Archie Shepp: Activist of the Avant-Garde

00:00:15 Speaker 1: Pushkin. Before we get started, let's talk about Pushnick. Pushnick is a subscription program available exclusively on Apple podcast subscriptions. Members will get access to bonus content like extended versions of Our Quest Love and Beastie Boys episodes. You also get uninterrupted ads, free listening to many of your favorite podcasts like Revisionist History, Kashner Retails, and The Happiness Lab. You can try it for free for seven days. Sign up for Pushnick and Apple Podcasts subscriptions. Archie Shep's been a leader in what's known as avant garde jazz since the nineteen sixties. He famously played tenor sacks alongside John Coltrane, Lee Morgan, and the great free jazz pianist Cecil Taylor. But like some musicians who are consider jazz artists, eighty four year old Shep doesn't consider the music he plays jazz at all. He calls it African American music to acknowledge the Black Americans who created the tradition. Shep has been politically engaged for his entire sixty year career. Every one of his dozens of albums touches on African Americans struggle to attain equal rights In some fashion one of my favorite albums. For instance, Attica Blues takes a critical look at the Attica prison riots of nineteen seventy one. On today's episode, I talked to Archie Shep about how an assignment he received in the third grade sparked his activism. Shep also talks about his relationship with Coltrane, who he says never took his horn out of his mouth, and he also recalls the rhetorical power of Malcolm X and the lasting image of seeing him speak to a sea of blackheads on the streets of Harta. This is broken record liner note for the digital age. I'm justin Richmond. Here's my conversation with Archie Shepp. I first heard your music when I was probably fifteen years old. Sixteen years old, I discovered Attica Blues, Yeah, and it was at this time when I was just developing a love of jazz music and I heard Attica Blues and it changed my whole idea of what people were doing then and what jazz could be. And obviously there was a journey to that album, but I thought it could be a good place to start one because it was my starting point with your music that I've since dived real deep into and fallen in love with. But it also really matches sort of the tenor of the present time here in America. Well, the idea was given to me by my drummer at the time, Bieber Harris, who suggested that it might be a good idea to commemorate what it going on in Attica. And I thought it was a good idea, and at that point I began to write music and put together the idea for the album. One of the reasons that it really kind of opened my eyes to what jazz could be because there's these kind of incredible vocals on that album that are unlike other vocal jazz. It's not like a vocal jazz record the way you might think of an Ella Fitzgerald album sounding right, And I know your drummer wrote those lyrics. Did he come to you with the lyrics first? When he had the idea, Well, he didn't actually write the lyrics. I wrote the lyrics, and I gave him credit for it because at the time he was trying to become a member of BMI and he had to have some document recorded, and I gave him cridit for the words the lyrics, though I actually wrote the lyrics. Did you write them before you compose the music? Well, at the same time, some of the lyrics were suggested to me by him and just in conversation. He had a worry of describing things about the natural forces and various things that he would say that gave me an idea of what I wanted to put. I wanted to construct the lyrics only when the natural forces told the world it's getting old. Do I worry? Yeah, I worry? Can you dig it about the human soul? So some of some of his conversation influenced my writing of the lyrics. Was it common for you or uncommon for you you to sort of derive inspiration for a song or an album from political happenings of the time. Well, I've been politically engaged just about all my career. All my albums have some make some illusion to struggle for African Americans to attain equal equal rights. So it was not unusual that Nattica Blues was dedicated and focused very intensely on the on the civil rights struggle. Because I was an activist on the streets with a very Baraka and people Calvin Hicks, people like that, and we were frequently on the streets of Harlem, with handing out the handbills and occasionally making speeches on the street to the people. So it was not unusual that Attica was so focused. Well, when did you first become politically aware in terms of the African American struggle for dignity, equality, freedom. There's a very young man I remember in the third grade the teacher asked us to write a paper about anything. Couldn't write about much at that age, but I wrote a paper about the struggle of black people to be free. And she was really quite amazed, and she asked me where