tchai.
 
His collaboration with John Coltrane began rather slowly. This led to a first recording, "New Thing at Newport”. On one side of the album was the Coltrane quartet, on the other, Shepp's group. Shepp was one of the leading voices of the New Thing or the music that was closely linked with avant-garde and the growing black consciousness.
 
With “Four For Trane" he made one of the classic albums of the sixties. But Shepp was less abstract than many other avant-garde musicians.
 
His grainy, heavy duty tenor sound comes from great saxophonists like Coleman Hawkins and Ben Webster. Sometimes he sounds tender, sometimes brutal, but he displays a romantic streak and seems to want to caress beautiful melodies. He interlays his sound with screaming, growling and whimpering tricks and deformed notes. Since the eighties he has played a sort of postbop, but with strong roots in the blues. In the sixties he was an instigator, but Shepp became a sort of custodian of  African-American heritage. He appeared in the Belgian movie "Just Friends" based on the life of the Belgian saxophonist Jack Sels. A concert of Archie Shepp’s music is fierce and  thoughtful but above all lyrical.