Saxophonist Archie Shepp performing with the pianist Jason Moran at the Whitney Museum, New York City, September 27, 2019
‘The Story I’m Telling’: An Interview with Archie Shepp
Accra SheppFor some musicians, their music and their politics don’t interact that much. But for you, they have. How did that come about?
Well, that’s existential. Having been a victim of social and political oppression, it was only natural that it would influence my music, my art, my writing.
How did that process play out for you? In the 1950s, there wasn’t much space for a young Black musician, just starting out, to express a radical politics.
I joined the pianist Cecil Taylor’s band almost immediately after I got out of college. He himself was very politically engaged—you don’t necessarily know that from his songs, and his approach to music. But it was Cecil that got me into what they called “free jazz.” He turned my whole concept of music around.
I would never have thought of myself as a free jazz musician while I was growing up in Philadelphia. I grew up around people like Lee Morgan, Jimmy Oliver, Jimmy Heath, Bobby Timmons, and, though I hadn’t met him yet, John Coltrane—people who were very influential to me. And they had nothing to do with what you would call “free music.” It was only when I met Cecil, that’s what he played. And he gave me my first chance to make a professional recording.
He was very aware of who he was as a Black man. The first time I heard about Malcolm X was from Cecil Taylor. I used to go to Cecil’s house every day and practice his music, which was very complicated. I had to pay a lot of attention to his work in order to learn it. After we’d finished our rehearsals—frequently, it would just be him and me—we would just talk. We’d talk for hours sometimes.
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When my mother died, in 1970, I recall a conversation with a lady who had been a good friend of the family. We were sitting in the car after Mom’s funeral when she said, “Well, Archie, I’ve got a lot of your records. When are you going to play something that I can understand?” It made me reflect on the fact that I was doing something that wasn’t connecting with people who were very important to me.
In the late 1970s, I recorded an album of spirituals with Horace Parlan that got the DownBeat critics’ award. When we played the first song, I choked up. I immediately reflected on my grandmother, Mama Rose, taking me to church when I was a little boy—and the “battles of song.” Battles of song were musical competitions waged between gospel groups during church revivals. Those were the conventions for the gospel singers like the Swan Silvertones, the Five Blind Boys, and the Clara Ward Singers. They would all get together and it was quite impressive because their music was provocative—provocative in the sense that it recalled the suffering and the enslavement of Black people: “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” “My Lord, What a Morning.”
Das ganze Interview gibt es hier:
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/09/29/the-story-im-telling-an-interview-with-archie-shepp/
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"Don't play what the public want. You play what you want and let the public pick up on what you doin' -- even if it take them fifteen, twenty years." (Thelonious Monk) | Meine Sendungen auf Radio StoneFM: gypsy goes jazz, #151: Neuheiten aus dem Archiv – 09.04., 22:00 | Slow Drive to South Africa, #8: tba | No Problem Saloon, #30: tba