did I get those ideas from? And I said from my father and the man upstairs. It was Billy Myers, who rented an apartment in my family's house. My father and he used to on the weekends would discuss political events. So I was very early inversed in in the civil rights dialogue. That would have been maybe mid forties. Yeah, I would say a lot of people now don't think about there being a robust civil rights movement. You know, doctor King and Salma and all that is in you know, the fifties. Maybe ten years after this, well, there was no movement, but black people were very aware of the contradictions in the society, and my father and a man upstairs just to frequently discuss the inconsistencies that existed in black life, visa be the struggle to be freedom, which which was almost continual after the end slavery, we've continually fought to extricate ourselves from oppression. Your dad seems like you must have had a pretty big influence on you. I mean, you're citing him as as a person would kind of opened your mind and was you would always hear him talk about the struggle for black freedom, and I know he also played banjo. Yeah, it was. He's an influencer who playing music. And also his mother, my grandmother, Mamma Rose, was very active in civil rights affairs and and the Baptists. Black Baptists were very committed in the in the South, so they had what might have had amount to pre civil rights organizations. And then my grandmother frequented and she she read quite a bit, she ran intensely, and and her daughter, my aunt Advis was a school teacher, so I was frequently acquainted with was going on in the black community. Did your dad teach you to play your first instrument. Well, my first instrument was the banjo, and he taught me a few chords on the banjo. I later took piano lessons formerly and clarinet, and a studied a bit of saxophone with Tony Mitchell. And in the early days when you were learning banjo with your dad, what would you have been listening to or playing? Well, what he was playing? In fact, he played. He taught me the first few bars of the Charleston. The Charleston like the dance Charleston, Charleston dumped up up Babe, Dub dub d dot dot. That's James P. Johnson's. It was a dance, and it was a dance that was inspired by the music The Charleston. That's so cool. How did you end up settling on sax Well, I was a boy in school. I heard play well, we had quite a couple of very good musicians, Brinkley Blackwell, Norman Satchel, and a white white boy, George Obuletski. I believe it was quite adapted the saxophone. So I was, you might say, influenced by all three of them, especially Satchel, who one day he played for the Art in the Assembly a piece of Sunny Stitt stringing the jug and I went home and I told my mother I want to get a saxophone. I was about fifteen at that age. After that time, I had been studying piano and clarinet. Philadelphia is a rich jazz town. When did you start listening to jazz? When did you become aware of it? And when do you start becoming aware of the musicians who were in your city? In Philly, first, I became aware of the music, and that was from the beginning because my father played what you called so called jazz music, I called an African American music. From the very beginning, that was all I listened to. He had recordings of Duke Ellington, count By See a lot of blues recordings. So through him I became aware of what was going on, thinking about the people who are you're in your town, the Heath Brothers, Coltrane. Yeah. I heard Jimmy when I was seventeen. I believe I'd go into a concert of stand Getz. He was playing at a place called Reynolds Hall in Philadelphia, and he was there was Jimmy and Rainy and the place was packed. So they played the first set, but Reynolds Hall had a number of rooms that they rented out to private affairs, and a friend of mine who I was with at the time, Eddie Ford, we started wandering around the building and we hit on this room where there was some kind of affair going on and Jimmy Heath was playing, and I remember we were so attracted by what he played that we never went back to hear the stand guests after the intermission. And I asked Jimmy when I took the liberty to asked him if he would give me some help on the saxophone, and he said he would. I remember going to his home the following week and I found out he didn't own a saxophone. In fact, he'd been playing on a borrow at horn and I brought my sax with me and he played it. I couldn't get much shout of it, but I remember after he played it, it seemed like a ticket the life of its own. It's the color had changed the who He sort of warmed it up and hung out with him all that That afternoon he went to his jam session and played. And the next week I was going back from my lesson and his brother two d Albert answered the door and he said, Jimmy's in the joint. He was in jail and he stayed in jail for six years. WHOA, I didn't. I didn't know