1965 was a busy year for the young Bobby Hutcherson, releasing his first album as leader (Blue Note’s Dialogue) and joining the Archie Shepp Quartet, a group at the vanguard of the “New Thing”. Free jazz relinquished the restrictions of song form in order to better express oneself musically, and for Shepp, politically.
Born into a Fort Lauderdale community scarred by racist violence, the saxophonist was politically aware from a young age; “Even when I was in the third grade, I remember my teacher asked us to write a paper,” he said in a 2012 interview with Mercury News. “She expected something simple; I wrote a paper about racism.”
He considered John Coltrane “the most important saxophonist in jazz” (since Charlie Parker) and after frustrated efforts to emulate Trane’s powerful sound, “I just decided to let go and play the way I really felt and really played” – a lesson summed up by Thelonious Monk’s advice: “A genius is the one most like himself.”
By 1965 the famed Newport Jazz Festival had come to be perceived by the avant-garde as conservative and commercial; Max Roach and Charles Mingus had even organised an alternative festival, earning them the moniker “The Newport Rebels”. Trane and Shepp had just recorded one of the most incendiary statements of the New Thing, the breathtaking Ascension (1966), when they reignited Newport with their fiery new sounds.
The performances are partially captured on the Impulse! release New Thing at Newport (1965), an odd album credited (presumably for marketing reasons) to John Coltrane and Archie Shepp, but featuring just one track by Coltrane and four by Shepp. After a tempestuous performance of ‘One Down One Up’ by the expiring (and perspiring, by the sounds of it) John Coltrane Quartet, Shepp’s set sounds so cutting and unsettling that you can virtually see it disrupting the smokey Newport air.
In 1987 Shepp called his music “narratives of our people,” an idea fully realised at Newport; the tracks all express elements of the African American experience: ‘Rufus (Swung His Face at Last to the Wind, Then His Neck Snapped)’, ‘Scag’, ‘Call Me By My Rightful Name’ and ‘Le Matin Des Noire (The Morning of the Blacks)’, whose long opening vamp is inspired by Trane: “Coltrane has suggested in his pieces the idea of infinity,” as observed by Shepp.
‘Le Matin Des Noire’ seems more interested in duality. It shimmers and fractures like shards of glass, reflecting optimism and sorrow in the dissonance between Hutcherson’s bright, steady vibes and Shepp’s raspy, frenetic tenor. In his liner notes Nat Hentoff calls it “a fusion of lament and hope. In one sense, morning here can be spelled mourning – the keening being for what blacks have experienced in the past and are experiencing in the present. The hope is for that morning of real, total liberation.”
Shepp described the role of the black musician in a contemporary interview with Down Beat: “His purpose ought to be to liberate America esthetically and socially from its inhumanity. The inhumanity of the white American to the black American as well as the inhumanity of the white American to the white American is not basic to America and can be exorcised.” Think of his music then as an exorcism, purging the hatred from America’s soul.
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