Paris (AFP)
Archie Shepp “is the Babelian memory of jazz”, says a specialist of him. At 83 years old, the legendary saxophonist publishes “Let my people go”, a record in which this storyteller digests on classics which are the basis of the history of African-American music.
“Babelian, because it covers a large part of the spectrum of black American music. From the gospel which he sings magnificently, to free jazz, he has espoused many phases of this music”, details the writer- French journalist Franck Médioni.
After experimenting with radical free at the dawn of the 1960s in New York with pianist Cecil Taylor, trying in vain to sound like John Coltrane, Archie Shepp will find his style: he improvises, on the tenor or the soprano, showing daring and avant-garde while rooting in the tradition of singing, that of negro spiritual and blues.
“I found that blacks weren’t too interested in avant-garde music, the audience for this kind of music was always white,” Archie Shepp told AFP from his home in Ivry- sur-Seine, south of Paris, where he lives with his wife, a former producer at France Culture.
“After leaving Cecil Taylor, I looked more and more towards the swinging blues, because I wanted to attract more black people to my music. It was a choice,” says the musician.
He has never ceased to trace this link between various African-American musical trends.
– Fundamental meetings –
Archie Shepp, born in Fort Lauderdale (Florida) before moving to Philadelphia at the age of seven, in the Brickyard neighborhood, was introduced to music very early on, thanks to a father who was a plumber and a banjo player.
“The first fundamental meeting was the one with my father, who showed me the way of music,” he says.
The second will be with John Coltrane. His participation in “Ascension”, one of the last recordings of “Trane” in 1965, and his records published on the Impulse! Label, that of Coltrane, will legitimize him.
“Even today, I work in part thanks to the impact of my records recorded for Impulse!”, Wrote Archie Shepp in the preface to the book “John Coltrane, the supreme love” by Franck Médioni, in 2018.
Archie Shepp is also a sound, his signature.
“He is capable of making his saxophone scream or of putting a round, mellow sound on ballads”, describes Vincent Anglade, programmer of the Jazz festival at La Villette, in Paris.
– Shout and whisper –
“It can go from a very fleshy sound to Ben Webster or Coleman Hawkins to the stridencies and the cry of an Albert Ayler”, adds Franck Médioni.
More than a sound: a clamor, where we find the joys and sorrows of a people who went through slavery and oppression.
Because Archie Shepp is above all a political conscience, a commitment, that of a man who has never deviated from the cause of Black Power, which he embraced very early on, and who today still defines himself as Marxist.
“In my music there is a message for the liberation and justice of my people … While trying not to be too intellectual, to keep a certain simplicity,” he says.
Before choosing music, Archie Shepp had studied law to become a lawyer, then branched out into drama. But the saxophone offered by his grandmother was never far away, and changed everything.
Sixty years after his professional debut, this character still wearing classy suit-jacket and borsalino still has the “spirit”.
“He has nothing more to prove, has written everything, his legendary status is there, but instead of falling asleep on his laurels, he still has this desire, this desire, to meet, to renew himself”, notes Vincent Anglade who learned to know this “quiet force” by developing with him projects and sometimes surprising encounters, such as his collaborations with the Cuban pianist Chucho Valdes, the choreographer Anna Teresa De Keersmaeker or around hip hop.
Last manifestation of this creative verve, his album “Let my people go”, with the title borrowed from the standard “Go Down Moses”, where the descendants of African-American slaves are assimilated to the Hebrew people enslaved by Pharaoh.
© 2021 AFP
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