that part of the story. Yeah, he had. They had caught him with smoking jan on the back of a car and he was imprisoned for six years. So I never got the second lesson. Wow. So he had one lesson with him, Yeah, And that was really listening to him play, and that was quite informative by itself. But I never really formally got to study with him. I know. Not too long after that you had you were in a band with Lee Morgan. Yeah. I met Lee as a kid. I was a year older than him, but he was very advanced and he was playing with really professional music. He was a professional when I met him. He was playing with guys like C Sharp and Coltrane. He was known even though he was only fifteen or sixteen years old. I asked him to give me some help on the instrument, and he consented to do so. The first session I made with him, I had only heard stern gets really on the saxophone, and I tried to create my stand get sound, and he and his friend who were observing me. They seemed to be somewhat They thought it was rather peculiar. They didn't I don't think that they They accepted my offering. So finally he asked me to play something with him, to play a blues and I learned the blues from my father because I knew the blues instinctively. When I finished playing this my solo, he said, man, don't ever change. And that's how we developed a very lasting friendship. And when he would have blues gigs, he would call me to play with him. Because he played standards in Ballot, he had a very wide knowledge of music, but I was sort of limited to the blues. But I could play the blues. So it's like you went back to the source. Well, yeah, I used the sound that I knew. I'd heard a lot of Bevin Webster prayers through the recordings of my father, and I suppose that sounded a little bit like Ben. That was my natural sound and the sound that I later made my own. Yeah, Ben Webster's quite a quite a soulful cat man. His sound is oh yeah, soulful brother. We'll be right back with more from Archie Shep after a quick break we're back with more of my conversation with Archie Shep. So you had a bean with Lee Morgan and Carl Holmes called the Jolly Rompers. Well, in fact, I was with the Jolly Carl and John Holmes. They had a band out in Mullagrove, Pennsylvania. But I kept bugging, bugging them too to get Lee Morgan in the band. So when they got Lee, they fired me. You know, so much for trying to do a good thing, Arn'tie. Yeah, yeah, trying to help my friends get a gig. You mentioned that Lee Morgan was a year or two younger than you, but when you look at his career compared to yours, you know, his was much more sort of straight ahead. So it's funny to me that you two coming from the same town, that you, being the older of the two, kind of had this much more from the start, this very adventurous career where you were really exploring and stretching out. And not that Lee wasn't Lee was incredible, but his sound was much more in line with the hard bop sound tradition. Yeah that was because I seemed up the Cecil Taylor. Really, I went in a direction I never thought I would, in fact so called free jazz reimprovisation that was encouraged by Cecil, and he kind of opened my ears to another direction. And Cecil was a piano player and maybe also like a poet from New York. Yeah, it was one of the first to really completely dispensed with traditional harmony and tempe. And after Ornette came to New York. And I don't know, Ornette was probably doing the same thing out in California, but ct was the influence in New York. When did you first hear Cecil Taylor and what made you when you heard him gravitate towards that sound? Well, I didn't really like the sound I heard him on record, and I wasn't very impressed. My background was, as you said, very much oriented towards lee and the kind of music he played. But his bass player heard me at a jam session in New York and Cecil was looking for a saxophone player, so he recommended me to Cecil, and Cecil hired me without having really heard me, on the advice of his bass player. I met him one night on the streets in New York in the West Village, and somehow he seemed to know me though I had never been introduced to him. So you're Archie Shepp. He said, you want to make a record, and I said yeah. Almost immediately after I met him, we started rehearsing for a recording which we made the World of Cecil Taylor and I was with his man that We didn't work much for about two years, and he was quite an influence on me ideationally in terms of my ideas. And he was the first time I heard of Malcolm X was through Cecil really and we used to have discussions after rehearsals went on for hours. So he was quite quite an enormous influence on my political and social ideas. Did you ever see Malcolm speak in those days? Oh? Yeah, I heard him at Temple Number seven and then on the streets of Harlem. He spoke when one afternoon the street was crowded with the people or you could see his heads black heads, and and the police at that time were mostly white. They were in the crowd. They were read with with probably fear. And Malcolm he mounted the podium and at that time you had to have the American flag when you gave a speech. You'd probably still do, and he had this little flag that you get from Wolvers. You could hardly see it from where I was, and he planted it on the podium and he said, you see that flag. Your mother was raped under that flag in the crowd, and oh yeah, he says, your father was murdered under that plague. And the police were really visibly frightened by intimidated by his language. But he was a probable speaker, and I was immediately attracted to his discourse. Around the same time, you not only fall in with Cecil Taylor, who's ideologically expanding your horizon, but musically be expanding not only your vocabulary but the way you think of the framework for the music you play. And then you're also hearing Malcolm X speaking Harlem and at the time, no one else was framing the struggle for African Americans the way Malcolm was. He had a great way of making you understand your own condition yeah and still just sense of identity, and made you proud of your African heritage because he would often talk about the anti sdents of slavery, and it was an awakening. It broughtened my horizons in a way that I never imagined coming from Philadelphia. So Cecil Taylor was a big influence on sort of your journey to avant garde music. But also from your hometown is Coltrane, who we were friends with and played with, who was also a person who really moved things forward with in terms of where jazz could go, along with Ornett, along with Cecil. Did you pick up any of that from Coltrane as well? Well? John confirmed the direction I was taking. He came out of the tradition, and like Hornette and Cecil, he didn't start on the fringes of the music. He began right in the center of it. And he was an improviser par excellence. And I was very influenced by primarily by his work, and as I say, he convinced me that by by example, that I was right in terms of what my search because he did. He later recorded with Cecil Taylor, and he was a close friend of Hornett's, and so when I met him at the Five Spot, he was playing with Monk and he never really took the horn out of his mouth from the time he started on the intermissions, when when the other guys would be at the bar, he was he went into the kitchen and he was practicing the pieces that he that he had learned from Monk he was refining them. And so after I heard him one night, I asked him I was I was at the club of your night to hear him. I asked him if he would help me with the saxophone, and he graciously conceded, and I was at his house the next morning at ten o'clock. Of course, he didn't get home until four in the morning, and then he usually practiced, so he went to sleep, and so he probably hadn't gone to bed and sleep until about six, and I was there at ten. So his wife at the time, Naima, told me that he was asleep, but I could wait for him. So at about one o'clock he got up and he went right to the saxophone, which was on the sofa, and he played about fifteen minutes and under rooted something like I imagined was giant steps, of which later became Giants Steps. Then when he asked me to play for him, and his advice to me was to keep my hands closer to the keys so I would be able to move faster. And he didn't really formally teach me. I just had conversations with him. I remember talking with him one day, and he spent the whole afternoon talking about Monk and Miles and I'll teatum. And he explained to me how he resolved chords, maybe starting a fifth away from the tonic and coming down and half steps playing scales, something that I later tried to adapt to my own style. But really basically it was a communion of my appreciation for him, and more than actual saxophone lessons, we became conversant and and I really, I guess because I appreciate it him so much. I look looks up to him as an older brother. I had been an only child, but an older brother that I wish I had had and probably wish you had more time with him, sure too, Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. And John Coldman helped you get your recordy with Impulse, right, yeah, he was essential in my getting that recording. I had been calling Bob Theel, the A and R Man Impulse. I call him frequently. At the time. I was un welfare and I used to take a dollar a day and change it to dimes custom dime to make a phone call, and I would call his office, his secretary Lillian, whom I got to know later on fairly well. But I always say Bob is out to lunch or he's gone for the day. Finally, I asked John, on the advice of Bill Dixon, who was working together. He said, well, col change your friend, why don't you ask him to get you a record date. So I kind of gave me enough of a nerve to ask John the people to help me talk to Bob Thield. And he looked at me very hard, and he said, you know, a lot of people think I'm easy. And I said, John, and that's not where I'm coming from. I'm serious. And he knew I respected him, so he said, well, I'll see what I can do. The next day, I called and Lee and the secretary said, Bob's he's out to lunch, but he's expecting your call. In that way, I arranged a recording date. He tried to talk me out of him by saying that you guys are avant garde and you want to play your own music, you will have to play the songs of Coltrane. But I had already been rehearsing. I knew that that was his line, and I had already been rehearsing with Roswell Rudd a repertory of John's music. So I said, yeah, I know, and I'm ready. So that the date was arranged and when we arrived at the studio, Rudy Van Yelder's Bob, but he really was he didn't want to do this recording at all. He has his back turned to me and all I could see was smoke coming out of his pipe. And by the time we did the third recording and so he said, hey, this stuff is great. I'm gonna call John and ask him to come and hear you. So he called Sharane out on Long Island. We were in New Jersey, and Shane very graciously conceded to come to the recording date. It was late at night, and so when he arrived you will see on the album cover he doesn't have on any sucks. But I later heard that John didn't wear socks anyway. So and he played Bob. Theeld played some of the examples of the recording for Train and the only one that he didn't like was the piece that I had written. It was a piece called Rufus Swung is back at lasted the win in his next step. It was a title. It was a bit lengthy and political in nature, and he didn't wanted to use that, and he said, I don't like this recording, and uh, he played it for John and John said I like it, Bob, so they left it him. So that's the only piece that I wrote that's on the recording. It's the recording. It's war for Train, Yeah, and it's a Those are some beautiful renditions of of Coltranes. Yeah. I thought we we nailed it. We got it wasn't exactly the way he would have played it. That's what makes it great, though, Thank you. And you also played on the Love Supreme sessions with Coltrane and then also on the Ascension record. Yes, how are those sessions with John? I was always overwhelmed by the presidents of John Coltrane, and I always tried to do my best and to present my work as originally as possible. I Love Supreme, I was, I suppose somewhat intimidated, though he didn't mean for me to be. But I had a problem just expressing what I really might have done, because I could have really approached the song more moodally and gotten into it. But I wanted to do something that was somehow different, and so the first takes I don't know I don't. I didn't feel like I got into the music like I really wanted to. But as we did several other ticks they've released them recently, I can see that I relaxed and I got into the music more intensely. What did you think of the music he was making on A Love Supreme and Ascension too at that time? I mean, was it surprising to you that that's what he was composing? No, no, not at all. In fact, when we did Ascension, he had a set of chords that he gave to McCoy to play as the sort of interludes, and he would play on the interludes. I often wish I had asked him what were the chords that he gave McCoy to play, But I didn't think to do that. After a quick break, we'll be back with more from Archie Chep. We're back with the rest of my conversation with Archie Chap. There's a lot of Latin influence in your music, even songs that might not even maybe harmonically or melodically sound Latin. There's a there's a you know, like a three over two, or you know, there's a rhythm sometimes going on and through your music. Where did born in the South, move to Philly, Dad plays banjo, slot of blues, going on jazz music, of course, Where did this Latin influence coming? At what point did that enter your consciousness? Well? When I moved to New York, I played in the Puerto Rican band with a guy called Chito Castro. He features that marengue and rhythms like that, which I quickly and it became attached to. And I still like those rhythms. What is it about those rhythms that appeal to you. Well, there's sense of dance and the dances they do are really quite exciting. And it's interesting too, because by the time you start recording records the sixties, jazz has really gotten away from the idea of jazz is being dance music is kind of gone or out of favor, and you're bringing this element back into it. It's kind of interesting. Well, I did, and I always consider dancing and essential fund of African American music expression. This is a good chance to talk about why you don't like the term jazz. I read at some point the word art you said you felt is a passive word. There's no function to the word art. Art. It's not a functional thing, and you consider at least your music, or maybe music in general, to be functional. Is that still something you believe? Is that something you ascribed to still? Yeah? Absolutely, And dance is a function of music. So yes, I do feel that the word art is a rather abstract unless it's connected to something that has meaning. I think a lot of people would say avant garde, and you, you know you, I think you do consider the music you play avant garde. That drings up an anecdote Duke and the Max and Charlie Mingus but recording Money Jungle, and the story goes that mister Mingus asked mister Ellington, why don't we do something avant garde Duke, and Duke said, oh, Charles, and let's not go back to that. So that's sort of how I feel about avant guard because when I was a younger man, they called me the leader of the avant guard, and now they call me a veteran of the avant guard. Duke's idea was, when you name the music, you date it in time. So avalant guard is a way of describing the music, but it doesn't fix the music in a block of time. Imagine you feel the same way about the term jazz. The label jazz, well, yeah, and then I think the jazz is really a term that limits the expression and the true meaning of African American music, so that somehow blacks are left out of the equation. They have made a part of the equation, but in fact they're never given credit for the creation of the music. It wouldn't exist without without our people. Not to say that white people can't play that music, but that's defined by African American innovations. Going back to Louis Arms Show up to Coltrane, all the key innovators have been African Americans. In fact, that the word jazz is a French word, in my opinion, it's not in the American lexicon English lexicon. There is a word in French jazz a, which means to talk light batter, And there's a town in France called Jazz, which is the way jazz was originally spelled j ss. Yes, so it seems to me to confirm the origins of the word to the French people who settled in New Orleans and who gave it the name jazz. I mean, yeah, that would done to make sense. Then that would be the French connection, Yeah, the French connection. Yeah. Yes. Do you have a composition of yours that you return to most often, either in your mind or and you're playing something you think about most often? In other words, a favorite composition or one that you just, for whatever reason, returned to most often. I have a piece Ima, which is dedicated to my daughter. I played that quite a bit, and another piece I dedicated to Alma Hope Hope too, which I have played quite a bit. I'll ask one last question. When Quincy Jones put out Back on the Block in the early nineties, I remember that you weren't the biggest fan of it because it put people like Dizzy Gillespie and surrounded them by these different trappions, these different idioms. So I was curious, you know, how your views have changed since then. You've never seemed to be a person who felt restricted to one style music, So I'm just curious how you felt collaborating with your nephew Who's Who's a rapper, rap poetic. I feels very close to rap because I did would would would be called a slam today, I guess and tribute to my grandmother Murmur Rose back in the sixties, and I did another poem set to music called the Wedding when Elsa in California. So I feel that in a way, I'm kind of one of the originators of rap music, along with the Last Poets and Lengths and News and Melbourne Van Trifles. I was very early into mixing words and music, So playing with my nephew was really a privilege. I enjoyed it very much because it's like getting back into something that I had been explored many years before. Well, Archie, I don't want to keep you from your practice. I know you're gonna be practicing now. Thank you so much for doing this. It's really an honor, and it's been an honor to listen to your music all these years as well. Thank you so much, Thank thank you. You've asked some very interesting questions and this is a very interesting interview. Thanks Archie Chip for sharing stories with us from his incredible career. Do you hear our favorite Archie Cheps songs? Tad to Broken Record podcast dot com. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel at YouTube dot com slash Broken Record Podcast. We can find all of our new episodes. You can follow us on Twitter apt broken Record. Broken Record is produced helpfully Arose, Jason Gambrell, Martin Gonzalez, Eric Sandler, and Jennifer Sanchez, with engineering help from Nick Chafee. Our executive producer is mil LaBelle Broken Record is a production of Pushman. In his stuis also consider becoming a Pushnick. Pushnick is a podcast subscription that offers bonus content and add free uninterrupted listening for four ninety nine. An look for Pushnick exclusively on Apple Podcasts subscriptions and if you like the show, please Rember to share, rate, and review us on your podcast app. A team musics by Henny beats Down Justin Richmond